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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8368004" data-attributes="member: 82106">I get the point, and I think that there's some merit to the thought, but see below.Right, and what I would say is that, in 4e as I play it, this kind of 'sense' also exists and can be significant. If you meet an enemy at level 1, and thrash him to an inch of his life, and then he shows up again at 4th level, you probably want some justification for why this guy who couldn't beat your level 1 fighter in a fair fight, is now able to take on the more experienced party. The answers may be fairly "thematic" in nature. I am thinking of a case like this in one of my campaigns. The bad guy came back, and 'got tougher' and the justification was he hooked up with a higher level bad guy and got some 'power ups', which were prominently displayed in the ensuing fight (he got some new minions to throw around as well). It turned out this reprise was a bit of a fizzle, the party basically wiped the floor with this guy before round 3 (I don't recall exactly how this happened, clever play, dice, something). Their basic response was "Once a looser, always a looser!" and they sent the head back to his boss on a stick. lol. The point being, they absorbed the thematic element, and 'got' that "this is a powered up guy, someone sent him", so the structure of the game GUIDED the way themes were developed. Thus I push back a bit on the idea that there isn't a strong 'objective' element present in the numbers, they can push things! It isn't all a one way street where numbers are just stickered to things in any way that you feel like to create 60% success rates.I don't really agree with the bolded part. That is exactly what I was talking about above, the change in DCs DOES signal something! It is associated with, I would say 'explained by', some palpable new/changed element in the fiction. The 12th level bugbear employs bugbearjutsu, advanced stealth techniques, etc. Sure, mechanically he may well be just a bugbear jacked to level 12. I'd have to go look at the statblock for a bugbear and imagine the exact situation, maybe I'd tweak something, not sure. Point being, yes, in the end there's a sense in which this is simply color, but you have to be careful with saying that. It might well be that the players latch onto this element and ask "where the heck did a bugbear learn martial arts?" and then off you go! Maybe the Monk PC asks "Can I tell who trained this guy?" and the answer is "your old master!" WOAH! I mean, this is kind of the forte of DW, as I run it, but 4e handles it well enough too.Right, in the end it all devolves down to thematics and how the mechanical 'engine' of the game generates narrative which is appropriate to it (or not if it fails to work right/gets used badly). So, at some level I agree that there are no 'causes' that can be assigned within games (this is the essence of the 'Thermian Argument' that was exposited in a thread we were all on not so long ago). So, to call a DC 'objective' is in one sense ridiculous. OTOH there's a need for them to have some sort of objective reality FICTIONALLY, and I think this is something 4e should have explained. While it is very transparent, some of its conceptions were subtly at variance with other editions and kind of deserved to be discussed. I suspect the designers were a bit unaware of what they were creating!Yeah, well, if you go back to AD&D 1e, then you find there's not really any hard and fast rules about what you can or cannot meet. A level 12 party (basically the top of that game's 'paragon' if you will) can surely meet a tribe of goblins. Its just a random encounter roll. While many people might not really bother to play out a fight like that, it does kind of serve to illustrate progress. Also there is a certain classification of monster, the Hill Giant is a perfect exemplar of this, which kind of 'span the levels'. In the AD&D version of my campaign (way back when) there was a lame old Hill Giant outside town that had 9 hit points. This is literally a perfectly legal 1e MM Hill Giant! (they are 8d8 + 1-2 creatures). They are AC4, so actually it makes a decent (very dangerous) fight for level 1 PCs! Likewise G1 is filled with this exact monster, pitted against 12th (I forget the exact level range recommended, something like that) PCs! I guarantee THOSE instances of a Hill Giant have 66 hit points (the highest legal value for a book Hill Giant). This sort of thing puts a heavy focus in that game on how your numbers have changed. I never did quite this sort of thing in 4e, though I did rebuild that Hill Giant as a level 6 Solo, IIRC.Yeah, I read 4e pretty similarly to you. The objective DCs in the skill section are, at best, 'hooks'. I think they're a vestige of incomplete transition to a more theme-driven sort of game, but at the same time I believe there needs to be SOME part of the game which telegraphs what is thematically appropriate to each level range/tier. There's probably a much better way to do it though! I was considering 'scale' as a technique in HoML 2.0, so that in an 'action sequence' you would have a scale, like 5' per square is a good heroic scale, and then when you go to 'Paragon' (Legendary in my parlance) you would expand that to maybe 10x10 squares, perhaps being slightly more abstract and just saying that small rooms are a 'space', etc. Mythic scales would be more like city blocks! Notice that this achieves a sort of power scaling too, your heroic tier Fire Sorcerer tossed out 20' diameter fireballs, but a MYTHIC Fire Sorcerer blasts entire neighborhood sized chunks of realestate with a single wave of his wand!</blockquote>

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