Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6656924" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I may have misunderstood what you were contending.  I read your post as effectively saying that subjective DCs (that is to say, non-world-physics-centered DCs) tend to push toward a play dynamic whereby your tactical > operational > strategic progression (my continuum) and "variations of the same old threat" are mutually exclusive.  That is what that first bit was about.  If I was wrong about what you were saying, I'd be happy to be corrected.Thanks.  We enjoy ourselves.  That group isn't the group that I GM old-school dungeon crawls for or run Cthulu for.  But they like me to run Dread, Dogs, Cortex +, PBtA, a smattering of 13th Age and Sorcerer, and 4e for them.  On your second part, I didn't think you meant to suggest otherwise.  I definitely thought you felt that different scopes were more fun.  I just thought you were positing that subjective DCs make the effort to do so prohibitive (or outright impossible).  I may have had you wrong there.Yup.  Agreed.  We're talking about system.  That is what I enjoy doing and typically try to provoke the nuance of such conversation when I involve myself in threads.On the subject of fixed DCs in 4e, yes they do exist.  However, they exist for the very small part of play that is zoomed-in, and task resolution based.  4e is an odd duck in that it has a few toggles:1)  higher resolution zoom on combat where the task resolution component (eg I want to jump from this 25 ft square space to that 25 square space) of the tactical combat engine must be precise (not abstracted) in order for it to maintain its balance and harmony when interfacing with its other component parts (action economy, et al).  These are your objective DCs.2)  improvised action system that is predicated upon genre fidelity while still being calibrated to cohere, for balance, with the rest of the combat engine's parts.  These "genre fidelity" DCs are subjective DCs.3)  abstract conflict resolution that are meant to capture genre tropes and accomplish the dramatic arc: exposition > rising action > climax > falling action > denouement.  Because it is an RPG, fallout is then tallied from that emergent story and the game snowballs.  These DCs are subjective DCs.This "toggle" nature of 4e is problematic ("jarring" is often the descriptor used) for some folks in the same way that minions, swarms comprised of multiple participants (etc) is problematic ("jarring") for some folks.</blockquote>

Verification