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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6659566" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION] (and anyone else who is interested): here are some examples of DC-setting and the adjudication of the ensuing action resolution that might help illustrate how "subjective DCs" in 4e, and the associated "looseness of fit" between fiction and mechanics, differs from a system based on "objective" DCs.I'll do two martial, two magical and two social.The first martial:[sblock]What is the DC for a mid-paragon fighter/cleric of Moradin - just about the toughest dwarf around outside of Moradin's portion of the Seven Heavens - to shove his hands into a magical forge and hold an artefact still so that the smiths can take a firm hold of it with their tongs? I don't believe that any edition of D&D provides an explicit answer to this question.In my case, the adjudication took two steps: first, is it possible for this PC to do this thing? The answer to that - based on genre logic, the rest of the fiction (eg this dwarf can single-handedly defeat a phalanx of hobgoblins), etc - seemed to be yes. Second, is it Easy, Moderate or Hard? I think the answer to that is obvious - that is Hard now matter how you cut it. Hence I set a hard DC within the context of the skill challenge.[/sblock]The second martial:[sblock]The fighter wanted to smash up the secondary buildings in Torog's Soul Abattoir, and then - after the PCs had also destroyed the main building and stopped the flow of soul energy - to help his allies escape the collapsing cavern:All DCs were level-appropriate; I can't remember now whether they were Moderate or Hard, except the one that allowed the invoker to get a bonus will have reached a Hard level of success in order to get the aid-another bonus in there also.In an objective DC system, how would this be handled? That would depend a lot on the system details (eg BW allows pooling skills to get big numbers to roll against a DC that represents the resolution of the whole scene), but would probably have to be a bit more fine-grained then this was.Note that shielding the invoker (and thereby conferring an aid-another bonus) is level-appropriate. Does this mean that the fighter never gets better at shielding his allies? No. Rather, as he gets stronger he is able to shield them from more and more dangerous things. This is an instance of [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s point from some way upthread that 4e is focused on the fiction, and the fictional stakes, escalating as the PCs gain levels. So the question of how hard it would be for the epic fighter to shield the invoker from a tankard thrown by a tavern thug just doesn't come up. Any such scene would be just narrated for colour when epic tier PCs are involved; it's not something that would call for the action resolution mechanics to be engaged.[/sblock]The first magical:[sblock]Again, level appropriate DCs were used. In any edition of D&D, what is the "objective" DC for harnessing and focusing chaotic forces in order to enchant onself and a finely-worked horn? AD&D 2nd edition had some rules for item creation, but they don't allow for this sort of spontaneity.As a GM, there were a few relevant considerations here. First, is it genre appropriate and consistent with the prior fiction? Answer, absolutely! - earlier in the Calastryx encounter, the same PC had been using vials of pure elemental fire to (try and) power up his flying carpet as he sought to escape the pursuit of hobgoblin wyvern riders, and had failed that skill challenge (and crashed his carpet) when the fire exploded in his hands.Second, it allowed some additional fiction to be introduced, providing colour - the mooncalves - which made the acquisition of the items non-trivial on the player resource expenditure side as well as reinforcing the chaotic and otherworldly nature of the sorcerer's magic.Third, 4e has a fairly robust treasure parcel system, and so actually factoring in the power up that the items consist in was quite straightforward.[/sblock]The second magical:[sblock]I think it's obvious why sealing of the Abyss by manipulating space and time is a Hard check. As to whether I think it's genre appropriate, when you are able to take on and defeat Lolth, and drive your flying tower through the Demonweb tearing it asunder, then sealing the Abyss is within your capabilities. These are 29th level PCs, the equal of gods and demon lords. (As noted, they'd already trapped Ygorl, the Lord of Entropy, in the Crystal of Ebon Flame.)The subjective DC system interacts, in this particular resolution, with 4e's player resource mechanics: the player spends healing surges to boost his roll (with an appropriate fictional narration for that expenditure - he is giving of his chaotic essence); and the player (and PC) permanently loses two powerful resources, a racial encounter power and a high level daily spell.I don't know how that sort of thing would be handled in 3E or 5e (the rulebooks that I've read give me no clues). In Rolemaster, the couple of times I've adjudicated something like this it has had a much higher degree of GM fiat, because that system does not have 4e's flexibility and "looseness of fit" that was exploited in this particular episode of action resolution.[/sblock]The first social:[sblock]Arguing and winning a court case in front of the Patriarch of Bahamut seems pretty appropriate sort of stuff for mid-paragon PCs.As the quote indicates, the interest here wasn't that the players (and PCs) succeeded - that was pretty foregone, given they're a strong social party (an invoker/wizard with Diplomacy and Insight, a CHA-sorcerer and a CHA-paladin) - but the new fiction generated during the course of their success. Because this was a paragon-tier social situation, the fiction was itself paragon-tier stuff: political intrigue between the rulers of the PCs' home town.[/sblock]The second social:[sblock]Another skill challenge with level-appropriate DCs, but mechanically a bit more dynamic than the court case in front of the Patriarch: the player of the invoker/wizard, in particular, is taking steps to change the fiction so as to (i) open up skill uses, and (ii) make possible the outcome he (and his PC) want, of purging the angels of their taint.[/sblock]For me, at least, the common theme of these examples is that a subjective DC framework strongly encourages players to engage the situation "fiction first", thinking about what their PCs might try and do given who they are - this is a huge deal in D&D with its class and level system, and 4e just amps that up with its paragon paths and epic destinies - and given how they are fictionally positioned.The fact that DCs are level-appropriate is a secondary concern. If the PCs had found themselves confronting Lolth on the Abyss at 27th level rather than 29th - not inconceivable - or found themselves fighting Torog at 28th level rather than 25th, then the DCs would have been set differently by me (because my DC-by-level chart would have yielded different numbers), but that doesn't have any bearing on the coherence or consistency of the fiction. It's not as if there are going to be two, otherwise identical episodes of storming the Soul Abattoir, or tearing up the Demonweb Pits!And harking back, somewhat, to [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s Secret Diary of Vecna example, there is basically no way - within the default setup for 4e - that (say) Heroic PCs, or even low paragon ones, are going to find themselves in a position to try and seal the Abyss. The fiction wouldn't support the GM framing the PCs into that sort of situation, and nor would it support the relevant action declaration: just as the player of a mid-Heroic PC couldn't plausibly declare that his/her character grabs hold of an artefact that is sitting in the forge and holds it steady. (Indeed, mid-Heroic PCs will have just gained the ability to enchant items at all - it is a 4th level ritual - and will probably not have access to an artefact that they are hoping to reforge, nor to the bevy of dwarven artificers who will do it for them. Having access to those artificers as a resource within the fiction, which is essential to the reforging being pursued at all, is a consequence of the PC having reached paragon tier and been called to dwarven leadership by an angelic herald sent by Moradin.)When I reflect on these episodes of play, I also think they exemplify fiction, and action declarations, that would be unlikely to occur in an "objective DC" system, with the exception of tearing up the Soul Abattoir, and the court case. The other examples all involve action declarations that trade upon fantasy and genre tropes and possibilities, rather than real-world possibilities, and hence are the sorts of things that an objective DC system, at least in my experience, finds hard to accommodate. You can have things like 3E's DC 120 to balance on a cloud, but precisely because it's been written in in advance, it does not provide much support for players declaring new and unexpected fantastic actions that the genre and the ingame situation suggest to them, but that the game designers haven't encountered yet.Another consequence of objective DCs in a fantasy system (not an inevitable consequence, but one that a designer needs to be aware of) can be what Ron Edwards calls "karaoke roleplaying": instead of the players coming up with their own wild ideas about what might be possible within the fiction, they orient themselves towards emulation of ideas that have already been thought of. Eg a player's goal becomes getting a high enough balance skill bonus to be able to balance on a cloud, rather than play being focused on new and exciting situations in which ideas like balancing on a cloud, or jumping onto the back of a dragon, or shoving one's hands into the forge, or whatever, emerge spontaneously out of the players' engagement with the game. Whereas subjective DCs facilitate this, by making a DC easy for the GM to set, with confidence in its effect on pacing and its relationship to other aspects of the game (eg challenges and rewards). Where the spontaneous action declaration also involves damage or condition infliction, damage-by-level and conditions-by-level facilitate in the same way.You can see the "karaoke effect" I am talking about when you compare spell descriptions in AD&D with those in B/X: extra cruft has been added to the spell descriptions (eg rules about what fireball can and can't melt) which present someone else's play experience (an adjudication made by a GM in response to a player's action declaration) as something to be emulated or reiterated by other players. The 3E spell descriptions are even worse in this respect, as in many cases they also incorporate years of Sage Advice. 4e, with its subjective DCs and looseness of fit between fiction and mechanics, goes back to the B/X style, of making this sort of thing an element of the GM's adjudication of the fiction, and the players' leveraging of their PCs' fictional positioning, rather than part of the rules context for action declaration.5e's "rulings not rules" is, in part, a similar sort of return to an emphasis on generating the fiction via play rather than via someone else's prior play. However, much like [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], I feel that 5e doesn't provide the same degree of support as 4e, because it doesn't give clear advice on how to set DCs. Also, because it has no skill challenge structure, and it provides less of a clear sense of how the player resource schemes work (given asymmetry), etc, it makes it harder to adjudicate and apply mechanical consequences in a way that serves rather than impedes overall pacing goals (and associated matters like the players' sense of fairness). [MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION], I hope this further illustrates how what is going in with the objective/subjective contrast is more than just a contrast between sand-boxing techniques and scene-framing techniques.</blockquote>

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