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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ulthwithian" data-source="post: 4283169" data-attributes="member: 60612">Whereas I can't speak for the D&D designers and their math abilities, I do know, for certain sure, that some WotC employees (most of the older Magic R&D people, at the very least) are math nuts, and I cannot imagine, in the least, that they let something like this out without checking to make sure that the theoretical probabilities were in-line with what they wanted.Having said that, there are at least two distinct possibilities from the data at hand:1) The model does not reflect the realities of WotC's system.  This would likely be due to some kind of editing error in the books (e.g., the +5 DC issue shouldn't apply).  While there is some kind of issue with more complex challenges being more probable to solve than less complex challenges, this may have been deemed worth the otherwise elegant system.  This brings to mind the Storyteller system's early issues with the fact that a 'critical miss' was more likely rolling two dice than only a single die.2) The model is correct.  In that case, WotC intentionally wishes skill challenges to be difficult to 'win'.  A few comments regarding this.  Other have observed that the penalties for failing a skill challenge are not as severe as the penalties for failing a combat challenge.  (No one should face death, for instance.)  In this view, skill challenges fail gracefully, while combat challenges fail catastrophically, and so skill challenges can be made more difficult.  Another point to make is that adversity generally allows for better characterization than success.  If WotC used this thinking in their general design of 'how to drive character development', it would make sense to make the better chance of failure (and thus adversity) fall on the challenge that fails more gracefully; that is, skill challenges.As for myself, since my players have by and large gone the '3 16' route in making their characters, I will cheerfully ignore the ambiguous-to-some +5 DC for skill checks and use WotC's system.Morrus: Early skill challenge reports had mentioned that you could choose the difficulty.  I thought that was silly and am glad that WotC moved away from that.Hmmm... maybe I should make a .sig... 'D&D 3:16 - I just characterized your ***'.  Hmmm. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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