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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6653432" data-attributes="member: 2067">Yeah - dramatically different experience over here. Any utility power that gave you some advantage on a skill check was seen as kind of a waste of a slot by all the tables I played at. The logic tended to run that skill checks were mostly relevant in skill challenges, and there, you could normally sub in a skill check you were proficient at for overcoming any challenge if you made a good enough case for it (and it was not a hard case to make in many situations), making the choice of proficiency mostly cosmetic (though there was some difference between an exploration skill and a social skill, even this eroded with time - "use Athletics to talk about fights with the warrior at the table" and "use Diplomacy to make the NPC's do it for you" were all things that saw actual exposure). I wouldn't dispute that the characters had proficiency in these skills, but I never saw a character voluntarily take skill-enhancing powers when there were perfectly good healing/defensive/movement powers available for that same slot. Proficiency was enough - often MORE than enough - to do everything exploration and interaction requested of us.Which is just to say that my 4e experience was pretty biased toward fights. More moving parts, more powers, more interesting things going on, more choices, more variety, more fights. Given the misguided complaints about 4e being nothing more than a minis skirmish game, I don't think I was the only one who saw that happening. Your posted character sheet, as a Slayer, is also light on the attack powers, of which a comparable non-Essentials character, at level 6, would have six if I'm remembering my maths right. Compared to three utility powers. Nothing so categorical. More that in practice, level-relative DC's can create a feeling of impotence in a player when they know that their achievements and experience don't actually affect the chance of victory very much, and world-relative DC's can by the same token create a feeling of mastery and achievement in a player when they know that they're taking on much harder challenges than they "should." Which is just to say that a DC table that doesn't take levels into account isn't inherently flawed or backwards or useless or that it must lead to bad play where the PC's can't pass by some DC that is too hard for them or any of the other things AA seemed to presume must happen because 5e doesn't set DC's relative to level, and that setting DC's relative to level isn't clearly a better or more advanced or improved option. The reverse is also true of course: setting DC's relative to level doesn't necessarily mean you feel cheated when you achieve them. But it can. I know I've felt more than once that 4e is largely a "level-less" game for all its 30 levels (of which I played about 18). And 5e, over the course of 7, is already showing me that setting the DC's relative to the world is a part of the edition's strong antidote to that. In 4e, I always felt at about the same level of badass ("fairly"). In 5e, I've felt the growth that comes from a tier-shift in a way 4e never achieved (going from "not very badass" to "a little badass!"), and in a way is a little more subtle and interesting than bigger numbers.</blockquote>

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