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With the 1.3 update, everyone is abuzz about the revision to Table 10-2 as well as the oddities it can create. The new version of Treat Wounds has a DC set by the level of the medic, not the patient. It was pointed out that a level 3 medic with Assurance can succeed every time whereas a level 15 character is never certain. And they're treating the same patient and getting the same result on a success. There is a lot of complaint about "treadmill DCs" where the DC for tasks basically increases as fast as you can raise it if you're specializing. As someone said: "it's not about which skills you become good at, it's about which ones you get left behind at".
So I think we need to take another look at Objective DCs vs. Scaling DCs, and what the current system tries to do. I saw a comment by Stephen Radney-MacFarland on Facebook that was rather revealing:
DCs were never that simple. Each task or challenge had its own DC (different skills, different skill uses, different traps, different barriers, CMD, etc.) And often they were bases with many modifiers. This, along with the various modifiers put on skills, created a rush to rolling for a skill check pointless or the skill was tanked because it didn't matter. Statisticians, especially those who design games, would tell you it's a mess.
As for the proficiency system, it was there in 1e too. For nonproficiency, the math was given in the opposite way (+3 bonus on your first skill rank rather than a penalty and then many of the not static DCs were inflated), and various feats gave you the higher levels of proficiency. Those feats were seen as either pointless or essential due to the multiple forms of DCs in the game. In fact, different proficiencies in the game worked in dramatically different ways (for instance, using a weapon you were not proficient with incurred a -4 penalty, while armor applied its armor check penalty to attack rolls). The desire to streamline this and make it more understandable, and easier for the GM to create encounters with various levels to challenge their players is the reason you see the proficiency system in the current state.
As for the point that we provide a chart that you look up, in P1 the various DCs for particular uses of skills and how to calculate their DCs was spread all over the book. Many of those were in the skill section, which player could and did look up and rules lawyered, even if you wanted to adjust them to tailor the experience to your group.
Just my thoughts on the subject. Thanks for specifying. I appreciate it.
The first bolded point is quite true: DCs for skills in PF1 are all over the place. Each skill works on a different scale, and has different modifiers and bonus items available. Harmonizing that is a good thing. The controversial +1/level system puts a lot of different stats on the same scale so that you can make many more sensible contested checks, like Intimidate vs. Will Save or Athletics maneuvers vs. Fortitude save.
The second bolded point however is where I take issue. This sounds a bit adversarial ("those dastardly players, always looking up rules that are in the player-section of the book and trying to rules-lawyer them"). PF1 and 3.x are games with a lot of rules telling the players how hard things are under standard circumstances. That can cramp a GM's style when he wants to set an arbitrary ("challenging") difficulty. The new system seems to swerve into "mother may I" territory instead, or "treadmill".
Sounds like a contradiction, but it isn't. We really need both.
Objective DCs give players the knowledge about the game world they need to make informed decisions. I can see that it takes a DC 15 Athletics check to jump 10ft over a pit. I know how good my character is at Athletics and I can decide whether it's safe to try it.
Objective DCs allow players to make progress with skills. If I've been stymied by a 10ft pit (DC 20 to jump over) and decide to increase my Athletics to the point where I can comfortably jump over it, I feel like my character is getting better.
The GM uses Objective and Scaling DCs in tandem. The DC wants to challenge the party with a boss room where an evil princess is going to sacrifice a good dragon. She's installed a pit at the entrance to slow down invaders, and is on the opposite side of a really big altar so she has total cover from people who don't cross the pit. This is a good example of a skill check where it matters how many characters can succeed at the skill check. The ones who fail can climb up but it'll cost precious time. The GM looks at the 10-2 table explanation and sees it should be a Medium skill check. If the party is level 3, then a 5ft wide pit should be sufficient. If the party is level 7 then a 10ft wide pit is more appropriate.
So, the 10-2 Scaling DCs table should be used a lot more as a diagnostic tool: "what level of bureaucrat is a good opponent for a level X party" instead of a prescriptive tool: "the party is level X therefore it'll take DC Y to convince the petty bureaucrat".
Quite often, the DC for a task should scale against the environment, not the PCs' level. Monster identification for example: a level 1 PC and a level 10 PC should be rolling against the same DC to learn something about a (goblin, troll, dragon, unique Mythos monster). It doesn't get harder for the level 10 PC to know about goblins. It makes more sense for the DC to scale againtst the rarity of the monster.
This illustrates yet another way in which 10-2 can be used diagnostically instead of prescriptively: the GM thinks of using a monster, and fiures out how hard it would be to recall a plot-relevant piece of information. Then he looks in 10-2 and sees it is a Hard DC, so he can mark down in his adventure draft that he's found a Hard skill challenge. Although actually, it's a bit easier: the 1.3 errata explains that checks where only one PC needs to succeed should be +4DC harder. The GM decides either to alter his notes ("only a Medium challenge to advance the plot; I can add in another challenge somewhere else") or to find a circumstance ("the monster is an albino and harder to recognize") to bump the DC to where he wants it.
TL;DR - Objective DCs set benchmarks that are important to give players agency and help the GM design increasingly epic instead of treadmill challenges.
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I agree on the principe.
My issue is that the examples given in the corebook don't go above level 5-8 for difficulty.
So when you diagnosize a "level 13 DC" you end up with a number but absolutely no idea at What it is expected to be.
Let's say you want some bridge to challenge a party and you found out that the DC should be 28.
Great.
Sooooo ?
Is the bridge in rumble while a tornado is here ?
Is there a lava stream that splash against it ?
You could say "whatever if it works" but the more you play the more it is difficult. Because you always need to think about something believable to explakn the increased difficulty while not creating inconsistencies. And no guidelines.
Example of jump (random number just for the though):
DC 10 : x feets
DC 15 : x+5 feets
DC 20 : x+10 feets or x+5 feets with slippery edges.
DC 25 : x+10 while there is a earthquake.
DC 30 : x+10 while dodging meteorites rain.
DC 35 : x+10 in a tornado... ? Is that really more difficult than the meteorite ? No idea. You just Pick it randomly because you need it that time and then you are "locked" in this for the rest of the campaign.
DC 40 : Jump to the moon ??
I read myself and I Feel like I don't make any sense but I totally fail to properly translate my issue in english :(
Smurf !
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I agree on the principe.
My issue is that the examples given in the corebook don't go above level 5-8 for difficulty.
So when you diagnosize a "level 13 DC" you end up with a number but absolutely no idea at What it is expected to be.
Let's say you want some bridge to challenge a party and you found out that the DC should be 28.
Great.
Sooooo ?
Is the bridge in rumble while a tornado is here ?
Is there a lava stream that splash against it ?You could say "whatever if it works" but the more you play the more it is difficult. Because you always need to think about something believable to explakn the increased difficulty while not creating inconsistencies. And no guidelines.
Example of jump (random number just for the though):
DC 10 : x feets
DC 15 : x+5 feets
DC 20 : x+10 feets or x+5 feets with slippery edges.
DC 25 : x+10 while there is a earthquake.
DC 30 : x+10 while dodging meteorites rain.
DC 35 : x+10 in a tornado... ? Is that really more difficult than the meteorite ? No idea. You just Pick it randomly because you need it that time and then you are "locked" in this for the rest of the campaign.
DC 40 : Jump to the moon ??I read myself and I Feel like I don't make any sense but I totally fail to properly translate my issue in english :(
Smurf !
That's the thing though. A simple bridge that would realistically hinder 13th level PCs SHOULD be special. Every single challenge that is presented to the PCs don't have to be their level. They could come to a level 5 difficulty skill check but maybe you can add some monsters to the environment, or some traps. Higher level skill checks should be extraordinary things because 13th level PCs failing because of a gap in the bridge makes no sense.
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That's the thing though. A simple bridge that would realistically hinder 13th level PCs SHOULD be special. Every single challenge that is presented to the PCs don't have to be their level. They could come to a level 5 difficulty skill check but maybe you can add some monsters to the environment, or some traps. Higher level skill checks should be extraordinary things because 13th level PCs failing because of a gap in the bridge makes no sense.I agree on the principe.
My issue is that the examples given in the corebook don't go above level 5-8 for difficulty.
So when you diagnosize a "level 13 DC" you end up with a number but absolutely no idea at What it is expected to be.
Let's say you want some bridge to challenge a party and you found out that the DC should be 28.
Great.
Sooooo ?
Is the bridge in rumble while a tornado is here ?
Is there a lava stream that splash against it ?You could say "whatever if it works" but the more you play the more it is difficult. Because you always need to think about something believable to explakn the increased difficulty while not creating inconsistencies. And no guidelines.
Example of jump (random number just for the though):
DC 10 : x feets
DC 15 : x+5 feets
DC 20 : x+10 feets or x+5 feets with slippery edges.
DC 25 : x+10 while there is a earthquake.
DC 30 : x+10 while dodging meteorites rain.
DC 35 : x+10 in a tornado... ? Is that really more difficult than the meteorite ? No idea. You just Pick it randomly because you need it that time and then you are "locked" in this for the rest of the campaign.
DC 40 : Jump to the moon ??I read myself and I Feel like I don't make any sense but I totally fail to properly translate my issue in english :(
Smurf !
I never denied that.
My issue is that they don't give scale.
So for one GM something might be "level 14" and another GM Will say "level 18" because since there is no indication it is up to everyone to build his own scale.
Nice pic though.
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Re the bridge, this is why there needs to be sample DCs presented in the skills chapter for each skill, and not just low and mid level examples but also high level examples. If we know what the devs think should be the target level / DC for balancing on a narrow surface in heavy rain and wind with nothing to hold onto, for example, that makes it a lot easier for DMs to adjudicate what should be considered a similar challenge.
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My issue is that the examples given in the corebook don't go above level 5-8 for difficulty.
So when you diagnosize a "level 13 DC" you end up with a number but absolutely no idea at What it is expected to be.
Let's say you want some bridge to challenge a party and you found out that the DC should be 28.
Some of the harder to pin down challenges for higher level parties are really just scenery to level 13+ characters. Is a bridge really a challenge at that level? That isn't to say I wouldn't consider something bridge-like for the setting that could have challenge attached to it, but I would have the event in mind and then set the challenge based on that, rather than picking a DC and trying to fudge an event into it. Most environmental issues will be trivial at higher levels. Earthquakes and meteorites seem like a cool thing that could occur once in a campaign. I fail to see how getting "locked" into a difficulty for those is going to really be a problem?
"Watch out, tomorrow is Tuesday, meteorite dodging day!"
"Locked" in the idea that anything you set up as a higher challenge should be obviously harder.
So it become a new reference. But a SUBJECTIVE one. Two people won't agreed about "What is harder between X and Y" since it is a personal bias.And the more you play the more you have those reference scattered accross every level and it become a nightmare to imagine a next one that would fit in the good level difficulty without breaking versimilitude created by the previous challenge you set up.
Smurf
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I think we can relate the skill difficulties thing to their philosophy on monster design seeing how this is an unified system where the dice work the same way for both things.
For monsters they got rid of the rules symmetry with PCs because they thought designing monsters was too fiddly since they had to come up with abilities, natural armor and random modifiers to get them to the numbers they wanted. The goal with PF2e was like this: "I know what numbers it needs to challenge my players, so the monster automatically gets them." A lot easier, but also completely arbitrary to maintain this "This is the value that challenges the players."
Skills are the same but for adventure design. "I need this negotiations with an NPC for PFS module to be challenge for tier 7 characters, DC 22 would be good. Now I need to design the NPCs and scenario so that numbers will line up to 22" compared to now "I just pick DC22". Again, you don't need to fundament these decisions on the in-game world, just on the meta of "what DC will challenge my players?".
So since this seemed to be the answer to all their problems in design and balance, it gets applied to everything. The most egregious case being Bardic performance "How do we keep the skill challenging at every level? Just use table 10-2".
Not only is designing the "old way" a lot harder for them, but it's also tough for GMs when they are making their own content. Not to mention that the designers usually started with the Difficulty then wen tbackwards to build things towards it rather than letting the numbers fall into place. Now we/they just skip the middle-man, but at the cost of verisimilitude in the game or logical explanations of why things are a certain way besides the meta "treadmill" and "challenging players of X level".
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Objective DCs give players the knowledge about the game world they need to make informed decisions.So you would suggest Tables 10-3 through 10-6 should belong in the Skills section maybe?
I think for every skill we should have examples of tasks of increasingly epic difficulties, all the way to the top of the DC table. Since table 10-2 goes up to 53 at level 23 (47 at level 20), let's have examples of tasks with DC 5 to 50.
They don't all have to be "bare tasks"; it can be a composite of modifiers. A bare task could be, "climb a vertical wall" or "climb along a ceiling". Composite tasks can be "do it with only one hand", or "do it with no hands".
So if "climb a ceiling with some handholds" is maybe DC 20, doing it with one hand could be +5, doing it with no hands could be +15, and if it's completely smooth that could be another +15. If you can beat a DC 50 then you deserve to basically stand upside down on a frozen-smooth ceiling and fight with sword and shield.
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I think part of the problem. A big part. Is that it's prickly to give high level examples. The community is already very divided on what high level play should look like.
If the high level examples imply a very high magic, high fantasy, setting (which I think it should and is a strength of the Pathfinder brand), then those using the system for contrasting, grizzly, martial, low-magic, styles and settings will feel alienated. I would be okay with this: throw in a sidebar on adjusting high levels for a lower fantasy campaign. Maybe a chapter in the first GM-focused book. But I think Paizo is being very shy about commiting to the higher fantasy potential they have.
I think giving an example of the kind of skill check the designers envision to be at various DCs for various skills would be a helpful GM Aid. But I like table 10-2 leaving it mostly up to the GM to decide. It does require a different set of GM skills though. GMs should *not* just make every challenge 'level appropriate'.
Just because players are level 7 doesn't mean that every door they run across is suddenly a Level 7 door. The peasant hut should still have a level 1 appropriate door while a fort's reinforced entrance should still be a Level 15 appropriate barrier.
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More specific static DCs would be nice, yeah.
I think part of the problem. A big part. Is that it's prickly to give high level examples. The community is already very divided on what high level play should look like.
If the high level examples imply a very high magic, high fantasy, setting (which I think it should and is a strength of the Pathfinder brand), then those using the system for contrasting, grizzly, martial, low-magic, styles and settings will feel alienated. I would be okay with this: throw in a sidebar on adjusting high levels for a lower fantasy campaign. Maybe a chapter in the first GM-focused book. But I think Paizo is being very shy about commiting to the higher fantasy potential they have.
IMO, I think you are right that high fantasy is the strength of Pathfinder, and a sidebar should make it explicit that this is what you get with higher levels. It should specify a level range that works well for grim and gritty, not try and make a square peg fit a round hole.
One of the strengths of items and whatnot also working off level is this should be easy to do.
OK, I'm 100% with the consensus here, I've been wanting to post on this topic,
agree this should be adjacent to the Skills section to flesh out what they mean in world,
with a more substantial range of Objective DCs/modifiers that hopefully can go with EVERY Skill in the game,
otherwise it just feels like game is detached from world, you have to understand what 1st level character can do with skills
to have understanding of what skills really are, yet "Scaling" just tells you "it matches desired difficulty for Level".
Now I think Seifter even conceded the test modules are over-doing the scaling DCs and Objectives normally would be used more,
and this goes along with over-all emphasis at this point on Scaling DCs, which is totally expected
because the scaling is the part of game math they REALLY want to get right, otherwise everything falls apart...
And the Objective DCs themselves are de facto benchmarkable against given Level/Difficulty Scaling DCs, so can follow the latter.
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BTW, one thing about Objective DC tables I don't like is it doesn't seem give base DCs.
Just Level/Difficulty which requires you TRANSLATE that to DC before using it, which seems overly onerous.
And entirely superfluous since the entire point is these are Objective and not Scaled DCs.
If it wants to put Level/Difficulty correlation in parenthesis, then OK, but I prefer flat numbers.
And if we want it in Skill section where players are expected to use it to understand context for Objective skill tasks, it should use # DCs.
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This was such a good, thoughtful, post that I feel I need to make my agreement explicit.
As the OP says, having explicit, or at least representative DCs for each skill would do an enormous amount to help the way skills currently feel in the game, on both sides of the screen:
Now, I understand Stephen Radney-MacFarland's reasons for being hesitant to provide such values:
And I can see how given these points (especially CONs 2 and 3), providing more concrete DCs can seem pretty unappealing from the point of view of the developers. Because no matter how they flesh out these details, it'll be a lot of work, and they're going to upset some vocal group or another.
But if you weigh all of the different ways in which adding these DCs would improve the gaming experience, it's (IMO) clearly worth it.
So as someone who really wants PF2 to succeed, I hope the developers will revisit this issue and provide representative DCs.
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The OP is way better at putting words together for my wishes on this topic.
P.S. Smurf.
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100% agree
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I've been considering this matter further. I really think objective skill DCs are the way to go. Porridge makes an interesting point:
Now, I understand Stephen Radney-MacFarland's reasons for being hesitant to provide such values:
- CON 1. It lessens the amount of power the DM has in setting DC checks for particular tasks.
I don't think GM power should be fetishized above all things. Arbitrarily high DCs are not good for anyone. Table 10-2 doesn't give the GM any handholds for explaining why a DC that's a good challenge also makes sense in the game world to be that DC. There's some text there saying you shouldn't arbitrarily set high DCs, but there's no help given to do it otherwhise.
Let me be clear: I think GMs should challenge players with things that are actually challenging. But the challenge should be thoroughly embedded in the game world. If players can use the examples of static DCs to come up with an alternative plan that would use a lower DC ("we don't climb straight, we hop from ledge to ledge instead"), that's fine. The players thoroughly engaged with the game world and came up with a better plan. This is exactly the game we want!
- CON 2. It's a lot of work on the developers to flesh out how these skills should (quantitatively) work.
It sure is a lot of work, but that's what you expect when building a new game system. But I think it should be embraced as adding really valuable content, instead of dismissed as a chore or a page-count eater.
- CON 3. It's difficult to provide such details in a way that will satisfy everyone, since (for example) there's a wide amount of variation among gamers in how epic people want high level play to feel.
Yeah. And I think dodging the question by refusing to give examples, is also making a choice. Generally a choice for skills being weaker (unless you buy another splatbook with skill feats). I think setting up a robust system with lots of skill examples will give the developers an immensely valuable frame of reference to balance skill-mimicking spells with. "This spell would duplicate a task that's normally DC 25, so the spell level should be somewhere around..."
I think P2 has to commit to a "fantasy level" anyway, because higher-level skill feats are going to paint a picture of what skills can do. But I think we need to establish a baseline of what skills can do even without skill feats.
And it's interesting that you use the word "epic", not "fantasy", because they do not mean quite the same thing. Die Hard is epic. Ocean's Eleven is about epic heisters. There's no magic involved. High-level skill users could be epic without being weaboo or something that would trigger anime allergies.
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So here's an outline of what I would like to see:
- Start each skill on a new page. Skills get 1 or 2 or maybe even bigger page spreads. Skills are supposed to be a big part of Pathfinder 2, so you will need to commit pages to it.
The current font/layout at least, makes Activities/Feats look so much more prominent than section heads, it takes me forever to find the beginning of a skill. I think it's all the lines around activity blocks, it's very visually aggressive. Putting skill names at the top of the page will make it much easier to find stuff too. And given how much we want to put inside each skill, treating them like proper sub-chapters is correct.
- Each skill, for each of its main branches, gets a table with DCs / modifiers that let you stat up tasks going from DC 0 (after modifiers) to 50 (possibly after modifiers). So for example Athletics gets a table with DCs for Climb going up to 50 ("have both hands free while climbing a smooth ceiling, so you can shoot a bow") and Swim ("swim up a waterfall"). Some of the other uses are contested (breaking grapples, breaking open containers); these tell you what stat they'll usually be contested against.
- Just about all the information you need to use a skill, is in the subsection for that skill. No hunting to the back of the book for more details.
- The skills chapter should not reference table 10-2 much if at all. 10-2 is a very valuable tool for the GM preparing adventures, for figuring out what DC tasks to use to challenge the players. But those tasks have objective DCs, and that's what the player-facing skills chapter describes.
This sounds like a massive chapter. Yeah, it would be bigger than it is right now. We have 17 skills, if we give them about 1.5 pages each, that's 26 pages. Compared to the current 14. So 12 pages more, but I think it would make the game immensely better. It would give us the following:
- Players can see the real growth of their characters. Although the GM's use of 10-2 means they still face challenges that stay just as hard across their career, the type of challenge becomes more and more epic.
- Examples of high-DC tasks fire up our imagination.
- We avoid "treadmill DCs", where the same task seems to arbitrarily rise in DC instead of the writer/GM stepping up their game.
- Cuts down on a lot of flipping back and forth by centralizing information in the logical place.
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I was thinking about how this should work. Let's say a high-level PC wants to climb up the wall of an evil temple. The GM knows nothing about the wall except that it is a wall.
The GM knows DC 29 is a moderate challenge for a PC of this level but first looks at a long, detailed table of example DCs. DC 30 is a wall covered with grease or ice. Since there is no reason this particular temple would be covered with grease or ice, that can't be justified, so the GM sets a much lower DC; not everything has to be an epic challenge.
If, instead of some temple, it had been a magical extra-dimensional fortress, then the GM could have announced that the walls are protected by a mysterious force-field, intended to make it impossible to climb. If the high-level PC is able to climb it anyway, it feels appropriately heroic.
When we get the first high level module with skill checks, it will give examples what they consider the DC appropriate context.
When we get the first high level module with skill checks, it will give examples what they consider the DC appropriate context.So we will need to buy more things in order to find out how the system actually works?
Multiple things as we'd only get what's "appropriate" for those levels so you'd have to get the entire AP to get an idea of level "appropriate" DC's throughout your levels of play.
I guess that's fine if you don't mind strong arming people into buying an entire AP for nothing other than getting the entire playset needed to start off the game with. And then you have to hope that the next author follows the first AP as a guideline instead of the actual rulebooks...
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When we get the first high level module with skill checks, it will give examples what they consider the DC appropriate context.
Will it? Module authors are usually not from the Development Team. They're usually freelancers. All they've got to go on right now is table 10-2.
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Thinking about the various changes I'd like to see in PF2 has made it clear to me that this really is one of the most important things for the developers to work on.
There are a lot of things about PF2 I'd like to see tweaked in one way or another -- the dying rules, mandatory magic items, resonance, sorcerer spellcasting, and so on. But almost all of these issues are things which I could introduce relatively simple house rules to change.
That's not true for skill DCs. There is no simple house rule I can just slap on to get representative DCs for different skill uses. Trying to work out something that would yield reasonable results would require an enormous amount of time and design expertise, neither of which I have.
So this is something which I think it's really important for the devs to do. This is something that requires a lot of time and design expertise to do well. And that's precisely the kind of thing you want talented professional designers -- like the excellent staff at Paizo! -- to do for you.
When we get the first high level module with skill checks, it will give examples what they consider the DC appropriate context.Will it? Module authors are usually not from the Development Team. They're usually freelancers. All they've got to go on right now is table 10-2.
They make it official by proxy. Eventually someone has to write the book with nothing but upper two-digit level challenges and the DC numbers are XX so at that point doing so is that DC. Development team be damned, Paizo product is a Paizo product, be it written by a developer or commissioned writer. They gotta carry that weight.
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They make it official by proxy. Eventually someone has to write the book with nothing but upper two-digit level challenges and the DC numbers are XX so at that point doing so is that DC. Development team be damned, Paizo product is a Paizo product, be it written by a developer or commissioned writer. They gotta carry that weight.When we get the first high level module with skill checks, it will give examples what they consider the DC appropriate context.Will it? Module authors are usually not from the Development Team. They're usually freelancers. All they've got to go on right now is table 10-2.
That's a really haphazard way to go about it. Freelancers get selected because they're good writers, know how to make a story come to life. They have to be competent at rules, but they're not the experts; that's the development team. Just because they got a paycheck from Paizo doesn't mean a freelancer is a rules expert.
And a given module is only going to contain a handful of skill uses. It's not going to give you a systematic framework to work with.
That's a really haphazard way to go about it. Freelancers get selected because they're good writers, know how to make a story come to life. They have to be competent at rules, but they're not the experts; that's the development team. Just because they got a paycheck from Paizo doesn't mean a freelancer is a rules expert.And a given module is only going to contain a handful of skill uses. It's not going to give you a systematic framework to work with.
Yeah, I can see it being super haphazard. But outside of writing explicit examples into every skill entry, it is the way it is going to go. Playtest scenarios will eventually get to high levels, which means someone at Paizo has to had a thought spent into creating that context. So either they see nothing wrong with it, or they will change it.
Yeah, that's why I think we do need explicit examples. Because the alternative is really bad.
Except that would call for reverting back to how skills were handled in Pathfinder 1. There is a certain level of mutual exclusivity here, the streamlining makes things ambiguous because that is the price of commonality. Ok, how do I think about this...
Let's take acrobatics. PF1, acrobatics has a whole section for "trying to cross a narrow path", aka the classic tiny ledge the whole party has to slowly nudge through by hugging the cliff side. PF1 sets ... concrete DCs. The book even says that if you got a wide path, was it 3 feet, DC is zero. But then in the nitty gritty where you can make the slope 30 degrees, wet, how fast they want to go...
This is not streamlined. Explicit examples were the TARGET OF ELIMINATION. In the end, it is just as arbitrary that 1 feet ledge is DC 5 challenge that it is whatever 10-2 tells you. In the PF1 method, you are handed a pre-thought world that you then ought to follow. Hard to pass ledges are narrower than 3 feet, make a such ledge according to these rules. It gives no real advice what is actually proper challenge, it just lets you turn a world into DC. PF2 is only concerned with challenge. Whatever you imagine the ledge, it is a challenge of your choice if you follow 10-2.
I cannot 100% support either solution. Because from one perspective, the world matters not one bit. This wide ledge, that wide ledge, why does that matter one bit? The GM just wanted a ledge that the party can fall off, do we need to study the geometry of balancing on such and such wide ledges? On the other hand, tying the logic of difficulty classes to somekind of worldbuilt logic gives them credibility like people have been saying. 10-2 is honest in the arbitrary of the challenge, how the sausage is made. I get strong feelings why I want to say that is better, because you could pretend to be all hardcore, "it is so good because roleplaying is now harder and demands more from everyone! Durr hurr I'm so good at this game!" It feels fake, roleplaying disconnected from a tactile connection to the imaginary world. Honesty exposes the lies we try to suspend to belief.
But PF2 cannot have explicit examples because its goal was to kill them to begin with.
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You talk a lot about streamlining, but I think the PDT is trying to achieve several not-the-same things at the same time, and I like some of them more than others.
Merge skills where pragmatic although not all good climbers are also good swimmers, being fit and athletic helps at both. So it makes sense that your character is good at both or neither. Likewise, Sleight of Hand and Disable Device aren't that far apart, it's a little annoying that you'd be good at one but not at the other, there should be some cross-training.
Merge maneuvers with skills that are a lot like those maneuvers I like it.
Unify the skill DC scale I like it too. PF1 skills move at vastly different scales, and also get vastly different-scaled bonuses. Some skills get +5 or +10 bonus items, others don't. PF2 makes this much more uniform.
Put skills on the same scale as attacks and saving throws So now you can easily oppose a skill against a saving throw or make an attack against someone's skill DC. Very useful innovation.
Get rid of a lot of examples Actually I don't think this was a goal. The back of the book does have examples. I think they just didn't want to make the playtest book huge.
Bound the range of skill scores PCs could have closer together the tight-math phenomenon that's all the hype nowadays. PF1 allowed waaaay too many bonuses to stack on skills. You could have half a dozen different items all helping on a skill. And you didn't really choose between different flavorful options, you just took them all. I like how PF2 drastically reduces the number of different bonuses, so if you have a skill bonus item you like, you don't have to worry you're missing out by not also digging through twohundred books for another bonus item.
Put the GM more in charge of DC As mentioned in the Stephen Radney-MacFarland quote in my opening post. He says players often rules-lawyered skill DCs based on those examples.
Here's where I disagree. This isn't streamlining, this is a very mistrustful outlook on how players immerse in a game world.
As my thread title indicates, I think GMs absolutely should be using Table 10-2 to figure out what would be challenging for the players and using that to guide their adventure design. But on the other hand, they also need to present an immersive game world, and one thing that really kills immersion is when difficulty for tasks becomes too arbitrary. To take an extreme example, if a lazy GM presents a shoddy door with a bad lock on it to level 10 PCs, but insists that it's a Hard DC to pick that lock, that really breaks the players' immersion. They're no longer characters interacting with a believable game world, but people button-bashing against arbitrary obstacles.
To take your ledge as an example: the GM wants an encounter with a difficult ledge that makes the players worry about falling off. For level 1 PCs, a narrow ledge is fine. But if you show that same ledge to level 10 characters, the players wonder what's so special about this ordinary-looking ledge that still makes it a Hard challenge.
If we combine objective DCs with table 10-2 however, the GM sees he wants a DC 27 ledge. That's not an ordinary ledge anymore. He looks at the examples of objective DCs and (stealing a bit from PF1) sees that a ledge 2 inches wide is DC 20. That looks pretty intense for us already, but it's not enough to really challenge level 10 PCs. So he needs to make it harder. He decides that since it's winter, he can add some rain turning to sleet, making the surface more slippery. He also works this miserable weather into the flavor text of the rest of the adventure.
Now the PCs come up there. They look at the ledge and see that it's going to be pretty risky. But because the DC really came from somewhere, they also have more options to interact with it. They could try to use cleats designed to walk on slippery surfaces, or use fire magic to melt away the sleet and reduce the slipperyness. This makes the challenge easier, but only because the players really engaged with the scene and came up with ideas, so that's enjoyable.
In conclusion: I think objective skill DCs do not sabotage "the goal of streamlining by eliminating examples" because I don't think that was precisely the goal. I do think it's a mitigation of the aggressive switch towards making all DC GM-arbitrary, and I want that.
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Explicit examples were the TARGET OF ELIMINATION. In the end, it is just as arbitrary that 1 feet ledge is DC 5 challenge that it is whatever 10-2 tells you.
Explicit DCs mean consistency. Climbing a rope shouldn't get harder because the characters are higher level, or because the GM made up a number and forgot what it was.
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Here's my issue with the way skills were done in 3.x/PF1, and why I think PF2 isn't fixing the problem (and is just trading one problem for another).
Skills checks are typically binary. You either succeed or you fail. You make the jump or you don't. You open the lock or you try again (or spring the trap). You speak the language or you don't. And on and on. Obviously, not all skill checks were like that, but far too many of them were. Some skills had varying degrees of success based on how much you beat the DC (monster identification for aabilities and weaknesses comes to mind), but even in those cases there is the second problem.
Skill checks exist in one dimension. I identified the monster and got one, two, or three pieces of information. In Diplomacy, I can improve someone's attitude by one or more steps. Most skills don't have more dimensions than "how well you succeed".
PF2 solves the binary problem for the most part, but it isn't solving the one-dimension problem. It's just inflating the numbers and stretching them out.
A suggestion for fixing it
Real life doesn't work this. Let's take picking a lock as an example. If you have been to a computer security conference that features a lock-picking village, you can watch competitions between people who can pick locks of an increasing difficulty and complexity at an astounding pace. They will blow through a lock in 1 or 2 seconds that takes me three or four minutes of work (or more!) because they practice a lot and have more experience. That's the equivalent of them having a massive bonus and me having my piddly one.
What I am getting at here is that there is more than one dimension to a skill check. An obvious second dimension is "time": given sufficient time, and by going slowly and carefully, I can make my way through some basic locks, but the difference is literally orders of magnitude. And there are some locks that I just won't get through at all because I am not good enough (it would take days or weeks of practice to succeed).
The "Take 20" rule models this to some extent, but it's not really the same. It's saying "pretend I rolled over and over and eventually got a 20", so I may get it if I keep at it and it takes 10x the time of one check. But the DC doesn't change. What changes is the number of attempts, not the speed at which I work.
Some skill checks add a true time dimension, specifically the crafting rules (whether mundane or magic). If I am good enough, I can craft faster. A lot faster.
But there are more dimensions than just success and time. For picking locks, I can think of a bunch: evidence it's been tampered with, damage to the lock itself, and noise all come to mind. All of these can be modifiers that allow for wide ranges of skill bonuses. Want to pick your lock? Great. You can do that, but the base DC just opens the lock. Add 5 if you want to do it silently. Add 10 if you don't want to leave evidence of tampering behind. The GM or adventure designer decides how long it takes to actually pick the lock. Add 5 to cut that time in half. Add 10 to to do it in a quarter of the time.
Example
So, I want to pick a DC20 lock. The GM says it will take me 1 round per DC of 5, so 4 rounds to pick. Someone might be on the other side of the door, though, so I want to do it quietly. Now it's DC25. And maybe I'm in someone's house so speed is important, too, as I don't want to get caught. Add 10 to do it in 1 round, so it's DC35.
With modifiers, I get a 27. Now I have to decide what's more important: fast or quiet. I choose quiet, so I beat a DC25, but it took me 4 rounds. Now the GM rolls to see if someone wanders in on me.
You can also add "good enough" results, too, for people who aren't as skilled or not in a rush. DC-5 if I don't care if I damage the lock so it never works again. Now I can succeed on a DC15, but it's pretty clumsy work. Maybe by taking 4x as long I can lower the DC by 5 (yes, I deliberately made faster and slower different modifiers).
This added depth can support wildly varying skill bonuses by modeling the fact that people who are really, really good at something make a task look easy and do it flawlessly and quickly. While the people aren't as good (and have low bonuses) get by, but not necessarily gracefully.
Not all skills will be as easy to adapt as picking a lock, but just about all of them have added dimensions you can bring in. Maybe Acrobatics lets you jump a great distance, but you're fatigued for several minutes afterwards. Unless you add 5 or 10 to the DC to make it non-fatiguing. Maybe I can learn a spell in less time by having a really high Spellcraft. Maybe speaking a foreign language requires me to make skill checks to let me communicate fluently (right now it's just binary).
TL;DR summary
Skill checks need to be more than one dimension. Higher rolls mean you do things with less effort, greater speed, less noise, etc. All these can be modifiers to a DC that let folks with small and huge bonuses still play the game and succeed at tasks, but with varying secondary effects.
You talk a lot about streamlining, but I think the PDT is trying to achieve several not-the-same things at the same time, and I like some of them more than others.
...
Put the GM more in charge of DC As mentioned in the Stephen Radney-MacFarland quote in my opening post. He says players often rules-lawyered skill DCs based on those examples.
Here's where I disagree. This isn't streamlining,
...
In conclusion: I think objective skill DCs do not sabotage "the goal of streamlining by eliminating examples" because I don't think that was precisely the goal. I do think it's a mitigation of the aggressive switch towards making all DC GM-arbitrary, and I want that.
This method of taking static DCs and the GM adjusting the DC up or down using circumstance is something I think needs to be added into the book (along with the static DC's themselves, obviously.) This process obviously takes a little more effort that having a bigger example table and pulling straight from it, but it has an additional benefit beyond just making players more engaged wit the scene.
It returns to the GM some of the control that the new, non-stacking bonuses seem to have taken. Different feats grant circumstance bonuses, meaning they don't stack with circumstance bonuses from well, the circumstances. Letting the GM have control over the DC avoids this issue while.
A solution that solves a problem is good, but things like this that solve multiple problems at once are even better.
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I totally EDIT:agree here with Ascalaphus, some really good writing.
Certainly what you propose isn't inherently conflicting with the system,
as it already has Objective DCs, the devs even said in this forum they would normally
expect more Objective DCs in modules, but the focus of testing is on scaling DCS.
(and getting math good there is nice to do before setting Objective DCs)
Thanks for taking the time to write up such well thought-out words, that IMHO reflects a large % of players/GMs.
I'm not somebody who has some problem with over-all direction of system mechanics at all,
but having skills and DCs "grounded" in real game world as much as possible is important to feel of game for me,
this gives context to player's increasing power, and let's them know what they can aim for or expect reliability in.
I don't actually want any limitation for GM using scaling DC, but I want the normal context grounded in game world.
The scaling DCs are generally about the FOCUS of game encounter, but you can take any of Paizo's test module encounters,
and there is plenty of potential checks: oh, there's trees by the river and gnoll camp, what DC to climb?
Scaling DCs are good to match to NPCs/monsters and CR'd hazards, but most of the game world isn't that.
If the GM just wants a normal DC for the real task, forcing them to decide on Level & Difficulty is absurd & burdensome.