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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9253669" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Oh, I wouldn't argue that point, except insomuch as the system should make it clear what an &quot;encounter&quot; entails. I think most of the scaling issues people have with D&amp;D come down to mistaking a pit or an army or a locked door as an evergreen problem.Yeah, my proposition here is that the problem should never be &quot;a wall.&quot; The wall should be contextualized as part of a broader situation, and it should ultimately be alright for &quot;walls can't stop this character&quot; to be true.I'm drawing a line between a specific action declaration and &quot;winning.&quot; The gameplay should be in deciding actions to deploy, and whether each action has a 100% or 65% chance of success is another data point in that decision making, not the ultimate challenge itself. Success or failure might come down to a die roll, but rolling dice isn't the gameplay. In our wall example, a game that puts all characters between 60-80% chance of success at wall climbing, and doesn't offer any other action when faced with a wall but to make that roll and see isn't a particularly compelling design.Basically, you're right that if the game is entirely down to a recurring set of randomizer rolls, then you'd want all the participants (averaged out over all rolls in the game's lifetime) to have relatively equal chances of success, but just solving that problem doesn't actually make for a good game (see skill challenges). Better to focus on how and why you're deploying randomness in the first place, which as you suggested above, is largely an issue of encounter design.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9253669, member: 6690965"] Oh, I wouldn't argue that point, except insomuch as the system should make it clear what an "encounter" entails. I think most of the scaling issues people have with D&D come down to mistaking a pit or an army or a locked door as an evergreen problem. Yeah, my proposition here is that the problem should never be "a wall." The wall should be contextualized as part of a broader situation, and it should ultimately be alright for "walls can't stop this character" to be true. I'm drawing a line between a specific action declaration and "winning." The gameplay should be in deciding actions to deploy, and whether each action has a 100% or 65% chance of success is another data point in that decision making, not the ultimate challenge itself. Success or failure might come down to a die roll, but rolling dice isn't the gameplay. In our wall example, a game that puts all characters between 60-80% chance of success at wall climbing, and doesn't offer any other action when faced with a wall but to make that roll and see isn't a particularly compelling design. Basically, you're right that if the game is entirely down to a recurring set of randomizer rolls, then you'd want all the participants (averaged out over all rolls in the game's lifetime) to have relatively equal chances of success, but just solving that problem doesn't actually make for a good game (see skill challenges). Better to focus on how and why you're deploying randomness in the first place, which as you suggested above, is largely an issue of encounter design. [/QUOTE]

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