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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7851582" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I’m pretty sure you do have different styles of playing.I’m not Hriston, but I suspect based on his comments that his DMimg style is similar to mine. If Bob the cleric told me he “treats Cher the barbarian for exhaustion,” I would say, “Ok, I’m hearing that your goal is to remove a level of exhaustion from Cher. What is your character doing to try and accomplish that goal?” Without that information, I can’t adequately determine if the approach has a chance of succeeding at the goal, a chance of failing, and a cost or consequence for failing, so I don’t know if a check is appropriate to resolve it, or what the appropriate ability, skill, or DC might be if it is.I don’t know that examples of actions performed in my game would be helpful to anyone else, because they are specific and context-sensitive. An action requires both a goal and an approach. Most of these “example actions” you’ve listed in this thread are just goals, so the DCs assigned to them seem arbitrary to me. How do you know that “determin(ing) the time and cause of death with no visible marks” is Hard when you don’t know what the character is actually doing to try to make that determination?Because doing so divorces the difficulty of a task from the actual task, and instead assigns it to an orphaned goal. It encourages the DM to just use the written DC regardless of what action the player takes to try to achieve the goal, which in turn rewards players for simply stating goals and/or skills instead of describing actions.I would argue that DCs are unnecessary for designing traps. Just decide what the trap does and how it works, and when the players interact with it, determine the results of their actions based on logic and your understanding of the trap you designed. If an action has a chance of achieving its goal, a chance of failing, and a cost or consequence for failing, set a DC based on your assessment of the likelihood of success and failure. Is it easy? DC 5. Moderate? DC 10. Hard? DC 15. Etc.</blockquote>

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