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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6657344" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks, and yes - different slimes. So the fiction is boring but not inconsistent.   It's a fair question. In some of my posts over the past few pages I've been trying to say a bit about it, but it's probably not as clear as it could be.I certainly don't want to be dogmatic about anything; on the other hand, from 1990 to 2008 I GMed a lot of Rolemaster (objective DCs), from 2009 to present I've GMed a lot of 4e (subjective DCs) and also some MHRP (subjective DCs) and BW (objective DCs), and this has given me an intuitive conviction that there is a difference.I'm going to take a stab at three main differences. Analysis, and relevant play experiences that shed light, are very welcome!First difference: "subjective" DCs encourage the GM to approach framing keeping in mind concerns of pacing/story - "How big a deal do I want this to be for the PCs, for the players, given the other dynamics going on in the campaign and at the table, etc?"A really concrete demonstration of this might be deciding, in MHRP, whether or not to drop in a die from the Doom Pool (with the appropriate fictional narration for the opposition) - the fiction and DC are correlated, but the choice of what fiction to be created is driven by the narrative/pacing concerns and not just extrapolation from ingame concerns (like impersonal causal processes + NPC motivations).Second difference (but not disconnected from the first): "objective" DCs put the focus squarely on ingame causal processes. What has happened, in the fiction, to make it the case that this gameworld element of this degree of difficulty is present here-and-now? As Luke Crane puts it in his Adventure Burner, DCs are the mechanism whereby the GM shows off the gameworld to the PCs and lets them get a concrete handle on it.This tends to discourage too much off-the-wall craziness (say, setting a high DC and justifying it by reference to fate or luck, or a spontaneous "wild magic zone"). With "subjective" DCs players tend to rely on knowledge of the game's mechanical parameters to support their action declarations - so the fiction is something that has to be respected and accommodated as a parameter for action declaration, but meta-knowledge about pacing and story and so on. Whereas with "objective" DCs I think players are encouraged more into ingame-oriented tactical/optimisation reasoning (Burning Wheel has other bells and whistles in place to push back against this encouragement).I think this is at least part of why "objective" DCs push towards grittiness. I think it also helps explain how objective DCs fit with bounded accuracy (which is part of 5e, and BE, and Rolemaster in virtue of its open-ended and crit/insta-death rules).Third difference: "subjective DCs" tend to allow the looseness of fit between fiction and mechanics that we see in HeroQuest revised, Maelstrom Storytelling, 4e's adaptation to Dark Sun or Neverwinter or Gamma World, etc. Whereas "objective" DCs tend to encourage a greater integration of particular aspects of mechanics with particular minutiae of ingame causal processes.Thoughts?</blockquote>

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