Difficulty Numbers: Scaling, or Static?

[Pedantic]

Scaling DCs are design malpractice. They can serve no purpose other than rank illusionism; if you don't want the PC's chances of success to change, then don't lie to them with scaling abilities. The pretense of scaling challenges to those new DCs is equally ridiculous; that's just palette swapping the same set of actions instead of actually giving the PCs new and more powerful things to do. There is nothing they do that isn't more honestly achieved by simply not having character progression in your game.

Generic DCs (what 5e does) are nearly as bad, but at least leave the door open for GMs to invent new actions to reflect PC scaling over time. Designers should be opinionated; write down what the scaling numbers on the character sheets mean. The GM will still change the numbers if they want to, and the more information about the game's intended vision they have, the more confidently than can make those changes.

More significantly, both scaling and generic DCs encourage poor GMing practice. The very identification of a "Hard" or "Easy" skill check encourage the GM to mistake calling for a roll/placing an obstacle defeated by a roll, with presenting a gameable situation to the players. Rolling a die and trying for a higher result cannot be a "challenge" and cannot have a difficulty. There is no player decision making involved in trying to roll high, there is no gameplay, just gambling.

Dragging skills down to objective, well-specified actions and difficulties derived from concrete situations requires the GM to present actual scenarios for players to interact with. That allows for emergent strategy and tactics and unexpected, novel board states to emerge from the interactions of those specific situations and player decision making. Taking my own advice to designers from earlier, it's my opinionated stance that this is better than gambling.

 

[Aldarc]

That's the sort of thing that I loathe. I don't want to think about "well for this character it's a DC13, but that one wait what was your background again? ok so maybe that's a DC11 but hm, it's dark so maybe it's a 13 again." Judging if a given obstacle is "moderate" or "requires expert knowledge" or whatever is just annoying in a game system that isn't set up to scaffold that in a consistent way.

In something like Blades where the probabilities are immutable based on dice pool and the only question is "how risky is this?" Very different; I never have to provide a quantified amount.

As someone who now comes from more narrative systems involving conversations of the fictional positioning - where players aren't shooting for a TN (e.g., PbtA, FitD, etc.) - OR games where players have PC-based TNs they are rolling under (or over) - e.g., Dragonbane, The One Ring - I feel that my situation is a bit outside of this conversation.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Scenario 1: Two characters walk up to a cliff together. One character is level 1, the other is level 10. The cliff is described as being 'difficult' to climb. Both characters must climb it. What is the DC?

Scenario 2: A character climbs the cliff at level 1. The DC is 15. He returns to the same cliff when he is level 10. The cliff has not changed. The circumstances and conditions are identical to when he last climbed it. What is the DC?

Scenario 3: A level 1 character has high Strength modifier, focus in Climbing skill, and has the Mountaineering background. Your character is a level 10 something with no Strength modifier, zero skill points in Climbing, and has the Bookworm background. Which character should find it easier to climb the cliff?

Spoiler: Solution

It doesn't matter. I'm playing a bird man. I'll carry my halfling partner over the cliff, and ignore the cave where there may or may not be goblins and/or ogres. Did we win yet?

 

[payn]

Scenario 1: Two characters walk up to a cliff together. One character is level 1, the other is level 10. The cliff is described as being 'difficult' to climb. Both characters must climb it. What is the DC?

Scenario 2: A character climbs the cliff at level 1. The DC is 15. He returns to the same cliff when he is level 10. The cliff has not changed. The circumstances and conditions are identical to when he last climbed it. What is the DC?

Scenario 3: A level 1 character has high Strength modifier, focus in Climbing skill, and has the Mountaineering background. Your character is a level 10 something with no Strength modifier, zero skill points in Climbing, and has the Bookworm background. Which character should find it easier to climb the cliff?

Spoiler: Solution

It doesn't matter. I'm playing a bird man. I'll carry my halfling partner over the cliff, and ignore the cave where there may or may not be goblins and/or ogres. Did we win yet?

Static baby!

 

[Reynard]

Scenario 1: Two characters walk up to a cliff together. One character is level 1, the other is level 10. The cliff is described as being 'difficult' to climb. Both characters must climb it. What is the DC?

Let's call it 15 since we don't have a lot of information.

Scenario 2: A character climbs the cliff at level 1. The DC is 15. He returns to the same cliff when he is level 10. The cliff has not changed. The circumstances and conditions are identical to when he last climbed it. What is the DC?

Still DC 15.

Scenario 3: A level 1 character has high Strength modifier, focus in Climbing skill, and has the Mountaineering background. Your character is a level 10 something with no Strength modifier, zero skill points in Climbing, and has the Bookworm background. Which character should find it easier to climb the cliff?

Now we are in an interesting space. What does "level" mean in this case? In 5E, "level" generally measures your competence in your specific class and subclass, and area of skills expertise (except with regards to hit points, but that is a whole other thread). A level 10 character has the same skills and saves as a level 1 character if they aren't proficient. But in 3.x, that isn't true. level is a much broader measure of overall character competence and power. Similarly, other games treat advancement as either focused or broad.

Spoiler: Solution

It doesn't matter. I'm playing a bird man. I'll carry my halfling partner over the cliff, and ignore the cave where there may or may not be goblins and/or ogres. Did we win yet?

Rocks fall.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Like many have said, scaling DCs are obviously just a terrible idea. If the numbers on your sheet get bigger, this should mean your character gets better at things, and scaling the DC to match that progression is plainly idiotic.

Now there has been some talk about "world scaling" and this is obviously better, but I think you need to be careful with this too, or it might start to feel a lot like the first instance. Yes, at higher level characters will be able to tackle greater challenges and those often come with greater difficulty. This of course is perfectly fine and good. But the GM should be careful that this greater challenge is indeed tied to the fiction, instead of just automatic like in many MMOs, where in the starter zone towns are protected by level 5 guards, you fight level 3 wolves and level 2 goblins and in later zone the towns are guarded by level 80 guards, you fight level 78 snow wolves and level 76 arctic goblins etc.

I think D&D 5e does poor job at defining what the easy, medium, hard etc DCs actually mean, thus it is very easy for the GM to just accidentally scale them. And of course the rules cannot list every eventuality, but they should come with plenty of examples that work as benchmarks and help the GM to anchor the fiction and extrapolate consistently.

For my D&D game I have my own mental benchmarks down, and I believe I am pretty good with keeping the DCs consistent. And yeah, this means that now that the characters are level 14, they just succeed at many things automatically due simple mathematics; their skill is just so high that they cannot roll so low that they wouldn't meet the DC. I also have my benchmarks for what the levels mean, to avoid populating towns with high level guards etc. And of course a lot of time the PCs deal with somewhat "level appropriate" stuff, but they also now live in world where they mow basically are among the most powerful people around and consequently a lot of mundane stuff is quite trivial to them. The high level chracters should feel powerful and capable.

 

[zakael19]

Like many have said, scaling DCs are obviously just a terrible idea. If the numbers on your sheet get bigger, this should mean your character gets better at things, and scaling the DC to match that progression is plainly idiotic.

The way 4e did this is to build a robust Skill Challenge system that allowed experts to be better at a wider array of problem solving approaches, ways to ensure that all players could participate throughout a challenge in an instrumental way, and guidance to the GM to ensure that the SCs themselves represented the characters growing in ability.

PCs are cooler because they do cooler stuff, face off against more impressive threats, and affect a wider swath of the world (and beyond). Not because they can consistently hit a DC15 on a 5+ roll.

Edit: and of course everybody just accepts combat related stuff scaling without question (setting aside “old school” systems).

 

[Maxperson]

This came up in he Daggerheart General thread and I thought I would move it to its own thread for discussion.

In games that havel levels, ranks, tiers, etc, do you prefer difficulty or target numbers to be dependent on those levels, or should they be independent of levels?

For example, let's look at the example of climbing a cliff face. In the first paradigm, the Difficulty is set based at least in part on what level the party/character is attempting it. In the second paradigm, the difficuty is whatever it is, regardless of who tries to climb it (or what level the adventure is, or whatever).

D&D has had a weird relationship with DCs, especially in d20 editions and forward. WHile many seem to say the DC is static, in practice those numbers always seem to scale for the intended level of the challenge.

I prefer static difficulties generally. That is a Hard lock, so it always has a set DC/TN. High level thieves, of course, can bypass Hard locks with ease because they are just that good. Like that.

One place it gets weird is with adversaries, monsters etc. If monsters are leveled similarly to PCs, they will inevitably be tougher, harder to hits, etc... the higher level they are. This is its own kind of scaling. But as long as there is no forced "level appropriate challenge" rules, it can be easily ignored. Sometimes low level characters wander into the wrong part of the woods...

What do you think? How do you liked games to handle difficulties?

100% static. The difficulty for climbing a specific rock face isn't going to change depending on who is climbing it. It's going to be DC 16 or whatever for everyone. Someone who is really, really skilled will make it look like a breeze. Someone unskilled could kill themselves on it.

That said, DCs do scale in one way. A 20th level group is far more likely to encounter beings with the resources and capability of producing a DC 30 lock than a 1st level PC. So in that regard as the PCs level up, they will encounter more things with higher DC numbers, but those numbers would be static as well. They wouldn't change if a 5th level PC looked at them.

 

[Maxperson]

The bigger problem is that I have the feeling that with something like DnDs typical D20 + modifier system, you can get some hard DCs that an incompetent and untalented fellow could still accomplish, but the trained one will fail. I wish there was a way to handle this better, and not just have escalating the numbers to ridicilous extents or outright forbid some people from making a check.

Some ideas. Gate the rolls behind proficiency for tasks like that. Alternatively, you can have different DCs for proficient and non-proficient, so not only does the proficient person get proficiency bonus, but the task is also easier.

 

[Maxperson]

However, MOST of the time, it would be silly to make your Osiris Cleric roll Arcana on knowledge about Osiris; especially if the barbarian can roll a nat 20 right afterwards and know more about the god than the god's own cleric.

That's why it's so important for the DM to play with auto successes and auto failures. The 5e rules say not to roll unless the outcome is in doubt and failure has meaning. If you only have one of those, you don't roll. The Cleric of Osiris wouldn't be rolling at all for the vast majority of Osiris knowledge. The outcome isn't in doubt. The barbarian might roll a natural 20 every once in a while and know about an aspect of the religion that the cleric already knows, though. For the barbarian, the outcome is very much in doubt.