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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9382999" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I don't know how to be clearer about this, but bolded line is exactly the kind of thing that points out this change in design. Skills aren't related to challenges and don't scale in the paradigm I'm taking about. An iteration in the design direction I'm suggesting is more likely to remove say, rolling, and write up skills entirely as feat like statements of absolute ability, with opposite rolls and knowledge reworked into different universal systems. I'm tempted to say you can't have a set of generic difficulties outside of design advice in an objective skill system, because they always seem to lead to skill scaling, but it's theoretically possible.An objective skill system is not something you can backport into a design with a generic difficulty or scaling system. You have to start, from the outset, with an understanding that players will be using skills to overcome challenges, design those challenges, and then design your abilities. Figuring out a level appropriate challenge for a character to resolve using skills should be in the same ballpark of complexity as trying to account for the utility spells a character can being to bear, not a math problem. It shouldn't be concerned with a character's +15 bonus, but instead their ability to cling to ceilings with 1 hand while moving at 40 feet, or ability to balance on clouds, or ability to quickly change their appearance and voice to match someone they met within the last 5 minutes or whatever it is skills allow for.To be clear, this is a design preference that has clearly lost. The preferred approach is "player makes proposition, GM determines appropriate skill, assigns difficulty (possibly with system guidance), a roll is made, success is evaluated immediately or after a few more loops (again possible with system advice)" is so thoroughly the default in every system that my position is usually presented as an unrealistic design impossibility or outside the bounds of what a skill system is in the first place. I'm sad that PF2, a system that I think otherwise has much to recommend it, has opted for this, because PF1 was the last time a major D&Dlike system was going the other way, and I sincerely hoped it would iterate further in that direction.</blockquote>

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