D&D 5E Justin Alexander's review of Shattered Obelisk is pretty scathing

[Paul Farquhar]

Then, as I said, "hard" is not "hard." It is only "hard" for an average person. Which few to no PCs are--even zero to hero stories quickly cease being about merely average people.

Would you have preferred, then, that I refer to these checks as some other word? Do we really need to be thesaurus police about this?

It just...why would you want this? Why would you want a scale that is useless for actually running adventures?

Given that the 5e rules use "hard" as an objective value (DC 20), it would be more useful if you used the terminology in the rules, yes.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Then, as I said, "hard" is not "hard." It is only "hard" for an average person. Which few to no PCs are--even zero to hero stories quickly cease being about merely average people.

Would you have preferred, then, that I refer to these checks as some other word? Do we really need to be thesaurus police about this?

It just...why would you want this? Why would you want a scale that is useless for actually running adventures?

It's not useless. Changing the DC as the characters level up makes levelling up pointless. Low level characters might struggle to climb a cliff, but they are not a serious obstacle to high level characters. They find different challenges.

The word descriptors on page 238 of the DMG are for an average human. Given that most DMs are average humans (and if they aren't they probably know a few), it makes it easy to assign the DC. If it's something I would find hard to do, then it's DC 20. If it's something I could do most of the time if not under pressure, then it's easy - DC10.

 

[Remathilis]

I'd argue that the scaling environment was NOT more pronounced in earlier editions. In 1e/2e, characters got better at things like picking locks, but the locks largely remained static. I certainly didn't encounter a lot of situations where a thief's Open Locks skill was modified by a tougher lock as they rose in levels. The expectation was more that their skills would improve.

I did. I certainly recall "this lock is highly complex and thieves attempting to pick it suffer a -20% to their open lock roll." It came up a few times in higher level stuff. It was frickin impossible to get OL to a reasonable level to begin with, and once it was it seemed impressive locks started showing up with greater predicability.

 

[Clint_L]

What I think the mercer effect has done is create two groups that make everything hard. One thinks all games worth playing should look like his professional planned out game with professional actors. One group thinks that if they can't do it that well they won't even try. I listened recently to a senior gamer who's been playing since 2nd edition rant about how he'd neve play a bard because he can't actually play an instrument or be that charismatic.

I do wonder if the Mercer effect at some point will start shrinking the game audience because all the newbies expect it to be that good. The game might be better off at that point.

Why would that happen, though? I don't understand this reasoning. Do fewer people play soccer after watching professionals? Or poker? Or Great British Bakeoff? Etc.

No. Exposure leads to increased familiarity which leads to increased popularity. That's why companies pay big money to advertise their products. The more shows like Critical Role, not to mention mainstream properties such as Stranger Things, normalize D&D, the better for the game. Anyone who quits because they aren't as good as Mercer and company was never going to stick with the game anyway and wouldn't be someone you wanted to play with. If they actually exist. Which I doubt.

 

[Clint_L]

It's not useless. Changing the DC as the characters level up makes levelling up pointless. Low level characters might struggle to climb a cliff, but they are not a serious obstacle to high level characters. They find different challenges.

Leveling is kind of pointless in terms of setting challenges, because as the DM you always want to hit that sweet spot where the players have to be clever and there is some risk to keep the game exciting. So as a DM you go from simple latch locks at level 1, to padlocks, to combination locks, to magical locks, or whatever suits the narrative, but the level of challenge remains more or less the same. You still want to push the characters.

So right now my home campaign is level 9. I'm not going to bother with situations where they have to worry about a trap that does 2d6 fire damage or something - what would be the point?

The point of levelling is to allow characters to face different challenges, but not for players to feel less challenged.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I bet he can't dodge a fireball either, expand a colony, or buy a hotel. What's this guy doing in gaming in the first place!?!1!

Never underestimate the number of people who put social interaction abilities on a pedestal where if the player can't do it, they don't think the character can (or at least should). Its particularly common with old fogey gamers.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Then "hard" does not mean "hard." Rather, you are using two completely different senses of the term.

On the one hand, there is the difficulty of a task; on the other, the likelihood of a character succeeding at it. You are, quite literally, saying that a "hard" check is somehow easy for a high-level character. What? Why on earth would you want that?

Do we then need to resort to verbal treadmill, watering down terms into meaninglessness, where what is actually difficult for a character goes from "hard" to "extreme" to "impossible"?

The fact that a term can be used both generically and contextually (and in practice mean different things between the two) is not unique here.

 

[Hussar]

The fact that a term can be used both generically and contextually (and in practice mean different things between the two) is not unique here.

And the funny thing being that in practice there is virtually no difference. A check will always be about a 66% chance of success for most characters. Some might drop down to 25% and some might auto succeed but that 2/3rds will cover most characters.

Functionally, bounded accuracy and 4e’s skills by level are very close.

I’ve run a lot of modules for 5e. I’m struggling to remember a single dc over 20 at any level. I’m sure there are some, but they’re pretty rare.

 

[Micah Sweet]

To be fair there were a lot of very good and very bad adventures in 2nd and 3rd edition. But neither of those editions had to be completely non offensive to anyone. It's a really high bar to make fantasy modules full of villains and scenes of monsters and death, of great quality that dont' offend anyone. I'm not sure we will ever see great modules from 5th edition simply for that reason.

Too high a bar to be worth clearing, IMO.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I did. I certainly recall "this lock is highly complex and thieves attempting to pick it suffer a -20% to their open lock roll." It came up a few times in higher level stuff. It was frickin impossible to get OL to a reasonable level to begin with, and once it was it seemed impressive locks started showing up with greater predicability.

Not my experience. With very few exceptions, when you got better at a task through character advancement, it actually got easier. A true joy (one of many) of the pre-WotC editions.