Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6647336" data-attributes="member: 82106">But that's just the point. You have no way of knowing what the DC of a lock should be that is locking Vecna's Vault of Secrets vs one that is locking the Village Bank in 5e. And even the highest DC listed won't suffice to make this difficult for the highest level PCs who are good at lock picking. At least in 4e I know that a level 30 difficult lock is what I should use, and what its DC is. Beyond that I know I should be using an SC, and that's a whole other gaping hole in 5e's mechanics. Oddly it uses a limited list skill system, like 4e's, but the designers failed to appreciate the role that the SC plays in that kind of system.As for this whole 'scaling' thing, this is simply not really true. In the PHB/DMG rules there is no hint of any scaling of anything at all. All that is stated is that the DM should scale the challenges (IE provide fiction which is objectivized into rules that give higher DCs for higher level characters to face). They use examples like doors to illustrate this.Later on, in the RC, some wag stuck in some 'scaling phrases' that apply for a few specific uses of certain skills. The idea was obviously to make things like in-combat Heal checks for challenging for high-level PCs (the PHB gives a set of DCs for these that are roughly appropriate for level 1 PCs, and become fairly trivial by level 10). While it was a nice thought in some sense it doesn't really represent a generalized rule. A lock that was DC10 at level 1 isn't mysteriously now DC20 at level 10. Its just that if you run into a lock in a level 10 adventure, its going to be a much tougher lock, generally speaking, and thus be DC20. If you really wanted to, you could put level 1 locks in your level 10 dungeon, but why bother?</blockquote>

Verification