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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sheadunne" data-source="post: 6095539" data-attributes="member: 27570">I never mentioned anything about challenging the characters. It's not about creating challenges, it's about skills accurately reflecting and participating in the game of D&D. The choice of options should be equal between climbing or flying or ignoring, and currently they are not. This doesn't mean they have to be balanced, but they should reflect a valid choice. And it seems like you do challenge players. You select the criminal. You select the magic. You select the cliff. What you're saying is that you don't do so based on the party resources. I do it the exact same way. The issue with this style is that eventually you reach a point where the game stops. The players do not have adequate resources in order to achieve their goals. So they go back to town and hire someone, find something, etc, which is the equivalent of the DM giving them the means to bypass the obstacle. This is a perfectly fine way to accomplish it, but it's no different than the 4e method which basically says, you'll get around it eventually, so why not just have you do it and ignore the part we think is boring. Those are differences in playstyle. I lean toward the former option, not the later. The issue I have is when the players sit there at the cliff and give up because skills do not adequately reflect their ability to climb the cliff. They know they can go back to town and get their supplies and hire help, etc, but they're frustrated that logically there's no reason they shouldn't be able to climb the cliff. They're 20th level! They can kill colossal red dragons without blinking, and yet they can't climb a cliff? They've been in courts for over 30 years and they can't dress properly to impress the king? They've been adventuring for 20 levels and they can't cook breakfast in the morning? Etc. There reaches a point where a skill becomes irrelevant in the course of the game and some tasks are just mundane enough to ignore after a sufficient amount of time has past. Basically I'm just saying skills need to be relevant across all levels. They also need a system that works for when a task doesn't need a roll and when a task requires a roll. While I'm not a fan of the current 5e method, at least they attempt to accomplish this. The 4e method at least acknowledges this and makes a choice. 1e doesn't view it as important. 2e wants to use it but hasn't figured out how. And 3e experimented and created entirely new issues <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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