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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2296060" data-attributes="member: 10201">That's true. I guess partly it's just a matter of semantics: if an "easy" lock were DC10, but the only ones that actually came up were DC20+ (because who bothers to put a lock less secure than that on something? and why make the players roll for a DC10 lock?), i think it'd work better for me. But it's also an issue of game play. My players took one look at the DCs for open locks and use magic device, and said "screw this" and never even put a single point into them, because of the number of points it would've taken just to be adequate. Now, if all skills had similar usefulness threshholds, this wouldn't have been the case--whether those thresholds were high or low. From a game-play standpoint, it seems like a problem when some skills require 5 points before you get to do Cool Stuff with them, while others require 15. Especially when, IMHO, the Cool Stuff in each case is roughly equally-cool.Now, on the flipside, i agree with you: some things are just plain easier than others. And equivalencies are hard to draw. For someone who knows how to pick locks, is an "easy" lock easier than an "easy" climb is for a rockclimber? (speaking as a technical issue of skill, of course--it's pretty much a guarantee that the lock picking is gonna be less physical effort.) Anyway, while i take your points [which i snipped] about this being a different sort of "consistency", i counter that i think they *are* intertwined. That is, IMHO, the consistency we're mostly talking about (consistent rulings), is, ultimately, grounded in one or both of (1) consistency of gameplay and (2) consistency with reality. The example of two different rules for swinging from a chandelier is mostly of the first sort, because the question isn't so much what it takes to do that in teh real world, as it is what it took to do it in-game last time. A counter-example of the second would be having the DC to climb a pinetree be higher than the DC to climb a brick wall. That is, i think that you, ultimately, want something that is consistent with your conception of reality, except where you explicitly want it to deviate to make the game better.</blockquote>

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