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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reaper Steve" data-source="post: 4390326" data-attributes="member: 51528">Ouch.I feel like I got a little bashing for what I thought was a decently explained rationale that I did clearly state was my opinion and not tested. I readily admit that my numbers are almost certainly not perfect, but I think my reasoning is sound.1) IMO, the original DCs were too high. It appears that WotC feels this as well because they lowered them.2) IMO, the new DCs are too low. Other than agreeing with the people that have run the math on the boards and my own personal feel for it, I have no proof that they are too low.3) The question I asked myself--and others have mentioned in this thread--is: how should easy/moderate/hard be defined? Is that relative to an unskilled person or a highly skilled hero? I took the passage from p.178 of the PHB  (skill checks should only occur in dramatic situations that are far from mundane) as my indirect answer. From that statement, I made my baseline assumption: the chance of success should only be high only if one has both high natural aptitude (i.e., stat) and training in the skill, and even then it should not be guaranteed. That is my assumption... if one does not agree with that, then the rest becomes moot.4) From my assumption, I made my baseline hypothesis: an average untrained character should have a 50% chance of succeeding at an easy check of his level. The rest of the DCs scaled from there in an attempt to give a trained character a 50/50 shot of accomplishing a moderate DC while making hard DCs truly hard but possible. Again, these are just numbers to start testing from. 5) After I looked at those numbers I was suuprised to see how they fell in between the old DCs and the new DCs. That somewhat validated my premise... unless WotC really wants players to have high, almost guaranteed, chances of success at skill checks of their level, then the new DCs are too low. It also somewhat validated that the original DCs were too high. But really, it comes down to: what is the baseline assumption? (And it would be nice for them to tell us.)</blockquote>

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