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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6657894" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't think it even HAS to be boring, its just up to the DM to elaborate the fiction if he wants to have a plethora of Cave Slimes. They could be the spoor of some sort of Far Realm entities that the PCs are after, with each one being the sign of a different aberration. I think this is really no different from what a 5e DM might do with the 5e version of Cave Slime, he could make different DC versions that are left by different monstrosities.This of course we understand that some players find to be anathema. I guess the theory is that a purely 'emergent story' is in some sense better than one which is an explicit above-board consideration. The usual response is "but you just plan these things covertly instead, which leads to various forms of DM force being applied to get there." etc.And the response of course is that even the GM should be barred from explicitly playing the meta-game. They might say "well, its OK if an NPC motivation is abstracted as a 'Doom Pool' access, where the pool represents the NPC's resources, but its not OK for the DM to have resources, because then they don't represent some causal process within the game world, and every mechanic must only represent causal processes." Sounds about right. Objective DCs tend to invoke causal process, which is then almost sure described in terms of the physics of our actual world. The closer you are to real world physics, the closer you are to the ultimate level of grittiness (nothing is grittier than reality, maybe that's an assumption?). I think objective DCs have to be spelled out. That is a system really needs to list them out because the only way to determine them is by analysis of game world (and by analogy real world) physics. Given that most people have only a loose idea of how things work in the real world its hard to count on them to know how to set those DCs themselves. Subjective DCs generally come ahead of fiction, a game like 4e could in theory not describe ANY fiction and simply have a DC chart, you'd just make it up and as long as it was fun it would be right.</blockquote>

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