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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6652867" data-attributes="member: 82106"></blockquote>All of this illustrates what I like to call the 'fallacy of the hard die roll'. RPGs are not more or less challenging based on what the DCs are. Challenge is injected into the game in a variety of ways, but none of them are 'being able to roll a 20', because there's no challenge in dice rolling. There MIGHT be tension, but its a pretty limited form of it. What makes a game interesting, and can create genuine difficulty, is when you create hard choices, and when you have situations where the players have to do a lot of different things, be inventive, whatever in order to get their chances of success to be reasonable. In fact these sorts of things should NEVER hinge on a single check, which is why 4e so assiduously uses SCs. Why have the player's elaborate and well-considered plan dependent on one check they have a 20% chance of passing? Failing it isn't exciting, its sort of a slap down at that point. All the hard part was getting there. I'm not saying low-chance-of-success checks can't have a place in the game. As essentially a 'saving throw' there's no compelling reason to use really easy DCs for instance (IE once things have gone pear shaped its fine to toss the players a bone and let them try to fix it with some Hail Mary). You could have different alternative branches of an adventure that could be accessed only by difficult checks too, if you don't mind generating content you won't use. Those branches should not be structured as 'rewards for doing well' however. They should just be interesting possible choices that provide the players with agency. A variation would be the hard-to-access adventure element that requires payment of a resource, that one could have a low-probability gating DC plus a reward (its luck if you get the reward, but as long as you can continue its no worse than any other element of luck). What you REALLY don't want is the players choosing a course of action, investing resources in it, and then at the end coming up against the locked door that can now only be opened with a low-probability, forcing the inevitable failure to either thwart the mission or force the players to go back and pay their way forward in some other way all over again. I CAN imagine a few cases where you could deliberately set up something like this, to put the party in a pickle maybe, but in that case there need not be any check at all, they just reach a hopeless dead end and need to backtrack.The point is, the idea that '4e is built around lots of easier checks vs a few really hard ones, so its an easy mode game' is simply fallacious. It rests on a deep misunderstanding of the uses of probability in RPGs.[/QUOTE]

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