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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9098378" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I take a fairly hardline stance personally that scaling is a design side tool that should be used to set the tone/structure of the world and system, but should not be an encounter design facing tool. Page 42 should have been buried in the DMG2, as a "if you want to change the underlying nature of reality, observe how this matches up to different skill DC" section, not referenced by standard DM or worse, player side mechanics.Yes, this is precisely what I mean by scaling in kind instead of magnitude. Players should be able to do more and more different things as they increase in capability. If you start with scaling or generic difficulty, you end up mapping a DC 5 Jumping challenge is a narrow pit to a DC 15 challenge is a broad pit to a DC 25 challenge is a chasm, but the play procedure hasn't changed and the player's decision making is completely unimpacted by the game. It's just the adjectives used to describe the problem that are different. If skills map not to "scale of problem" but instead to "specific player abilities" then the whole decision space is changed as they level up.I think part of this requires a deeper and more nuanced understanding of challenge/obstacle design in general though. Even something like a skill challenge (my least favorite innovation in game design) is really starting numbers first. I'm not actually interested in, as [USER=7006]@DEFCON 1[/USER] put it earlier, creating an "Ability check minigame." Instead, I want players to solve puzzles and problems and express themselves through gameplay choices against puzzles and situations. It's fine and good if a player finds a way to fix an issue in 3 die rolls, but it's horrible to design an issue that's solved (or is meant to be solved) by 3 die rolls. I don't actually think "roll to cast" is that fundamentally important in the skill vs. spell capacity question. They have different resource expenditures, generally time vs. limited charges, and it's pretty easy to modulate access to them, thus that having a lot of spell ability limits broad skills. If anything, I think low level utility spells often represent a better core gameplay loop than skill checks do. Skills are nearly always rolled reactively; a problem or obstacle happens, you roll a skill check to see if it affects you. Spells are proactive; the problem happens, you decide if you want to spend a resource to overcome it. That same thing expands to agency in general, skills rarely provide any ability to frame or alter a situation while spells have lots of declarative text that lets you do that.There's a lot of hacks that would make sense to put more abilities in the skill system that steal some of that gameplay from spells. Imagine say, a rogue with a pool of "thievery points" they can allot to increase skills checks so they can hit specific DCs, or a specialist character that can assign a floating skill bonus each rest to change their capabilities, or a berserker that can overdrive some skills for X period of time and risk fatigue...there's a lot of different resource models you could layer on top of a skill system.I blame a lot of my idiosyncrasies on a 3e entry into the hobby. It feels entirely normal and natural to me that skills should largely define their effects in player facing material, and the real design question was what those abilities should be and at what rate they should be delivered to characters. I'm still baffled by how comfortable everyone is with just making up a DC. I would have once upon a time called an RPG without an attempt to spell out the applications of skills as an incomplete product.</blockquote>

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