eamon
Explorer
Wow, I completely disagree. Easy/Moderate/Hard DC's are fine for resolving novel cases that the rules don't describe. They're like the infamous +2 circumstance bonus - a quick, easy reminder to tweak the DC's to the circumstances and not just whatever "rule" the book happens to include.
Circumstance modifiers or the nearly equivalent easy/moderate/hard distinction are fine, but I don't need the rulebooks to repeat that guideline in a gazillion spots. The book-writers have the time and opportunity to work out more balanced and reasonable DC's - something I can't do on the fly.
D&D comes with a few built-in player/character rewards. Gold or items are one of these, story advancement is another, but XP and levelling are absolutely core as well. Using level-scaling DC's undermines that core D&D feature in an inexusable fashion - and it makes little sense to boot.
Actually, in general it makes absolutely no sense for the difficulty to scale with level. Something that's hard at low levels is easy at high levels; it just doesn't make sense to say "use the hard DC for the appropriate level". It's much better to give a scaling DC based not on the character level, but on the difficulty of the task - and then, of course, it's reasonable to suggest that the DM actually select tasks that fall in the easy-to-hard range normally and handwave others. By doing that, there's really a feeling of advancement - the chasm that was unscalable at low levels is merely moderately challenging later on. The troll bridge guardian who wouldn't let you pass without a bribe before is now easily intimidated.
There's nothing wrong with easy/moderate/hard DC's - but they have their place as a DM-aid, not in a rulebook that can afford to do better. Frankly, a completely fixed DC is better than a "defined-to-be-moderate" DC in every way - it's simpler, more reasonable, and supports one of D&D's built-in player rewards (leveling).
Every time I see an easy/moderate/hard DC in a rulebook, I see a fine DM-tool that's been abused to the point of undermining the game. Sure, a DM can fix it by being smart and descriptive and realizing that if the DC scales, the in-game task must have as well and alter his descriptions accordingly. But that just makes the game harder to DM well - references to "easy/moderate/hard" almost never explicitly point out that their fixed meta-game nature necessitates varying in-game descriptions to avoid undermining levelling and believability.
