Pedantic
Legend
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.
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.
