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Hot Take: D&D Has Not Recovered From 2E to 3.0 Transition
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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8860896" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>The treadmill effect has to do with the play loop encouraged by having level scaled DCs, because it encourages DMs to break the relationship between player abilities and skill roll results. Characters don't actually get any better at doing things, the adjectives used to describe the challenges around them just change.</p><p></p><p>Your climb check is a great example. The player didn't get a higher climbing speed, or learn how to ignore slippery conditions, or how to climb at full speed on ceilings and so on. The player hasn't gained a capability they can leverage: they won't make any different decisions because they are now an expert climber and can easily cling to ceilings to drop on their foes. Instead, the DM was prompted to take the same challenge "make a climb check with a 60% chance of success to get over this wall" and use different language to describe it.</p><p></p><p>5e does this too, just with even less different language and slightly more scaling.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 8860896, member: 6690965"] The treadmill effect has to do with the play loop encouraged by having level scaled DCs, because it encourages DMs to break the relationship between player abilities and skill roll results. Characters don't actually get any better at doing things, the adjectives used to describe the challenges around them just change. Your climb check is a great example. The player didn't get a higher climbing speed, or learn how to ignore slippery conditions, or how to climb at full speed on ceilings and so on. The player hasn't gained a capability they can leverage: they won't make any different decisions because they are now an expert climber and can easily cling to ceilings to drop on their foes. Instead, the DM was prompted to take the same challenge "make a climb check with a 60% chance of success to get over this wall" and use different language to describe it. 5e does this too, just with even less different language and slightly more scaling. [/QUOTE]
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Community
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Hot Take: D&D Has Not Recovered From 2E to 3.0 Transition
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