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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9098095" data-attributes="member: 6690965">To some degree, this is an unavoidable responsibility of DMing. You have to decide if the fortification wall is made of wood or stone, and whether it's smooth or rough and all of that will produce a climb DC. Some of that comes down to professional responsibility to make those decisions based on some consistent set of criteria (internally consistent worldbuilding, scaling player capability, extrapolation from some standard, there's several approaches that can work here). Beyond that, I think this can and should be mitigated in a few ways.Firstly, I think it's incorrect to evaluate obstacles in terms of their difficulty in the way you're proposing here, and judging from the bolded bit, I think you largely agree. Obstacles should not scale in magnitude, but in kind to match increased player capability as levels increase. With a broad enough RNG, it's reasonable to have several grade of "gate" but that does not mean the conceit of "a locked portcullis in a sturdy wall" should produce a DC that's uncertain at all levels of play. It's fine and appropriate that there is a point that task falls off the RNG, and Take 10/20 help here, by making that a transition through 3 states. Initially it can be achieved at maximum effort given uninterrupted time (Take 20), then it can be achieved when not under immediate stress or perhaps by a character with a specialist feature (Take 10), and finally it is not longer a challenge (DC<=1+Mod). Rolling becomes a risk you take when you have to, either because you're pushing the boundaries of what you can do, or because a situation is out of your control.Secondly, many skill DCs should be attached to player facing abilities, not to obstacles in the world at large. If a player is provided the ability to "climb any sheer surface at half speed" by a DC X check, then the decision making is entirely out of the DM's hands. More abilities granted through the skill system should be declarative; that's exactly what spells do.Once we stop conceiving as a DC 25 roll as "hard" and instead as "the requirement to use the 'open magical locks' power" the skill system moves away from a loop of the DM picking a difficulty and players tugging at the slots to see if they win the action they want. Designing a hard challenge means not picking numbers that players will achieve approximately 60% of the time, and instead in devising a situation that will require a novel use of their abilities (ideally iterated over time) to overcome.</blockquote>

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