Editing Page 42 (section)

== Why is this so [[Rage|effective]]? ==
* To 3.5e fans, this basically renders levels meaningless since the DCs just keep rising arbitrarily as you get stronger.
* To 4e fans, this is basically just the same scale 3.5e used for most DCs, but with less eyeballing.
* Every now and then some chucklefuck asks "how is this different from [[Rule Zero]]?", which starts an even nastier argument.

The problem comes from trying to express an abstract idea in a mechanical way. Obviously, there needs to be the possibility of failure for challenging tasks to create a sense of tension. But the players are heroes, and as such tend to get really good at things, and a lot of things that would be 'hard' to a novice become trivial to them. So the idea of 'easy/medium/hard' really means 'easy by the standards of the character at this point in their development'. And that's where the problem comes from people thinking it is an absolute scale of difficulty rather than relative. The designers framed things in a way that seemed reasonable, so that leveled up characters don't just breeze through everything and there remains the important sense of dramatic tension, especially important for dealing with checks that happen against a time limit (pick the lock before the monsters catch up!) and because the numbers are in your face obvious people complained about a number treadmill.