I think there's a huge difference in that 4e was/is VASTLY more transparent about what it is doing. I mean, your average 4e GM doesn't even have to think about it, really, it just happens! They follow the books and other material, so the fiction progresses (you can see this even in the much-maligned HPE module series pretty plainly). As the fiction progresses, the DCs also progress in kind. If you make up your own material, you clearly know what sorts of things are Heroic, Paragon, or Epic kinds of elements, and they appear in your adventures as long as you follow basic encounter building procedure.
Now, I think 5e sort of manages that with combat encounters. Its CR system is MUCH less reliable than 4e's level/XP budget process, but surely GMs mostly grok that goblins are things that challenge low level PCs and big dragons challenge high level PCs. However, outside of that? I don't know anything that really naturally puts you on track. If you read the DMG, more carefully than a lot of GMs apparently do, then you are informed, once or twice in a couple of descriptive non-mechanical paragraphs, that DCs should be set to fit with both the fiction and the level of desired challenge. If you followed that exactly, you'd get 5e's rough equivalent of 4e's 'treadmill', but then nothing, not even the intro adventures, manage to do that.
So, no, I don't think it is dirty pool at all. The natural outcome of 'just doing whatever' in 4e is it works as-designed, and the natural outcome of 'just doing whatever' in 5e is that it doesn't.
I don't think 4e is vastly more transparent, it just has clearer instructions. 5e blurred those, intentionally, to allow for more GM arbitrary inputs. However, the math at the bottom is still pretty similar in impact, and the guidance in 5e exists. That many choose to assume they know how it works isn't a problem with the system. The claim you're making is that lots of people choose to play Monopoly where Free Parking is a winning lottery ticket versus a dead space means that Monopoly's rules are worse than Risk's rules, because most people play Risk according to the rules. This is in error, though, because there's a lot of people that play Risk and ignore the cards because they don't grok how they work and then complain Risk takes too long to play, like Monopoly.
The upshot here is that you're claiming a base of GMs running 4e and doing so properly as a baseline. What you're ignoring is that there's a large plurality who tried 4e and didn't make it work, and quit playing it. Many complained vociferously about it, and made arguments that don't make sense because they failed to grok what you're saying just works. It didn't just work, you still have to make it work. The difference between 4e and 5e is that 4e failed to work if you tried to play it as a different game, but 5e is more forgiving and still mostly works if played in a manner similar to a previous edition. What it doesn't do when played that way is support my argument that the math of 4e actually replicates, on average, the no progression mode that 5e starts with.
Nobody said anything about "doing it wrong", that's not needed. You and I are, I daresay, members of a fairly exclusive club of GMs who practice running games as an art and a science, and take the time to study it as an activity and develop our technique. As
@Morrus has pointed, something like <1% of his traffic comes from these boards. Judging anything by you and I anyone else who will ever even realize this thread exists is not even scratching the surface of what actual GMs in the wild do. My speculation on that may be speculation, but I think it is at least informed speculation.
I'm not that special. I learned to play 5e this way BEFORE I began to really get into how games work. It was a step in that direction, but the claim that it's because I am a keen student of how games work is incorrect at the time I learned how to run 5e. Iserith is a champion of the approach I'm suggesting, and he's actively hostile some styles of other games, showing a complete lack of understanding in how they do things. He's blocked me for pointing out a flawed argument he was making about other games and how they work. So, no, it doesn't require a special study of games to make 5e work as the guidance suggests. It requires reading the rules and following them.
Sure, so then why build a system which requires you to undermine its core advice to sell modules? I mean, OK, that wasn't an INTENDED result of the design. So it seems like a flaw, to me at least IMHO.
Yup, no argument, I find it frustrating. However, 5e is loose enough by NOT being explicit on it's design principles that they can do this an most people don't notice. You can call that a flaw, but, to me, it reads as a happy accident.
'Valence' I have been using as a way to describe the significance or 'weight' of a check result (and thus of the entire ability check process in a given specific fictional context). Maybe that is a bit off from its traditional meaning, but not too far. I'm a chemist by education, where the term relates to the 'power' of an element to form bonds (react, I don't want to get technical). In how I used it I mean its significance to the fiction. So, a check with high valence would have a lot of 'fictional weight', success would clearly contribute heavily to steering things in your favor, failure would clearly contribute heavily to steering things in your disfavor (again, lets not dissect that too much). 5e ability checks lack a set valence because they don't exist within any mechanical framework beyond the GM can call for them, and the GM can decide the DC, and then the GM makes up something that happens next. They are almost advisory, actually. Contrast this with 4e in which a check has a specific 'weight' in the context of an SC (outside SCs free checks are more like 5e checks, which IMHO is an area where 4e falls a bit short, though there are other non-SC subsystems which mitigate this a bit).
I agree with this, but 4e checks outside of skill challenges have the same situation. It's only using the skill challenge, which is orthogonal to my point about the maths, that this is true. So, pointing it out doesn't really advance any counterargument to my points, because I'm not arguing that 4e doesn't have the skill challenges system that puts more weight on outcomes than anything in 5e. It does. This doesn't affect my arguments that there's little difference between the neglected skill in 4e and the neglected skill in 5e in relation to actual chance of success over the course of a campaign -- it's pretty flat. You have to average 4e DCs to see it, because of the level ranges, but the general course is that you stay in exactly the same place for anything that matters.
I think I've pretty much addressed all of this above. This is all very much like an 'Any Good Scottsman' sort of argument. One might almost call it an Oberoni on 5e. I grant you, the same issue has affected most 'traditional' RPGs since time immemorial (I can just barely remember it anyway). That doesn't make it any less of an issue!
Huh. Follow the guidance and it works way X gets met with an accusation of Oberoni, which is specifically that you can houserule any problems away, so there's no problem. I mean, the only thing I can see here is a terrible use of bad logic to attempt to dismiss an argument not by counterargument but by smearing it and creating a strawman. This is absolutely bad pool.
As I just wrote above, your valence argument doesn't even touch my point, because my point isn't about the causal weight of a check, but about the math of bonus vs DC. You're off target. The meat of it is that, going by on-level only, the DC for an easy task rises exactly as fast as the baseline level bonus that is all a neglected skill gets. Thus, you're always at the same point. The counter to this was that levels can be varied, so the DC varies, but this is a failed argument as well. Either you're mixing it up pretty evenly, in which case the average is still on-level and there's no real improvement for neglected skills, or you're consistently weighted lower or higher (ie, the average of used levels is above or below on level), and so, over time, you're still standing in the same place, just slightly easier or harder than on-level. This means that if you neglect a skill, your odds of success remain the same for whatever it is you're actually doing in the game, because you are not facing far below station challenges, but only slightly below and then in about the same incidence rate as slightly above (which is a harder DC). The actual play ensures you do not see any improvement in ability. It's only a white room example of a far below level that this exists, but it doesn't exist in game. 5e has the same impact, it just got rid of the treadmill and lowered the overall gonzo factor.
I still beg to differ, and I addressed this in another post. The fiction is the fiction. An increasing set of DCs is simply there to provide the average GM with the mechanical 'ramp' to make it all 'just work'. From Day One of D&D the game has been designed to enable and support that fiction. Low level PCs are starting characters who deal with more 'gritty' and less 'fantastical' fictions, or at least fictions that operate on a local scale and involve stakes like "my village needs this medicine" or something. High level PCs are experienced characters who deal with more fantastical and/or issues of greater scope and wider import "I must destroy the Throne of Bone or else the skeleton armies of Bad Guy will overrun the whole world!" Increasing DCs simply implement this progression. In theory you could play without any change in fiction and still have increasing DCs, but that is plainly not intended, so the fiction must be the primary POINT of this, right?
The fiction increases because the DC does. The DC does not increase because the fiction does. This is apparent -- change the chart to a different progression and you'll have to alter the fiction you're using. If you change your fiction first, it now no longer aligns with the chart, and the players will be seeing DCs outside of the range suggested by the fiction.
Also, there's my conversation with
@pemerton that clearly suggests his approach is to only make sure the tier is represented in the fiction, actual DCs are selected due to pacing or challenge concerns. They only need align to the fiction enough that they aren't glaringly inappropriate.
I think I've already adequately stated my arguments for why scaling DCs are a good design.
I don't agree -- it's a design, and can be good, but scaling is neither necessary nor sufficient to good design.
Well, this is sort of a game design tautology here. There's no need for each GM to craft their own DC progression, that would be rather silly. So, yes, the game provides a chart which gives a set of DCs at various levels, and then it provides (at last count) FIVE entire books full of monsters (and plenty of additional ones elsewhere) which actualize the fiction for each of these levels, as well as many sections of DMGs and other books which describe the kinds of fictional elements which are typically expected to appear in each tier/level range.
Goodness, no other D&D games has provided different threat monsters. Truly an innovation! /snark
I do not follow this line of argument. You're right because the game has monster manuals with leveled monsters? How does that help set the fiction for scaling a wall?
I still don't put it that way, or think of it that way. I think of Tartarus as a thematic element related to the Epic Tier, a part of the game's progression in which PCs undertake adventures and face challenges of a HIGHLY fantastical nature. In D&D's (with 4e having its particular spin on this) milieu these are often hostile extra-planar locations, like Tartarus as a fairly stock example. So, the fictional story would progress to that kind of location, and then, yes, naturally it would make sense to portray enormously hazardous (in a fictional sense) elements there which will sufficiently warrant their level-appropriate DCs. Now, the DC progression could have been different, and I agree that the exact numbers stem from a mechanical progression, they aren't inherently significant, except that they insure that the mechanics mirrors the fictional depiction of 'Tartarus' as "a place where ordinary mortals dare not tread." This is the sort of place Epic Adventures are made for!
Great! Here's the thing. Bob the Ignores Climbing Skills Man has exactly the same chance to scale the loose scree slope of gentleness at 1st level (an easy challenge, DC 8) as he does to scale the cliffs of Tartarus at 30th (DC 24) for "reasons." Nifty. It looks like Bob has gotten better, but, in reality, Bob is on a treadmill and will never, as I've been told multiple times, ever even have to roll to climb the loose scree slope of gentleness. It's a non-issue now. But, when I say that 5e lets the GM determine this, I get met with disbelieve -- there's no way 5e suggests doing this! But, it does, because the guidance is to consider if the task is uncertain, and, if so, has a consequence for failure. Bob in 5e, at 20th level, faces no consequence of note from the loose scree slope of gentleness, and the climb up the cliffs of Tartarus can be an easy task in 5e as well with the right approach. So, Bob in 5e has the same chances as well. This is my point -- there's nothing about the monotonous increase in baseline numbers in 4e, because, in play, it just keeps you in the same place against the math increase, at the easy end. The hard end, though, is a different matter. If the tasks to climb above are hard instead of easy, Bob the 4e character will never climb the cliffs of Tartarus -- he cannot make the check. For Bob in 5e, he still has a chance at it.
What does this mean? Is 4e or 5e better? Nothing and neither. They are different. I'm here because there was a claim that 4e's level bonus shows characters improving across the board, but it really doesn't (outside of fixed DC skill uses, which are the worst part of 4e's skill system). I like both systems. I prefer 4e, outside of a few glaring issues (fixed DCs get the hairy eyeball), but have no interest in fixing it myself because there are lots of other games that don't do this. I play 5e because my friends enjoy it and I like it perfectly well enough. I absolutely bash on 5e -- there's lots of threads where I'm the bad guy because I don't sugercoat 5e. I see no point in it. But, similarly, I'm not going to say it's bad on things where I don't think that's warranted, nor will I give 4e a pass. The skill treadmill is a real thing, and it's important to how the system functions, and acknowledging it doesn't make the system any worse or not work anymore. It's just how it works.
