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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6278697" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agreed. As the book says, "Success at the challenge should be important to the adventure, but not essential. You don’t want a series of bad skill checks to bring the adventure to a grinding halt. . . When a player’s turn comes up . . . let that player’s character use any skill the player wants. As long as the player or you can come up with a way to let this . . . skill play a part in the challenge, go for it. . . Always keep in mind that players can and will come up with ways to use skills you do not expect. . . [M]ake sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation." (4e DMG pp 72-73, 75)Agreed. The GM presents a situation, and the players have to be creative and decide how they use their PCs's skills to handle the challenge. As the book says, "It’s up to you to think of ways you can use your skills to meet the challenges you face." (4e PHB, p 179)Though in some cases the GM has to work with the players - for instance, if the GM describes a well of other-worldly power and a player declares that his/her PC is trying to tap the power source, is that an Arcana or a Religion check? The GM has to help out here: with the fiction, the PC is just trying to tap the power; at the table, though, we have to assimilate that task under one or another discrete skill descriptor.Whether DCs are set "objectively" (as in 3E and D&Dnext) or via "scaling" (as in 4e) is to some extent a separate issue. For instance, bounded accuracy in D&Dnext means that the DC range is constrained, much as it is via scaling DCs in 4e. Whereas 3E, with its non-bounded "objective" DCs leads to DCs over a much wider range of difficulties.I think the scope of PC build choices is a separate issue too. I think there are good reasons for the game to discourage excessive specialisation in PC build, both for reasons that  [MENTION=66434]ExploderWizard[/MENTION] has given, and also because too much specialisation undermines party play. (As the PCs can't all participate in a particular ingame situation.) And party play is pretty integral to D&D.Huh? I don't really see how fairness is relevant. Skill systems can have a variety of interesting properties, but I've never thought of fairness or unfairness as one of them!I'm not sure what the target of these remarks is, but you can have clear character differentiation - such that role, character and player choices matter - in a system that uses a constrained DC range and does not allow PC skill competence to blow out wildly. (4e illustrates the former, though perhaps not so much the latter.)</blockquote>

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