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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 3734788" data-attributes="member: 21673">Good for Roger. But the DC 15 is still a bloody hard challenge for a wizard at 10th level if he has no climb, and worse if he has a strength penalty. It's even worse for the fighter who hasn't been buying climb, because of armor-check penalties. Whereas the rogue who's been maxing Climb for the past 10 levels can potentially take 0 on the base challenge, so he can breeze the hard stuff. It gets worse from there. And a SWSE-style skills system doesn't prevent him from doign things like that, either.Ramping the DC is not always a viable answer, whether by doing via the base DC or by penalties.Yes, the wizard could bypass by use of spells (and probably should). But that requires him to have a fairly specific spell set ready. If he wasn't expecting to have to climb a tree today, what does he do? (That's possibly answered by the new resource management system, I hope it is  anyway). It doesn't help the fighter, and I'm not sure it helps the cleric.At any rate, game design should not be driven by character design. And to the extent that adventure design is driven by character design, I would prefer to have more options to challenge the characters before I know what the character's are capable of than I do now. Without knowing what skills the party has, I can't begin to set a DC appropriate to their level, because I don't know what skills they have, and I don't know what skill bonus they have. SWSE tells me, within a 10-point range (+/- stat bonus), what DCs I should be using, without having any knowledge whatsoever of the character or party capabilities. As an adventure consumer, I can therefore assume that a competently-written module can set DCs appropriate to the party's capability without knowing anything about my party. That means that, among other things, there can be a purely skills-based encounter without a "kill them all" escape hatch, without having to guess that my party has enough characters with a particular skill-set to get through the encounter.If I had the time to hand-tune each encounter to my party, I'd care a lot less. I don't. I have the time to take off-the-shelf adventures, change a name or two, and run it as-is. I've had near-TPK because module authors have made assumptions about skillsets that aren't the case in my party. I've also had it go the other way where what was supposed to be a challenging encounter for the party was not at all for the same reason.I don't care as much about how much this makes NPC design easier; I don't design NPCs right now. But to the extent it does, I'm all for it. I am glad to hear that the devs are looking to make adventure design easier, maybe that will let me do it again. But while I'm working 10-hr days, and have social obligations on the weekends that limit me to maybe 1 or 2 sessions a month of around 4 hrs each; I'll take simplicity over complexity every time.</blockquote>

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