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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9539045" data-attributes="member: 7035894">So in other words, you do scale battles to character ability. So why is that okay, but not other challenges?Well, that would just be vindictive and kind of meta-gaming. However, if you are at a level where characters have ability scores as high as +15, then they should be going up against commensurate challenges, and sometimes that might mean running into a guardian that is just as elite level as them, doesn't it? I mean, it just makes sense that other folks will also get good at doing their job.Like, if I'm the Level 10 appropriate BBEG with a vault to guard, I'm not hiring low level mooks. I'm getting the pros.You keep writing as if the DM designing challenges that are actually challenges is petty on the part of the DM. I do not understand this perspective, at all. Players want to be challenged. Being challenged and figuring out a solution is the fun of the game.There's usually someone as good or even better, even amongst experts. In the Olympic 100m final, someone's going to win, but it's going to be competitive. And if your rogue is level 10, what happens when they run into a level 20?This is such a peculiar way of looking at competence. Characters don't feel competence because they are still breaking into warehouses and finding it easy. They feel competence because now they are breaking into vaults that would have been way beyond them at level 1.I was a fairly serious climber for many years, and still go to the climbing gym on occasion. Sport climbing uses a difficulty rating system, where an easy climb is around 5.5, and it goes up to around 5.15+ for elite, world class climbers. As I got better at climbing, I didn't keep doing 5.5s. I might warm up on an easier climb, maybe a 5.8-9, but my focus was on doing climbs at the edge of my ability and failing until I figured them out. That's what everyone does - there is not a line-up of skilled climbers waiting to have a turn on the newbie climbs.You experience your competence and expertise by testing yourself, not by doing boring, trivial tasks over and over. The progression is expressed by facing and overcoming harder challenges. Exactly the same as taking on harder foes, which you've already admitted you do - the ogre that was once a boss is now a minion.See above. I think you are defining competence very, very oddly. Especially given that the game is about creating heroic stories. Breaking into a local bandits's warehouse with a level 10 party is not exactly epic.Not necessarily, but if they do, then they were probably interesting challenges. I will agree that taking out some bandits with a level 10 party would be very quick. It could be entertaining if done for the larfs - in Critical Role campaign 2 the party actually did keep running into the same group of bandits, who went from being a minor threat in the first encounter to comic relief, strictly for RP, in future encounters.You are writing as if there is no nuance - as if it's either always do easy or super hard, must optimize challenges. How about setting encounters commensurate with the party's level and the pacing of the story?But hard challenges are the most important thing in story telling. There are no good stories - not one - in which characters do not ultimately face challenges that test their limits and force them to make difficult choices. Challenges are what create meaning in stories. That's the narrative perspective, and you can pick up just about any book on writing and it will tell you the same thing: the protagonist must be tested for the story to have stakes and for character development to occur. For themes to happen. Some challenges are there as minor tests and setbacks, but others must be extreme.That's the narrative perspective. From a game-ist perspective, hard challenges are, again, vital. Beating hard challenges is why we play video games over and over. When I played World of Warcraft (rabidly, for too many years), 25 of us ran Ice Crown Citadel for months, over and over, failing again and again before finally defeating the Lich King. If you lose a level in Super Mario Bros, you go again. Once you've got it down, you move onto a harder level. The fact that you are still failing all the time doesn't lessen your sense of growing competence at the game, because you know that you are now attempting stuff that used to feel impossible.</blockquote>

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