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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7935402" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I do have the tools to describe it, they’re called DCs. When you tell me your goal and describe an approach, I will tell you the DC. If it doesn’t match your expectations, you are allowed to say “actually, on second thought let me try something else.” In my experience this happens only very rarely, because as it turns out, most folks’ ideas of what it’s reasonable for a human to accomplish aren’t terribly far off from each other.That’s a definite shortcoming of 5e, no doubt. I’m terms of damage output, casters and non-casters are actually pretty decently balanced over the course of a 6-8 encounter day, but caster supremacy is definitely back in 5e and it’s one of many critiques I have of the system.This is actually a selling point of the game. Accuracy numbers don’t inflate like they did in 3e and 4e, which makes low-level creatures a legitimate threat to high-level ones in large numbers, and eliminates the need for a table to set appropriate DCs by level. An appropriate DC at 1st level is an appropriate DC at 20th level, so I only have to remember a single set of numbers for easy/medium/hard tasks instead of a set for each level of proficiency. This is important for making the 5e action resolution system as user-friendly as it is. All you have to know is that 5 is easy, 10 is medium, 15 is hard, and 20 is very hard, and use your own best judgment as to which category a player’s declared action falls under. Far, far easier to adjudicate than 4e’s skill system was, in my opinion.Ok, so use Beowulf as your baseline for difficulty instead of an imagined average human. That actually sounds like it would make kind of an awesome game! And 5e empowers you to do that without having to do a single thing with the system math. You don’t have to adjust any DCs or inherent bonuses or anything, you just have to map 5, 10, 15, and 20 to “easy, medium, hard, and very hard for Beowulf” instead of “easy, medium, hard, and very hard for the average Joe.” And then boom, there’s your way to communicate what the players should expect to be able to accomplish. You just tell them “you’re heroes on the caliber of Beowulf, so you can reasonably expect to be able to do anything he could do.”Still tell your players the DC before having them commit to the roll though, just in case they have a slightly different concept of Beowulf’s capabilities than you do. Not likely to be a huge problem, but it’s good policy anyway.</blockquote>

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