Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9098247" data-attributes="member: 70468">See below for explication, but I think the primary concern is scaling with some affordance made for consistency with worldbuilding. Given that, scaling DCs make some sense. If you want a number that fits the current context, it’s a lot easier to provide a scale and let the DM make up something appropriate than it is to provide a menu of options wirth the required numbers. (I do think numbers should be knowable by the PCs even in a scaled DC systems. Otherwise, you can’t reason about the approaches available to you, and it makes resolution less immediate, and that contribute to the fun.)My assumption is the DM will be picking obstacles the same way they do monsters, which is by evaluating what’s available at the intended level of difficulty. The party is Xth level, which requires a set of CR Yth level monsters for some particular amount of challenge, and I want those to be undead, so I can pick from Z options. For that same Xth level party, if the DM wanted to include a trap or barrier, then the DM is going to look at things of the intended difficulty and pick from that list. In a sense, these things are helping to reinforce the game’s intended milieu by ensuring the challenges match what the characters are capable of doing.As you intuit, I’m not a fan of the progression treadmill. I prefer the approaches used in old-school games and static DCs like PbtA games. As you get better, you get better. If done well, your journey in competence goes from requiring a lot of help (and risk of consequences) to being self-sufficient (or nearly close to it). That’s how it worked in our Blades in the Dark game. In the beginning, we had to work together, push ourselves, and take devils’ bargains. By the end, we were doing solo scores and taking on big things by ourselves. I like that much better as a form of progression than what amounts to doing the same thing at higher levels but described more fantastically.Non-combat specialities are a WIP in my homebrew system, but that’s how things work thanks to static DCs. If you want to make a map of an area you explored (thus allowing you to find it again without having to navigate back), you make a Skill Check using Cartography + Wisdom. If you want to cast from a scroll, that’s Scroll Use + Intellect. Spells work the same way as skills, but they use your Mage rank the method instead of a skill. That avoids the problem of spells being categorically better than skills. You’ll still want to invest in skills because there are trade-offs to using spells. They cost MP, which you can only recover normally with MP potions (that cost stress to consume) or by using a weekly downtime activity; and your Mage rank is derived from your level, but skills are bought with EXP and have a maximum rank of +5 that’s independent of level.I like this approach. It’s similar to the argument that old-school skills were actually providing you with something more than the baseline. A thief who uses Move Silently is not just sneaking about but is in actuality completely silent upon success. I don’t now how common that view was though at the time, and I think the idea of using that approach in a modern D&D-like might be a tough sell for some. (See also: the complaints people have about skill feats in PF2.)</blockquote>

Verification