The Price of Inflation

 "Just increase the difficulty"
This is what we hear from time to time when it comes to competent characters. The big idea is that, well, you want to challenge the character, so you put in things with a higher difficulty for that character to overcome.

Let's throw in a theoretical.
Let's say you have a 5th level character in 5e who can't roll below 14 on sleight of hand checks and to pick locks and disarm traps, and once per short rest also gets to roll with advantage on such checks. More often than not, the character's going to be fortunate and succeed at such checks.  Note that, in 5e, picking locks is DC 15.  No less, and very, very rarely more. This means the character will only ever fail to pick most locks with a roll of 1, and can usually get through most traps as well.

Alright.  So, the game master wants the lock picker to be challenged, and raises most of the DCs for picking locks and removing traps to 25, meaning our rogue is going to need a 11+ to succeed, making it a bit riskier, but with Advantage it's more than possible. Note that DC 25 is "nearly impossible".

Okay.  Now, let's say half-way through the dungeon the rogue is dropped.  Someone else is now in charge of disarming the traps and picking the locks.  Someone who, say, is more 'average' than our elite lock-picker.  +5 (which, for normal locks means they succeed on a roll of 9+).  The GM has two options.

1) Keep the locks and traps at the same DC, essentially blocking the adventure at this point or watching the PCs spring every trap.
2)  Lower the DC so that the new lock-picker and trap-finder is capable of doing their job. And revealing to the entire party that the only reason the traps was so hard was to make things "challenging", while also making it patently unfair for the character who made this their focus.

This is why at our table the rule is the world is not aware of the PC's capabilities and is not going to tailor itself to those abilities. Just because a character is more skilled than normal doesn't mean the world suddenly ups the difficulty for that one character. This applies to monsters, too.  Just because one character is a god-killing machine doesn't mean that the monsters suddenly ramp up to be a match for that character (and woe be to anyone else).

If your GM is doing that ... what's the point of even trying to be good at anything in the first place?

We were in a 5e campaign with a character with godlike perception. So the GM made all the perception-based challenges things like DC 30.  The highest DC in the game for skill checks. We looked at the game master.  "We're level 6. Are you telling us that we're facing legendary challenges through this entire dungeon?"

The GM came back with "Well, you need to be able to fail."

To which we replied, "No, we don't need to. You want us to.  There's a difference."

We then pointed out this means that nobody else can succeed. At all. Ever. The game master is, in fact, putting our character more in the spotlight because what was something any PC could do, now only our character can hope to do.

And really, this idea of 'I have to up the difficulty to give player X a hard time' (sorry, 'to challenge them') is a stupid, juvenile tactic, because you're effectively locking out the other characters in doing so, and you're making it so there's no point to trying to 'get good'. At this point, the characters might as well, set their attributes to 10, never have anything improve.  Then the GM can use the difficulty chart, and never have to change it ever for anyone.  There, now all the PCs can succeed or fail more or less as the GM wants.

Fun, isn't it?

Or, how about not doing that.
In our 5e campaign, we've a character who's been a god when it comes to seeing things through the entire campaign. Wisdom isn't even the character's highest stat, but through a combination of factors they're just amazing with perception.

So what did we do?
We think about what's there to be spotted.  We figure out the difficulty.  And then we simply say, 'hey, you.  You spot this thing'. Because unless a god has descended from the heavens to hide these things, the character's going to notice them.

Would we like to spring traps and surprises on the PCs?  Oh, of course. It's fun. But we're not about to fuck with a character's elite abilities to do so. Because that sucks, and it ruins the fun for that player.

This happened in a Mutants and Masterminds campaign at one point. There was this character who's entire role was "I curse our enemies. They can act as normal, but with certain specific actions, they take damage, or they suffer a condition."  So, for example, an enemy may suffer a penalty or damage each time they move, or if they activate a superpower, or if they attack, or if they speak. To get these curses to stick requires the target failing a saving throw.

Any time there was even a remotely significant opponent, they always passed. Always.  So the player cranked the character's cursing ability to the highest capable for their level. Mutants and Masterminds has level limits, and the character hit them for their curses. And the enemies passed. Every single time. Because the GM simply cranked these saving throws to the max (and higher) as well.  Thus rendering the character useless to the group.

Fun, isn't it? The player wasn't having a good time.

Or, in another (Robin Hood themed) game, the character we made was a social character, someone we could send into town to get information and make contacts. The GM had no interest in this and would say, effectively, 'you go into town and come back later'.

So we put all our points into our combat abilities, since there was no point in trying to develop that aspect of the character. The campaign ended when the GM threw an entire army of knights at the group to try to flush them out of the woods and have them go 'on the run'.

The PC party slaughtered the knights, because since there was literally nothing else of interest to put our points in, we'd become combat gods, and the rules were heavily in our favour because of it. (A critical hit guaranteed death if even a single point of damage got through ... and with full attack, you were all but given to get a critical hit on a 'skilled knight' because their defensive traits sucked - armour was effectively DR, it was not 'harder to hit' but instead 'prevented damage').

And thus ended that game.

But seriously.
If you want to challenge the PCs, you pick areas where the character's vulnerable. That's game mastering 101. You don't crank up the difficulty for the stuff they're good at - because then you're telling the player their choices for their build don't matter, what you want matters more.

Got a stealth expert?  How's their social skills?  Not so hot?  Put them in social situations from time to time.  Another character's really good at social stuff - but not so much in knowledge stuff?  Have them make a few knowledge checks from time to time.  Or maybe they have to climb a wall, or tie a rope, or help on the deck of a ship.  You obviously don't do this all the time, but you keep the players on their toes while allowing them to be awesome where they want to be awesome.

Because we do this as a game master, in point-based games our players are notorious for spreading their points all over the place, making sure they can do at least a little bit of everything to cover each other where it's needed.

And that's good.  The characters are working together, helping each other, and well-rounded to some extent, even if they are god walking in their specific fields of interest.

It's certainly more fun for the players.
Does this mean your carefully laid plans may run afoul of the character who just happens to have the proper skills to get the job done?

So what.
In our view, the game master runs the setting, and is the neutral arbiter of the rules. The goal is to give the players an experience of what the world is like. If the players want to go out and be challenged, they'll find ways to do it, and because you're running a living, breathing world, they'll sometimes step outside their comfort zone.

But forcing your desires on the group to give them a 'challenge' where they might not want it, is a dick move. A player who throws everything into a character's armour class is telling you 'I don't want to get hit'.  This doesn't mean you throw things at the character with higher and higher attack bonuses just so you can hit that one character. That's basically telling the player 'I don't fucking care what you want'. You send a normal threat at someone more squishy, so that the character can rush into harm's way to protect that person, acting as the distraction.  That's a lot cooler.

And if you're worried about some character stealing the spotlight? That just tells us the player doesn't know how to share. And if you still want that player at the table, all you need to do is look at the player you want to act and say, "so, what do you do?"

Any player with any amount of brains will know it's that player's turn to act, and not theirs. And if they don't take a clue from the clue tree, you can simply say, 'it's their turn, let them act'.

And if they still don't buy a clue ... why do you have them at your table, then?

But seriously.
Don't suddenly crank the difficulty of actions just because a character's good at it. If you're going to do that, make a simple house rule:

"You can't have more than double your proficiency bonus as a bonus on any action. Anything past that is ignored."  Or if you're doing Pathfinder, "you can't have more bonuses than your Level + 5."

At least then the players know where you stand.  And then they can decide if they want to play at your table or not.  At least, then, you're giving them a heads up.

And if you're not willing to lay your cards on the table and let the players know what you expect from them, that's a you problem, not a them problem.