Difficulty Numbers: Scaling, or Static?

djotaku said:
I'm going to throw in a related concept - if you're an expert in something you should (almost) never fail. Some systems explicitly code this, but others leave it up to the GM. Can experts fail? Yeah, just yesterday or the day before one of the ladies at the Olympics broke her leg skiing. She's one of the best of the best since she made it to the olympics but she still rolled an nat 1 on her run. 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. One exception would be high level secret knowledge. Let's say you had a religion where the lay folk and the low level clergy had one truth about what was going on and the high level clergy knew what was REALLY going on. Then arcana would make sense to see if your person came across some secret knowledge one day while they were in the temple.

To bring it back around to your original question - while I prefer a static DC - a wall should not get harder to climb the more I've adventured - I also wouldn't ask my ultra-nimble fighter to roll OR I might set the DC to 1 (allowing for an epic fail like that olympian). Everyone else, especially the wizard, would have to roll.
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Most things in life are not random. Vaugn did not "roll a nat 1" -- she went out there when she was not up to the task. Yes, she was an amazing athlete, but she is past her prime and did not want to accept that. You see that a lot in sport.

It is actually too bad few games capture that part of it. I bet lots of old adventurers would bite it on "one last run into the dungeon before retirement."
 

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overgeeked said:
Neither. Dynamic TNs for me. Before the game starts, roll whatever kind of dice you normally use for resolution, so 1d20 in d20 games. That's the first TN the PCs will face. From there, whatever the PC's result, the total of the dice plus modifiers, will be the next TN.

For example, I roll 1d20 and get a 12 before the game starts. Whatever skill check or ability whatsit the PCs make first, the TN is 12. Take their result and that's the next TN. So if your hyper specialized bard with +13 to their persuasion rolls a nat 20...the next TN is 33.

It's so much easier to handle than worrying about scaling or setting TNs. Saves a lot of time and brain power. And has the wonderful benefit of mirroring the pass/fail cycle of stories.
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I would get really irritated as a player if I had to follow that Bard in the play cycle order. Why should my Thief fail at a pick pocket try with a 19 die roll just because the Bard has a +13 modifier and rolled a nat 20 just before the thief goes? So the Bard gets laid and my Thief gets caught?

To answer OP, prefer static. The task is the task. The task shouldn't get harder just because today the character is 4th level compared to yesterday when it was 3rd. But it is expected that the GM will provide a new harder task for the freshly minted 4th level character. That farmer commoner that I pick pocketed yesterday isn't in the tavern today. But a better dressed person is in the same seat....
 

It goes beyond DCs and TNs, of course. One of the frustrating ones for me is level based encounter charts (not Dungeon Level based ones, but PC level based ones). What lives in that forest should be true no matter who walks into it.
 

Reynard said:
Most things in life are not random. Vaugn did not "roll a nat 1" -- she went out there when she was not up to the task. Yes, she was an amazing athlete, but she is past her prime and did not want to accept that. You see that a lot in sport.
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Honestly, that's real life where events will follow as complex a set of factors as they must in order to resolve a question such as "who will win this skiing event". But for a game, we don't know all or even most of the factors so we replace it with a stochastic factor to account for all of those other unaccountables. And whatever would be the equivalent of rolling under whatever she needed to get the bottom of the hill given her level of skill and the difficulty of the task - that's what Lindsey Vonn got on this particular trial.

Edit:
MegaTraveller would almost certainly have called it a fateful task, meaning a failure would mean something bad happening. Perhaps having already injured her ACL, Vonn would have faced a hazardous one as well where a bad result is worsened than for someone not trying a hazardous check. Just to interject some other RPGs into the mix...
 

billd91 said:
Honestly, that's real life where events will follow as complex a set of factors as they must in order to resolve a question such as "who will win this skiing event". But for a game, we don't know all or even most of the factors so we replace it with a stochastic factor to account for all of those other unaccountables. And whatever would be the equivalent of rolling under whatever she needed to get the bottom of the hill given her level of skill and the difficulty of the task - that's what Lindsey Vonn got on this particular trial.
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Sure. That is what "rolling a 1" is in this instance.

I was mostly thinking about how we don't generally have a good way to model "peak fitness" in RPGs. The numbers only go up.

Also, I am kind of salty about the whole thing.
 

djotaku said:
I'm going to throw in a related concept - if you're an expert in something you should (almost) never fail. Some systems explicitly code this, but others leave it up to the GM. Can experts fail? Yeah, just yesterday or the day before one of the ladies at the Olympics broke her leg skiing. She's one of the best of the best since she made it to the olympics but she still rolled an nat 1 on her run. 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. One exception would be high level secret knowledge. Let's say you had a religion where the lay folk and the low level clergy had one truth about what was going on and the high level clergy knew what was REALLY going on. Then arcana would make sense to see if your person came across some secret knowledge one day while they were in the temple.
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Ultimately, this is 5e in a nutshell. This edition encourages the DM to make a determination of Yes/No based on what the PC brings to the table and the nature of the task, and then suggests rolling only when Yes/No is unknown/unclear. So yeah, don't make the priest of Osiris make a roll about stuff they should know about - they just know it.
 

Reynard said:
Sure. That is what "rolling a 1" is in this instance.

I was mostly thinking about how we don't generally have a good way to model "peak fitness" in RPGs. The numbers only go up.

Also, I am kind of salty about the whole thing.
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I'm not really sure what you mean with "the numbers only go up". An RPG could model Vonn's injured ACL as a flat penalty on the die or some equivalent of disadvantage on the check. Various RPGs take things like injuries and deviations from fitness into account, but most don't because most don't want to get that far into the weeds. And I would wager most players don't want to either.
 

billd91 said:
Ultimately, this is 5e in a nutshell. This edition encourages the DM to make a determination of Yes/No based on what the PC brings to the table and the nature of the task, and then suggests rolling only when Yes/No is unknown/unclear. So yeah, don't make the priest of Osiris make a roll about stuff they should know about - they just know it.
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That is the theory, but it isn't reflected in any official module that I can recall. I don't think I have ever seen "And a character with x background automatically succeeds at this task" in an adventure from WotC.
 

I like static to mostly give the players a sense on how a baseline goes, but I also raise things depending on the bad guy, which tends to follow level. The fist level PCs going into against a goblin lock or cave wall might be a DC10- because they are goblins. When the PCs are 10th level the DC might be 20 in certain places and the general 15 for most since the bad guy can buy better locks and hire people to smooth out the walls.
 

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