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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3690565" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think this is a very insightful post.What I would add is that, even if we put to one side the issue of modelling learning, there are other problems with the way D&D skills and DCs model reality. In real life, people exist who are well-rounded. I have a friend, for example, who is both a PhD in chemical engineering, and a regular finalist in the Anchorage marathon. Another friend is both a professor of philosophy, an excellent guitarist and an amateur painter of moderate talent. I'm sure the world contains a crack SAS soldier who is also a capable poet.D&D has a lot of trouble modelling these sorts of well-rounded individuals, because there are simply not enough skill points available. Furthermore, most adventure DCs are set in such a fashion that maximum ranks in skills are required to achieve them, thus discouraging diversification at higher levels. Furthermore, it is sometimes far from clear what these ultra-high DCs actually represent. This is especially so, I find, for non-phyiscal skills. Take Knowledge, for example, where obscurity of information is typically correlated with higher DCs, regardless of whether the information is technically or theoretically more challenging (in which case higher ranks should be required) or just less well known information (in which case assiduousness of research should be able to make up for gaps in ranks).To tak another example, if a module tells me that the DC for calming down a particular raging NPC is 60, what does this tell me about the nature of the rage? What sort of rage is there that no one, no matter how hard they try or how long they talk to the person, cannot be calmed except by the most silver-tongued high-level character?The meaning of high skills bonsuses is also sometimes unclear. Diplomacy +40, for example, which is what is needed to calm the rage in the above example, suggests that a character can sweet-talk Kim Jong-Il into giving up his nuclear weapons in just a few minutes of negotations. What real-world ability does this model? Just as the nature of the rage is mysterious, so is the nature of the skill.Stats have the same issue: while I understand what it is for something to be as strong as a 28 strength suggests, what is the meaning of 28 intelligence, given that 18 is the maximum for any adolescent human?These "modelling" issue could come up in earlier editions also, but not as acutely, because the bonuses simply didn't get as big (and so the differences between starting numbers, and hihg-level or god-like numbers, were not so great).</blockquote>

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