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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6647473" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm sorry, but you have left reality behind when you start telling me what is 'objectively true' about games where the rules explicitly state you can do anything you want. I have no idea where this came from. I want a game system to be able to largely cover the things that I am going to do. Why would I not want that!? I pay for exactly this in my rules. I hate to tell you this but I started DMing D&D games in 1975. I know ALL about what every version of D&D, and most of the other really popular RPGs have done and are about. Nothing is 'shackled' just because a way exists to represent it on paper. I mean you're subject to reductio ad absurdum here just for starters. If you want to free-form game, why buy an RPG? Going back to the example of my 'utility wizard' from 4e. ALL of the various things he was doing were supported by some sort of rule. He could make items, potions, alchemy, poisons, use rituals, and have a huge and varying spell book to pick from, ALL based on 4e RAW. In fact the game I played him in was an online game that had various rotating groups of players, it was explicitly using standard rules with no houserules or additions. Now, I'm not saying that endless subsystems has to always add more value to every game. However, it worked quite well for 4e to have a structured set of rules that were carefully considered. The players/DM could then depart from that when they wished.4e has AT LEAST as much, in fact considerably more, variation in skill bonuses than 5e does, so the same thing holds true. Yet we can still get a good idea of what is appropriate, and the Easy/Medium/Hard DCs scale in such a way that at all levels, accounting for character build practices, the Hard DC is hard to hit for any PC, the medium DC is moderately challenging for an average PC, and the easy DC is trivial unless you have very little talent. I don't know what the problem is. Of course one PC will find the task much easier than the other, you have set up the scenario so that this is the case. I would note two things about this. First that 'hard DC' in this case in 4e will mean moderately difficult for the high bonus PC and very difficult for the low bonus PC (probably impossible much beyond heroic tier as the gap increases with level). The true answer though is again that this should be an SC. If its just some throw-away check for no real consequence then who cares? If its a significant part of the game, then it should be a series of checks and actions that tests the character in multiple ways and leads to some advancement in the plot. In such a case the level of the SC will be more likely to represent the difficulty of the challenge as you aren't tossing just one die, it will be an average of checks against various bonuses and tend to even out between the characters (assuming some sort of competition, TBH that part would never be structured this way in 4e anyway, but that's a whole other thing).</blockquote>

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