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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 6351127" data-attributes="member: 1879">There is exactly no difference between having a fixed DC with a character level based bonus to the roll and having a fixed bonus with a DC related to the characters level. The DC is a 1e lock never changed, your chance of opening it changed based on your increased skill as defined by the characters level. Exactly the same a a 1st level thief and a 6th level thief in 4e having different odds to open the same DC 20 lockbased on their differing bonuses. The only difference is that 4e explicitly expects the DC to rise based on the level of the adventure, in order to maintain the "sweet spot", as described in the DMG on page 61. Which is there explicitly to meet metagame goals rather than to accurately 'sim' anything.And that is absolutely true. In real life, and at your table. Although you might well consider real-world blood loss to serve as an ablative damage function.It is not absolutely true in every game or at every table, I've already described in this thread what it would mean at mine. If you insist that D&D is attempting to 'sim' the world as you understand it, then yes it is a miserable failure. A fireball is a grotesque violation of the law of conservation of energy for example. Speak with dead is (at very least) a violation of the laws of entropy. Flight violates conservation of momentum and gravity. A Dragon is a walking-talking-flying-speaking-firebreathing violation of all of the above plus the cube-square law. And it's the damge system that makes you question the state of the sim? Really?D&D is not attempting to model your life, it is attempting to model a reality where elements that we would consider supernatural are common place parts of everyday life. Rather that insisting the system falls down because it fails to emulate what happens to you when you stub your toe, consider instead that it may be successfully emulating a world where people know that they will experince life after death with the same certainty you feel about tomorrows dawn. That they know that there is no wound short of death that cannot be healed with perfect recuperation with the aid of magic. It is a fictional reality and it follows fictional rules. Sim, to you, seems to mean an attempt to model reality as we experience it. Which is fine but it's not the only meaning of the word. In fact that is a completely pointless exercise as many of the experiences related in this thread will show. For many reasons not least of which is we simply don't know how some things work well enough to model them in a game and it would be a nightmare to try. The sim-as-process joy that I get out of the game comes from not insisting that the rules are some kind of misbegotten tragedy that stand between me and my fun, but instead taking them at face value and seeing where they go. So far they've taken me to some pretty interesting places, and if I don't like where they go, well, I can always change the rules. More often then not the problem lies not at the level of the rules, but with the fiction we are trying to relate them to.</blockquote>

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