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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5464016" data-attributes="member: 54877">Edit:  Please note that I submitted this before seeing pemerton's reply to the same post.  I do think it interesting that we both independently saw a theory/practice divide. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> I think theory and second-hand information is getting in the way here. First, if the GM does what you said above, he is a bad GM. Well, unless he is just running a highly stylized version of the rules on behalf of players that want such (e.g. mere tactical skirmish game or, other extreme, a mere character roleplaying bull session with a bit of die rolling tacked on). But in one of these highly stylized games, skill DCs will not matter all that much. Second, the presence of a means to measure is not dictating the outcome of the measurement. (It may have subtle influences, of course.) That the 4E GM can determine that a level 5 encounter will have predictable interactions (with the usual caveats) with five level 5 PCs--says exactly no more or no less than that a 3E GM can determine the that 4 CR 5 monsters in an encounter will have predictable interactions (with the usual caveats) with four level 5 PCs. The GM can then use a tougher or easier encounter as desired. Finally, in practice it very much depends on how the information is conveyed, what the players use to parse and assemble that information, and then how that relates to the situation at hand. In particular, it is going to matter a great deal how much the players memorize and care about those DCs and the labels that go with them. When we played 3E, if I said that a lock was "mundane" or "fine" or whatever descriptors were in the book, I might as well have said that the flibbet was in the wakka-wakka. Players didn't know, didn't care, etc. I'd just have to translate that into, "You think you have a fairly decent chance of picking it," or, "You are not sure if you can pick this or not," or, "It looks completely beyond you at the moment." Sometimes, over the course of the campaign, the players may come to understand that certain locks are easy enough they know they can pick them, but it is just as likely to be a misunderstanding. They might decide that dwarven locks are very hard when really it was just that dwarves were using fine locks (or these particular dwarves were).  If you are going to say to that, that 3E creates a consistent starting place for players that do care about such things, then I agree, it does. If you happen to like that starting place, and you play with such people, then off you go. OTOH, if you play with people that want to make these assocations based on what happens in play, and you especially want to vary those assocations from campaign to campaign--then that consistent start place not only has tremendous holes in it, it is positively counter-productive. That's all probably too abstract. So try this: I'm doing a particular campaign. In this campaign, we decide that dwarves are master craftsman. One of the ways this manifests is that dwarven locks are generally hard to pick. Stop! That's all we need to know at this stage (and even getting specific with locks was really too much information). As a GM, I put together the world. The party decides to invade a kobold lair. The kobolds took over an abandoned dwarven outpost. There is a locked door. I look at the hard DC for a level 1 encounter. Naw, not high enough. Hard is something that is tough, but not unlikely for highly trained characters. I look up a few levels, and decide that by the time the party reaches 5th, they could be picking dwarven locks. Boom, DC is set. All dwarven locks will now hover around this DC for the rest of the campaign (barring dwarven master thieves or paragon dwarven bank security or other flavor reasons why the DC would go up.) This is no different in function as to the way I would have done it with 3E. It's merely that the labels that get associated to the concept vary. If the GM wants to set something up ahead of time, and lock these down, same thing.</blockquote>

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