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<blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8424705" data-attributes="member: 71699">I mean the task is &quot;easy&quot;. Is that what you mean? Where we might differ is that I am thinking about what that could tell us about the game world, and the nature of day-to-day activities within it.In one view - there is a putative check, but it is consistently waived. In another view, there is no check. What I find helpful about the first view is that it argues for in-world consistency. Whereas the second view creates a mystery - a kind of epiphenomenal ectoplasm - an aspect of the world disconnect from other aspects. For whatever reason - partly intuitively - I prefer the first view.I mean to buttress the view that the DCs get their meaning from the point of view of &quot;low-level characters&quot; - which is what I understood [USER=6779196]@Charlaquin[/USER] was espousing. Did it seem that I was disagreeing? I was saying that words in the DMG add substantial weight to that view.You may have mistaken the intent of my second example. I start by saying &quot;While that helpfully anchors the day-to-day world, it is not quite so useful for DMs.&quot; So I mean that while a low-level perspective anchors the description-text of DCs (such that very hard actually is very hard), it stops being useful quite early on in a campaign arc.In the DMG, the designers explain their intended pacing - they expect about ten 4-hour sessions to get to level 6 - so after ten sessions a group can often expect to have characters with an average roll of 27. So apposite to the OP, when it comes to calibrating skill checks I believe those descriptors - based as they are on low-level characters - stop being helpful.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="clearstream, post: 8424705, member: 71699"] I mean the task is "easy". Is that what you mean? Where we might differ is that I am thinking about what that could tell us about the game world, and the nature of day-to-day activities within it. In one view - there is a putative check, but it is consistently waived. In another view, there is no check. What I find helpful about the first view is that it argues for in-world consistency. Whereas the second view creates a mystery - a kind of epiphenomenal ectoplasm - an aspect of the world disconnect from other aspects. For whatever reason - partly intuitively - I prefer the first view. I mean to buttress the view that the DCs get their meaning from the point of view of "low-level characters" - which is what I understood [USER=6779196]@Charlaquin[/USER] was espousing. Did it seem that I was disagreeing? I was saying that words in the DMG add substantial weight to that view. You may have mistaken the intent of my second example. I start by saying "[I]While that helpfully anchors the day-to-day world, it is not quite so useful for DMs.[/I]" So I mean that while a low-level perspective anchors the description-text of DCs (such that very hard actually is very hard), it stops being useful quite early on in a campaign arc. In the DMG, the designers explain their intended pacing - they expect about ten 4-hour sessions to get to level 6 - so after ten sessions a group can often expect to have characters with an [I]average[/I] roll of 27. So apposite to the OP, when it comes to calibrating skill checks I believe those descriptors - based as they are on low-level characters - stop being helpful. [/QUOTE]

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