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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8364967" data-attributes="member: 82106">Then the problem is that A) the idea that starting that fire in Phlegethos has the same DC as starting the one on the hillside back home, or else you are just dealt out of any possibility of attempting it, since you never improve at all. Or else the difficulty is only modestly better and then the trained guy needn't bother to make a check (well, maybe he'll fail on a 1). This is where the 'spread' causes weird things in 5e. In 4e its level-appropriate moderate/hard most likely, and characters that have middling bonuses in the skill (Nature presumably in 4e) can try it with some chance of success. There will rarely not be such a character in the party. Really it is not so much that there is a vastly different outcome with skilled GMs, but in 4e EVERY GM will run it this way, 50% of 5e GMs will not know to do it right (at least, IME).but that is exactly what it seems to encourage.You can achieve +45 without stupid amounts of trouble. I've seen highly optimized characters drawn up with things like +69 in Arcana (which appears to have a couple ways to boost it more than other skills).Everything is core and shows up in the CB in 4e, which was pretty much always the assumption. Maybe nowadays with people going back and picking and choosing and playing 'retro 4e', I don't know. Same with items, the general practice was to get people what would work with the build they envisaged, though that might get a bit of pushback in a few cases that are extra cheesy. Depends on the GM to an extent. Again, I don't know what 'typical 4e play' looks like today, but I would observe I have virtually all the books, all the Dragon/Dungeon PDFs, and access to a working Online Compendium. I could run 4e with 'all the stuff', no problem, could undoubtedly get CB up and going again if I was motivated enough. I know [USER=82504]@Garthanos[/USER] and a few others are still able to run it (I still have all the original downloads on my machine).It isn't 'beholden' to it perhaps, but the way it handles advancement and numbers VERY MUCH encourages GMs to play that way. There are real questions about how to run stuff in a more 'gonzo' environment. Granted, if you actually read the 5e DMG carefully, its there. OTOH it 'just works' in 4e. I mean, you literally almost cannot NOT do it (I guess you could certainly assign the highest level DCs to real-world stuff, but it would definitely feel like reflavoring when the book descriptions of high level terrains and whatnot is very fantastical). I think both games are technically capable of the full range, certainly, but one seems to beg for it and the other seems to kind of subtly discourage it.I do consider the Underdark fairly fantastical, yes. In 4e the 'shallows' are high heroic/low paragon material, with the 'deeps' ranging in the paragon and potentially even up to capstone epic (you could for example battle Torog, delving deeper and further while tracking down his lair until finally battling the Tortured One as a 30th level capstone, that would not require any background material not already present in PoL Canon). Along the way you could visit the strange spacetime warping pyramid of the monstrous Aboleth lords, the weird land of trapped demons, Swordwing cities, Mindflayer enclaves, Beholder nesting grounds, and of course the Dark Elven metropolis of Erhli-Cinlu (sp?). I would say that the Elemental Chaos and Astral Domains are a bit more 'crazy' than that, no doubt the Abyss is pretty harrowing stuff, but with 30 levels of play to chew through, a side trip into those sorts of realms would probably be expected. The 4e Underdark is said to have 'connections' with many strange extra-planar locations after all (and definitely has direct pathways into the Feywild and Shadowfell (Feydark and Shadowdark). You could battle Fomorians or whatever those weird Shadowdark cultist guys are who's name I have forgotten.</blockquote>

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