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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5747076" data-attributes="member: 54877">There is no particular problem with lopsideness from a wide spread of DCs in a version of D&D--provided that you are willing to narrow the supported playstyles. Or rather, there are problems with it, but you can find counters that will work well enough for some playstyles. However, if the intention is to support 4E and 3E style (and possibly pre-3E style as well, in a separate, common core piece or otherwise), then the counters won't work very well anymore.  Now, you could obviously get around this by keeping the wide DCs, but using an entirely different set of mechanics for skills, separate set of DCs, etc. for "Legend" and "Lore" options. But if you go that route, might as well make two separate games. There won't be enough common stuff to even pretend they are related. BTW, and related to the more recent discussion about simulation, one of the reasons that you might want to make this sacrifice to support more playstyles, is that the playstyle of the 3E/PF group is not really purist simulation. They wouldn't care for a purist simulation version of D&D anymore than they would 4E. (On average they wouldn't. Some would enjoy various pieces of that effort.) So making the "Lore" side more like Runequest or Rolemaster is not going to make them happy.  Simulation in D&D has nearly always been mainly pretense. There are things that you don't look at too closely. There are times when the rules get ignored to get that result you want (as pemerton said of 2E play). 3E caters to this pretense on one level. If you extrapolate logically from 3E RAW, it falls apart. But there is enough of it there to satisfy some people that they are simulating a coherent world. They learned to ignore expanding hit points and other such. (I'm convinced this is the core of why healing surges are so vilified by this crowd by the way. It's not that healing surges are what they are. It is rather that the surges constantly call attention to the simulation nonsense that is expanding hit points.) Mainly, this illusion is maintained by saying things are such and such in plain text--whether the mechanics support those statements or not. 3E built some D&D-ish rules that at least tried to hit the ballpark of what a lot of those statements said. In contrast, 4E throws up its hands on a lost cause, and pulls the curtain away. 2E was early Wizard of Oz. 3E was about making the Wizard more than a mere fraud. 4E said the important thing is that the wicked witch gets melted and we get back to Kansas. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> But you might notice that one of the reasons that people were quite happily drifting Basic and 1E play into their own divergent styles is that for most people, it got played in a relatively narrow scale (compared to D&D in general, if not other games), and thus people were able to so diverge in the drifting. If the fighter has +1 scale mail, a +2 shield, and a couple of magic weapons, while the rest of the party has similar stuff, then the pretense of simulation can be reasonably maintained. Or I can play it like a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story. Or any number of things can happen. (We'll all have to bend around problems in the rules doing that with Basic or 1E, but that's because of other issues, not scaling.) And just to be entirely clear, I'm not advocating that the scaling in 5E be more tight.  I am saying that if the game is going to have options and/or whole supplemental variants that are going to cater to the 4E and 3E/PF crowds (and older gamers) all at once, then tigher scaling is a necessary prerequisite to having coherent rules.  Plus, being completely open about my dog in this fight, I think that such scaling in such an effort would impose some discipline on the whole design that would have some other benefits in the long run (e.g. regarding power creep).  However, it would be a tricky, very ambitious design, and is hardly my money or reputation riding on it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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