Yeah, I'm totally with you on that, both as a player and as a DM. I'm very much in the "tailor the adventure to your party" camp for DMing. But I can also totally understand wanting to model a real-seeming world that presents a broad range of options to challenge players to build a well-balanced party (if not individual characters).
I agree!
It's weird to me that people act like there is nothing in between two wild extremes. Like, it's either "let the chips fall where they may", or coddle and/or punish the players by tailoring every challenge to them.
See, in between those, is a whole continent of good DMing/adventure design.
I'll use [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]'s example again, of a boulder blocking a path. One way to deal with that in a group with no str scores higher than 10 or 12, and most at either 10 or 8, would be to simply let them "suck" in that challenge, too bad for them, should have raised that str a bit.
The second way, is to find a handwave solution for it.
Third, you could include in the adventure the tools with which the party can get around the obstacle without high strength scores, and what was designed to be a strength (athletics) challenge becomes a different kind of challenge. Still a challenge, just a different kind.
The third one is my preference. I don't buy for a second that it is somehow less fair than the first option, or that it reduces player agency, as [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] suggests.
The only adventure that is worth the time and energy of playing through is the adventure that happens naturally, based on the premise that represents the internal forces of the world.
Seriously? That doesn't seem like an exaggeration, at the very least?
In both cases, the decision by the DM essentially makes any decision by the players meaningless, because the outcome is already determined ahead of time. And even if the DM decides to take a balanced approach and throw things that they think will present a reasonable challenge for you to overcome, your success or failure still hinges entirely on what they think is reasonable for you; if you fail, it's because they mis-judged you, rather than because of any choice you made.
It's hard to know where to start here, except to simply say, "nope". If the outcome of challenges is determined ahead of time simply because the DM chose to make it a puzzle solving challenge, or a challenge of coordinated teamwork, rather than one of muscle power...it was poorly designed. Nothing to do with the kind of challenge chosen, it just wasn't made well.
And if a goal has only one path to reach it, there isn't really any player agency, is there?
By allowing creative solutions, and making sure the game supports multiple approaches to the challenges faced, player agency is strengthened, not undermined.
And that is all it takes to not create a situation where an obstacle turns into an impassible roadblock simply because you made the adventure without a specific set of PCs in mind.
No one. No one. is suggesting that DMs should avoid social encounters because no one has high Charisma.
But there certainly isn't anything wrong with making sure that your social encounters allow for Insight, lore skills, etc to overcome the challenge, if you've a group with no "face" character.
Because, I don't like running a game that makes players have to look to metagame information/ideas while making their characters, like "hey, DnD with this DM tends to involve athletics challenges that can't be gotten around without a decent athletics score. We better make sure most of us are decent at athletics, regardless of concept! "
