Much farther down you refer to something as not being a gameplay benefit; that and the above quote would seem to suggest you're coming at this from a game-first or small-g gamist perspective rather than an in-character-first perspective. This alone would explain probably 95%+ of our disagreements.
I believe gameplay and narrative are both important and each should serve the other to the best of their ability.
The player experience is constantly going to be desynchronized from the character experience, no matter what you do.
Obviously they’re never going to be 1:1, but that doesn’t mean ludonarrative harmony isn’t worth pursuing.
Even before seeing the roll result, for example, you-the-player picked up a die and rolled it; but (almost certainly) your character didn't. It's a very short jump from there to having the fiction reflect the roll result whatever that result may be, particularly if one doesn't necessarily see the PCs as always being perfect.
For the fiction to reflect the roll result, a roll of a 2 must necessarily reflect 10% of what the character is potentially capable of. Obviously the PCs don’t always act to the best of their ability, that’s (part of) the reason we roll dice when an action has a possibility of success, a possibility of failure, and a cost or consequence for failure.
This is another thing: starting with 4e and ramping up further of late there seems to be a massive amount of focus - far too much, IMO - on "keeping the game moving forward". I see nothing at all wrong with the characters - and thus the players - being stumped by something and left with no obvious way forward; it only seems logical that this sort of thing would likely happen fairly often to the characters. And if it means the players (either in-character or out) have to stop and scratch their heads for a while, then so be it.
Whether it’s logical is of little consequence compared to whether creates enjoyable gameplay. Now, what’s enjoyable will of course vary from person to person, but most people don’t enjoy the game grinding to a halt. If you do, knock yourself out.
In the game I play in we hit one of these points in last night's session: a door we just couldn't figure out how to open. Several in-game hours (and a couple of at-virtual-table hours) and a whole bunch of creative ideas and resource-burning later we figured a way through it; but now we're weaker and have found the opposition on the other side...
I’m glad you had a good time doing that, but it sounds
painfully boring to me.
When I referred to difficulty mitigation I didn't mean in-character risk, I meant at-table frustration.
That’s not what difficulty means.
You're seeing the task from one degree further back than I am and thus - I think - equating task wth goal. To me the goal is to get through the door, the task is to pick its lock. Fail. Then the goal is still to get through the door but the task now becomes to break it down. Etc. Checks resolve tasks, not goals; and thus each task can have a different DC (or equivalent) even if all those tasks are in pursuit of the same goal.
A task requires both a goal (what you’re trying to do) and an approach (how you’re trying to do it). Picking a lock, breaking a door down, using a key, casting knock, and shouting at the door are all approaches to the same goal, therefore they are all different tasks. That was precisely my point - picking a lock was a poor example to use in support of your position that DCs should exist “in the wild” independently of character actions. The lock doesn’t have a static DC to pick it floating there, an attempt to open the lock by picking it is resolved with a check, which has a DC. That DC may vary based on circumstances and the particular approach being taken.
And there is nothing - nothing! - wrong or bad about this. You're rolling in hopes of achieving the meaningful consequence(s) tied to success.
See above.
Yes there is, it’s boring. Maybe not for you, but for most players.
I'm not concerned about bringing gameplay to a halt, because the gameplay doesn't halt. The progess of the story might stop, but that's very different; the gameplay continues as the players/PCs either look for find another way through, or go and do something else, or try to think of a solution, or whatever.
Gameplay can and does come to a halt when a failed check results in the inability to progress. It can of course be started back up again, but it does stall. And in my experience. most players don’t care for that. I certainly don’t.
With you and I this probably ties in to (EDIT) different expectations of (/EDIT) pace of play and-or degrees of patience. I don't usually care if something takes them all night to solve; as the campaign's real-world duration is completely open-ended, there'll always be next session to get to what wasn't got to tonight.
But do your players care? I can tell you, if my players regularly had to take all night to get a door open, nobody would ever come back. And I wouldn’t blame them. There’s a million other, far more interesting things that they could be doing with their time than spending 4-8 hours thinking of ways to open an imaginary door.
Got it. Comes back to making things easier/more difficult, I suppose: I tend to go the "more difficult" route, meaning the DC (or equivalent) is set on the assumption of reasonably good conditions, with adverse conditions causing penalties.
Not at all. Again, it’s not about difficulty for me, and I don’t set DCs independently of actions with uncertain outcomes and meaningful stakes.
Try this: picking a lock on a door. Success means you open a false door with only wall behind it thus no progress. Failure means you set off a trap or alarm or cause some other Bad Thing to happen.
Once again, you’re describing a task that has a consequence for
failure and no consequence for success. I’m asking for an example of the opposite.
EDIT: Though I see now that I mistyped initially, so that’s an understandable mistake.
