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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8010610" data-attributes="member: 42582">I know that we're mostly in agreement or at least like-minded in this thread, but I wanted to express some disagreement with this.Whether different degrees of difficulty correlate to meaningful decisions seems, to me, and once again, to depend on details of system and orientation of play.In "skilled"/OSR-type play I agree without hesitation. I hope the reasons are obviousl.It's also true in BW, but for completely different reasons: PC development in BW depends upon the players being able to pit themselves against a range of obstacles of different mechanical difficulties; and BW also thrives on players being able to choose, in the fiction, how hard their PCs bang their heads against various walls. So different difficulties create a context for these choices to be made, but they're being made within very different frameworks of gameplay logic from those that operate in classic D&D or other OSR-ish games.In 4e D&D or Cortex+ Heroic, different degrees of difficulty aren't a very important thing. In the former system, degree of difficulty (eg level of a combat encounter; degree of complexity of a skill challenge) is something that I generally control as GM, as it is an important tool for pacing and also - especially in the combat case - for forcing the players to make decisions about resource expenditure.  So whether the players use the sewers or contrive hang gliders to make an aerial assault will change the fiction and hence the PCs' fictional positioning in subsequent scenes, but probably won't change the mechanical difficulty of entering the castle. Here's a post from an old thread that illustrates the idea to some degree at least:What made the choice to pacify rather than kill the bear meaningful wasn't the effect that it had on mechanical difficulty (it had none) but the effect that it had on the fiction (ie the bear is not dead and rather is a friend of at least some of the PCs).</blockquote>

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