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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8366979" data-attributes="member: 42582">The only way I telegraphed the level 12 bugbear was by including it in an encounter that was framed for paragon tier (level 14 or 15) PCs. That's what I'm getting at when I refer to "subjective" DCs.Likewise with doors. I would treat the DMG list as serving the same purpose as the MM lists. But if for some reason I need an iron door in a higher-level situation I'm not going to worry too much about stepping up its DC a bit to make it more interesting, without any telegraphing beyond the fact that I've included it in the encounter.Just as I can say something about the toughness of the bugbear if I need to (but I don't think it came up), so likewise I can say something about the superior make or thickness of the door.I don't think I agree with your last sentence. The core idea in 4e - which builds on D&D heritage but spells it out with a degree of specificity that is new - is that PCs advance through tiers, and these tiers involve changes of fiction. As [USER=82504]@Garthanos[/USER] posted, the fiction - at least in general terms, like kobolds being low-level and Orcus being high-level; or like adamantine being a particularly strong metal to make doors and walls out of - was already there, in the D&D legacy.What 4e does is (i) design PC build around the tiers (eg with paragon paths and epic destinies; and more generally with certain sorts of abilities generally reserved for higher tiers), and (ii) publish default lists of challenges (monsters, traps, NPCs, doors), which if followed will produce a certain sort of correlation of fiction with tiers.My own view is that what is fundamental to make 4e game play work is to get the maths right - hence the rewrites of damage numbers beginning with MM3, and the various tweaks to the DCs-by-level table which ended up with the Essentials numbers that I've referred to in this thread. So if you introduce fiction and just read its maths of the default lists (eg iron doors for epic tier PCs; non-minion bugbears for paragon tier PCs) you will generally get sub-optimal play. Which then suggests two choices:(1) Treat the lists as sacrosanct, and only use numbers and hence fiction that is tier-appropriate as per those lists (eg no iron doors for epic tier PCs; no non-minion bugbears for paragon tier PCs); (2) Treat the lists as defaults/suggestions, and depart from them by levelling up or down (ie changing the maths) as seems necessary to ensure good gameplay.As a 4e GM I always went for (2) over (1) - hence my characterisation of the system as involving "subjective" rather than "objective" DCs. It never caused any issues in play, or placed any burdens on verisimilitude. The sense of verisimilitude in 4e play, at least in my experience, is not the product of careful tracking of the correlation of particular fiction to particular maths but rather the consistency of the fiction on its own terms, and the vibrancy of the situations and outcomes that occur in play.[USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER], the above is all relevant to your post about subjective vs objective DCs. But rather than make this post any longer I'll reply separately to that, but building on this.</blockquote>

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