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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tyrlaan" data-source="post: 6655454" data-attributes="member: 20998">This was your original point, which I refuted, and I'll refute again. Honestly, if you build a 5th level adventure to have the players crack open Vecna's diary, you can give it whatever DC you want and work out how its possible all sorts of ways. Maybe another god is granting the thief a +20 bonus. Maybe the thief has magical lock picks and doesn't know it. Maybe it's actually already been picked. Etc. My point is, if someone running the game is a stickler for making sure the DCs of locks later on are consistent with the sliding scale rules, that person is probably going to justify breaking the sliding scale when they break it. The fundamental tenet of 5e is rulings not rules. Why is it impossible to assume rulings not rules for 4e? Furthermore, this whole example laid out to try to demonstrate why DCs are "bad" in 4e feels a lot like the linchpin in the example is akin to putting a warning label on a Batman costume that reads "cape does not actually enable child to fly". As in, this absurdity should have been addressed because someone somewhere is going to mess this up. Basically, how much do you expect to have spelled out in a rules system? I'm especially curious to hear an answer to this because 5e leaves a lot to interpretation by design. Which, if that's good for 5e, how is that a flaw for 4e?Alternatively, if you just don't like 4e and prefer 5e, that's cool, but please just acknowledge that and move on. This really feels like a lot of twisting and turning just to pull out the dead horse and give it another kick.The DCs are just a smokescreen. The DCs, the bonus and the rate you get them, is all pretty much irrelevant. What provides a feeling of achievement is a DM presenting challenges and PCs overcoming them. What numbers specifically are involved doesn't matter, as long as it feels like an obstacle was overcome. If DCs really mattered as much as you and others are arguing they do, diceless RPGs and games that use opposed roll mechanics for resolution wouldn't work because "how would you know if you're getting better"? The answer is simple - it's in the fiction. Games like D&D bake that improvement into the game through the numbers slapped on monsters and PCs that give you queues on how to steer the fiction. With an easy yardstick on character power - levels - you can then take advantage of what the designers have already built for you to give players bigger and badder obstacles, or throw old obstacles at them so they can see how much they've improved. But at the end of the day, how those numbers work and where they come from doesn't really matter as long as it's consistent over the course of the game, which is edition agnostic.If I sat down at a table expecting a game to go to max level, yeah. But if the campaign was designed to go to 7 or something close, and that was communicated up front (which we can assume is likely since the alternative is group dysfunction and can't be justified as a criticism of any system), then I'd be okay with it - or I wouldn't and therefore wouldn't play that game. I'm sure this illustrates something, but I am not seeing what that is other than a really odd premise for a game.Why is level 7 meaningless anymore than level 15 or 20 or 30? What point is this supporting?So your suggesting that if a GM alters the difficulty of an encounter they only shift one attribute? I don't understand what you're getting at here. Sure the slow advancement of numbers in 5e gives you more of a safety net to play this way, but nothing is stopping you from doing the same in any system. 5e just lets you be lazy about it.Of course the fiction is relevant. If the fiction wasn't relevant we would play games like this - GM: Adam, roll a check against obstacle A. Let's say this is a combat obstacle, you can roll your attack.Adam: I got a 15.GM: Success! You hit obstacle A and it's damaged. Janice, there are 3 more obstacles here. To make it interesting, Obstacle B has partial cover and Obstacle C has an obscurement effect. What do you want to do?Regarding your Dark Souls example.... So in the example, you improve/level up and the boss gets progressively easier for you to handle, not because it's gotten less powerful, but because you've gotten better. If that's your example, wouldn't that be analogous to whiffing on sirfneblin at level 1 and crushing them at level 7 because you've gotten so much better? Afterall, it hasn't gotten weaker, you've gotten stronger.And since that is a fair analogy to your Dark Souls example, isn't that the same as saying in 4e, you had a hard time fighting orcs at level 1 and later fight them at level 7 and crush them? Your example for 5e doesn't track with your Dark Souls analogy because you claim the way improvement is demonstrated is showing how you do against a completely different foe. Don't get me wrong, I'm very convinced you can obtain a sense of achievement from 5e. I just struggle to understand how you can argue that this can't be experienced in 4e.Or if you want to know how to preserve balance OR break it when you want, sure. The alternative feels just lazy to me.</blockquote>

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