Killer obstructive DM, nintendo hard games, and shift in gamer culture

[Saint-Just]

And a LOT about how useful a skill or spell or any ability is, is all about WHAT a player tries to do with it. If the player wants to have the character hang out at the Happy Tree Apple Farm where all the trees are DC 5 to climb, then the character will be the awesome demi god of climbing. Should the player have the character go to the Black Keep of Evil, they would find the trees there DC 15....and the Cursed Isle of the Undead has DC 25 trees, and undead ents too.

I suppose that this gets into simulationism vs story territory. Even if we're talking about heroic exploits like surviving great falls, breaking chains with your bare hands etc. there is still place for relatively precise abilities - hero can survive fall of 100 feet but if he fights near 600 feet chasm he knows that fall would kill him, being able to tear apart your typical manacles does not mean you can break 1-inch adamantium chain and so on. But some subordinate consistency to the narrative - if the city watch needs to hold falsely accused hero he would not be able to get rid of normal manacles, if he needs to escape from Evil Overlord's prison adamantium chains would not be able to hold him.

DCs for the same action getting harder relies on getting PCs into the progressively weirder and more dangerous locations - which is not so widespread as to be default assumption. Challenging encounters (getting ambushed by the high-level NPCs near the capital while delivering urgent news, non-lethally infiltrating treasonous noble's keep in search of the compromising evidence) does not need unusual terrain, and in some case preclude them (forest near the capital is unlikely to be unusual, unless utility magic is widespread (not a default assumption) there's not much reasons for the keep's wall to be harder than DC 25). That is why enough people consider it important to have benchmarks for normal scenery\situations. In most campaigns a tree near the Castle of Doom strongly resemble one on the Happy Farm, so assigning different DC to them is not desirable.

You understand that the whole basic game concept is based around the idea of a living virtual interacting world where the challenges are varied to an extreme, always changing and always increasing in difficulty?

Overall challenge does not necessary mean that producing the same (object-level) result (climb the tree, tie your shoes, deal 10 points of damage) becomes harder, only that it takes more to achieve meta-result of "victory". Even if trees stay the same you still qualify from climbing the trees to take potshots from safety all the way to fighting while running on the treetops.