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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4205648" data-attributes="member: 40961">I'm skipping most of your post because I think the issues in it are sufficiently debated above, and that I am clearly right.But in regards to this point, I have something to add.I am not of the school that pretends that DMing is about reaching into the ether and pulling out some kind of objective truth about the imaginary gameworld in which my campaign takes place.Or to put things otherwise, when I set the DC for something, I know darn well that I'm setting it for a particular party of PCs played by a particular set of people.So when it comes time for me to decide the DC for using Intimidate on a landed gentry with his own private army, I don't do some sort of magical math in my head and set the DC based on his NPC level, his Wisdom score, his ranks in Insight, the average level of the men in his private army multiplied by a weighted inversed average of the number of rounds it takes for each soldier to respond if he calls for help in the middle of a dinner party, divided by his fear of collateral damage to his mead hall during the battle.I just ask myself, "knowing what this guy has in terms of backup, and what the PCs have in terms of leverage, how hard should it be for the PCs to intimidate this guy?"  And then I set a DC.  And sometimes, if the answer is "it should be freaking impossible," I don't bother setting a DC.What this approach lacks in terms of a false pretense of objectivity, it makes up in honesty.So from my perspective, there's no difference between declaring that the DC of an Intimidate check is 50 when I know darn well the players can't achieve that, and just saying "Intimidate doesn't work here."  Except that the first way required making up an arbitrarily big number and lying to myself about where I got it.If someone wants to go through life doing things the first way, well, they'll function in society just like a normal person.  But like Dumbo and his feather, they'll be able to fly even without it.</blockquote>

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