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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9265988" data-attributes="member: 4937">As a 3rd edition player, let me say that I have always had my head around non-scaling difficulties.  Difficulties are set by the demographics of the setting and not by the level of the PCs.  There are if you will "zones" where the difficulties are higher whether it's the royal vaults or a liches tomb, but those difficulties are fixed to some reasonable standard prior to the game beginning and not the level of the rogue trying to break in.  What is really different in 4e/5e compared to 3e is the assumption that you have a reasonable chance of succeeding in things that aren't in your silo.  In 3e, lock DCs were typically in the 21 to 30 range, and as such your Paladin without lockpicks had no chance of opening even easy locks and would need to find some other way to overcome the problem.  One area that I thought 3e was deficient in was not discussing enough what DC 5 or DC 10 was and when that applied.  There were a lot of situations in 3e where I was applying DC 5 or DC 7 type checks where skilled individuals had no chance of failure and unskilled individuals had limited chance of failure that to me added a lot to the game.As for "no player left behind", it is good in theory but in practice is a difficult problem of encounter design because without things like time pressure or multiple simultaneous problems or splitting the party or what not, there is no pressing reason why an unskilled party member needs to do anything and a strong reason why the rest of the party might want the Barbarian with no social skills to keep their mouth shut.  It's not really something system alone can solve, as optimized play may well involve letting one player character do all the work while the rest watch and it's very hard to have verisimilitude and not have that occur.  So as a GM you have to be trying to create complications that will force the party to have to work together on the problems they face.  That's for various reasons I've discussed before easiest in combat situations, but you can if you work on it come up with strategies for encouraging everyone to participate.  Albeit, some of those strategies like splitting the party will lead to you waiting 30 minutes for your turn, so there is still a need to cultivate both the enjoyment of watching other people play and the skill of being an entertainer to your fellow players so that your play is fun to watch.</blockquote>

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