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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6659350" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can easily imagine a mountain that would be deadly to peasant and easy for superheroes. And in my post above this one, I talked about a mountain that would be deadly to peasants but merely challenging to superheroes: the Obelisk of Ice. The epic-tier PCs in my game had to fly their Thundercloud Tower down the side of that mountain, from the Feywild to the Elemental Chaos, and it posed a degree of challenge but was certainly never going to be deadly. 4e is full of such mountains, and of comparable challenges. (Many of them are located on planes other than the prime material.)That is not the same mountain that is hard for everyone. A mountain that is hard for everyone might be something like the "living island" in Giant Size X-Men number 1 - and when peasants try and climb it it only fights them with a little bit of effort, whereas when superheroes try to climb it it fights them tooth-and-nail. Hence it is hard for whomever climbs it.I don't think there are any such mountains in default 4e. You are the first person to talk about such a mountain, in this post. [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] didn't talk about such a mountain - he talked about imagining a blizzard in the gameworld, deciding that he wants it to be a challenge for paragon tier PCs, and therefore setting the blizzard DC appropriately. Such a blizzard would obviously be impassable to peasants, and would blow them off the side of the mountain, given that peasants are self-evidently far less capable than paragon tier heroes.I assume, then, that either they were misinformed on Day 1, or else that the knowledge of certain death was capability-relative, and their capabilities had improved.In my 4e campaign, the heroic tier PCs knew that the Elemental Chaos and the Abyss would not be safe places for them. At epic tier, though, they've been hanging out there a lot. That's because they became more capable.That seems to be a consequence of the fact that the DCs, being inanimate non-thinking things, don't care about anything!Do you mean that you never design gameworld elements having regard to the likely capabilities of the PCs your players will be bringing to the table? If so, that speaks to [MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION]'s suggestion that part of this DC discussion is about scene-framing vs sandboxing. Though in D&D (as opposed to, say, Runequest or Rolemaster) discussion of sandboxing is complicated by the fact that there is a well-established convention of dungeon levels with graduated difficulties of monster, which mean that some of the elements of scene-framing play can be achieved within a more sand-boxy architecture.I don't really follow this. The idea that a GM might build encounters, or indeed a gameworld, in order to provide a fun play experience for particular PCs brought to the table by particular players, is not new to 4e. I started doing this as an AD&D GM in the mid-80s.The main thing that 4e does is make this easier, by setting out DCs in a handy series of level-appropriate lists (eg DC-by-level, Monster Manuals with monsters listed by level, DMGs with traps and hazards listed by level, etc).Maybe you are assuming that the fiction in 4e is understood to be independent of DCs - so that rusty locks are DC 8 for 1st leve PCs and DC 18 for epic PCs. This is the thing that [MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION] described not far upthread as "nonsensical": assigning level-appropriate DCs to the fiction regardless of the fiction. The only 4e player in this thread who suggested that s/he plays the game in that way is [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION], in the context of explaining something that he didn't like about 4e. The response from the other 4e players in the thread was a high degree of incredulity.When [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] talks about setting the DC of a blizzard to something appropriate for paragon tier adventurers, he is not supposing that the blizzard has no consistent nature in the fiction. Rather, he's talking about introducing a new element into the fiction - a blizzard - and deciding, as GM, that he wants it to be a challenge for the PCs in his game, who are paragon tier, and then looking at his handy DC-by-level chart to see what a good DC would be to set for that blizzard. He then narrates it appropriately. (For me, the storm on Caradhras is my reference point when I want to narrate a fierce mountain blizzard to my players.)</blockquote>

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