Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 5322872" data-attributes="member: 54710">There is no question that it is very useful for the rules to tell a GM what DCs are appropriate for an easy, moderate or difficult challenge for a party of a given level.  I think everyone agrees that this information is valuable and that a well thought out set of numbers is a crazy-useful tool.  I also think that everyone agrees that there are times in GMing that you just want a "moderate" challenge (and - just as importantly - you don't want to have to look up some chart of various wall materials and their associated DCs) so you just look at you screen and pick an appropriate DC.  Honestly, I doubt that anyone would consider that bad GMing if a game master chose to use that tool all the time.However, there is an issue with that being the only tool provided by the rules.  The 4e rules provide considerably flexibility to GMs (which is great!) and make it easy to use the same type of monster or encounter at a wide range of levels (which may not be "great" but is, at the very least, very helpful).  That's nice.  But, without some careful GMing, it is possible to have a game in which epic level play doesn't feel any different than heroic play.  Like in WoW, it doesn't matter if you gain 20 levels, you're still fighting spiders in the forest -- sure now the spiders are red and glow a little bit, but it's still just spiders in the forest.  Fixing this isn't just a matter of keeping the DCs on an old wall so that characters revisiting old locations can scale walls trivially when they had a hard DC before.  It's a matter of changing the character's relationships to walls.  At low levels, only the climb monkeys can scale a 20 foot wall to get to the archer on the balcony.  At paragon levels, many characters should be able to manage such a feat.  By epic level, a 20-foot height advantage should be a largely obsolete terrain feature....at least IMO.-KS</blockquote>

Verification