I read that as "Your party is now stronger. It doesn't matter you still need to roll a natural 15! BWAHAHAHA!!
but earlier you said you faced a near TPK by using secrets to get to the BBEG and the DM tanked it so you could win. That sounds like the opposite of what you want to do as a DM?
DC is meant to show how hard something is, by decreasing the odds that a roll will make it. Upping the DC because the party is stronger makes NO SENSE because they are LITERALLY BETTER AT IT! That's like saying a party needs to roll a 30+ to stealth because the rogue has expertise. MAYBE HE'S JUST GOTTEN BETTER AT STEALTHING?!??!?! GL getting the Cleric and Paladin past in full armour that optimised to do OTHER THINGS THAN STEALTHING AND ARE WEARING HEAVY ARMOUR!!! And if you say anything about power-gaming talk to the rogue with a 20 DEX and expertise in stealth and come back...
That's because you pulled the wrong message or I didn't explain it well. If the party fights a goblin a level 1 its a challenge if the goblin fights the same goblin at lvl 20 its easy so if you start an area with goblins and player return to the area and fight goblins they will be easy. At the same time you the players will be board if you don't challenge them and expect to fight harder things and face greater dangers as they get stronger. They don't expect to fight goblins the whole campaign. So how do you reconcile this?
1. Always a Possible Path forward so you’re not driving them to an early end of no escape
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When the GM is only giving them one path and the players are just following their must be some chance of them defeating it. You don't send your party to fight an ancient dragon at level 1 with no way to escape. If you do so as GM you are Total Party Killing your group and make no mistake, if you only throw out one hook, 99% of the time groups will fallow it because that is what they think they are "supposed to do". If the GMs path leads them to a river with
mighty enemies on their heels their needs to be some possibility of them crossing it or as GM your railroading them to what? drown or die fighting?
2. Standard unchanging DCs to show their growth
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Players get stronger and need to see and experience it. So, if you fight the same band of goblins they fought at level 1 again at level 5 they see the difference. If they cross the same river it should be generally the same DC with some possible minor changes with rain etc. When they travel old road and swim old rivers they can see what was once hard is now easy because their role bonuses are higher but the DC is the same. Minor enemies they fought before like Goblins or wild animals that are native to these lands should appear when they are level 20 just like they did when they were level 1.
3. Player scaling challenges and DCs to test them
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Players want a challenge and will get bored if the enemies and challenges don't increase. When they get high enough to fight a dragon they want to fight a dragon. That is just as important to feeling powerful as being able to kill goblins easier. You have to let the old challenge remain so they can find it again but you have to have hooks that lead them to new challenges that test their new strength. If they beat 5 goblins at level 1 with 4 players, at level 5 they fight 20 goblins easily killing each one but struggling with the group. Also, perhaps when lead to a more treacherous land drawn by a hook they fight dragons or other stronger foes that they once thought impossible. They will see the strength in that. When they scale these taller mountains, swim the raging rivers, or disarm these deadlier traps... it should be hard.
4. Deadly Options and Easy Options occasionally provided for player agency
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When possible for a GM to make
multiple hooks or provide some parties can ignore, like a hunter’s board with different options on it or even random encounters with options to fight or flee. There should be challenges that players can't beat to make the death real but have foreshadowing to warn the players and an option to escape o that bad choices can happen but aren't necessarily end of the campaign (unless players ignore the chance escape and chose to fight to death or victory). This lets them know there are times to run or die and it also gives them the chance to see options they know better than to do but might look forward to trying later. At the same time there needs to be challenges that are noticeably very much beneath them so they can avoid them if they consider them to easy and not worth their time or do them to revel in their great power.
5. Don’t be afraid to fix a terrible mistake
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If a GM realizes that they were trying to give them a challenge but instead only railroaded them into total party kill the GM needs to be willing to admit the mistake and provide some
possible option for escape
or success making it clear what it is. Players will usually run with enough foreshadowing and an opportunity to do so... If they don't the first time they generally do the second time. I do recognize "teaching players through death" or "adjusting difficulty" can both be GM meta gaming but at the same time players can lose agency and pass the point of no return without realizing it because the GM failed to provide a warning for player to pick up on or missed an important comment. If your players say "how were we to know an ancient dragon was hiding in the water and going to block our exit? We were sent to check out this cave and it looked empty until we got to the back and we were rolling for perception to look out for danger and found nothing!" Well then, the players could also be total party killed for meta game reason as well because you mentioned the "sign painted in blood reads
a red dragon lives here now with the corpses of to cave giant’s half eaten with big bites the length of your body out of them " at the front while they eating unwrapping some snacks or thought it was a joke not an actual sign your describing. When you realize they are about to die by a misunderstanding, a failure of the GM to pass important information, or simply because you made a map with 5 secret doors that if found in order could lead them to bypass the dungeon and go straight to the bosses and all die (which actually happened to my group). You do what my GM did and say well, they made no choice, they had no player agency here, if I don't adapt this fight or give them a way out ... the group will Total Party Kill because I railroaded them by accident, and you make some change that makes it
POSSIBLE but not guaranteed. This only means they have a chance to live or die. You don't have to give them sure thing but if you set them up for failure with no escape, you should give players at least one decent chance before you TPK the group. Maybe they don't take it and the all die. Maybe you lower the strength of enemies but they get bad roles while using bad tactics and die anyway. But you need to know and they need to know you saw it was an accidental railroad and you fixed it so that it was just a dire potentially deadly situation. Then your conscious can rest at ease and maybe if you did their job right and they do well they have an awesome tale of success or at least a good tail of a near miss in their last campaign.
That's my opinion anyway.
