On the other hand, under 5e skill system, it's all "GM may I". There is no concrete guides what you can do with skills. Sure you can try and DM can rule it on the spot. Personally, I never encountered DM who said no in 3.5 days if i tried to use skill in creative way that wasn't covered with specifics. Was there DMs who said you can only do what's listed? Sure. Same as DMs who under 5e rules say - it isn't in skill description, so you can't do it (fe, Medicine states that you can diagnose but not cure illness or disease, so DM may just say - description doesn't cover curing, so you can't do it).
Those aren’t the same. The 3.5 example is reasonable. When there is a seemingly exhaustive list, it’s reasonable to conclude that it
is exhaustive.
It isn’t a reasonable interpretation of the 5e rules
which the clearly stated as not exhaustive description of the sorts of tasks a skill can add your bonus to are actually totally exhaustive in spite of the rules saying they aren’t.
Best way is 4-5 concrete precise examples with DCs and wording that says that those are examples, give other general uses. FE Medicine- cure poison/disease with DC, stabilise with DC, heal x HP with DC. Then add - covers general medical knowledge, so it may be used for diagnosis and ways of transmitting various diseases, recognizing procedures done to someone, perform autopsy, determine cause of death etc.
Sounds like 4e….like I said.
Yes, good experienced DM can on the fly make rulings. But inexperienced one, who's only experience of D&D is 5e, needs more guidelines. Let's use that Medicine example. If player says that he want's to use it to heal injured player. What DC for skill check? How many HP does he restore?
When my nephew ran the game with the new rules, for the first time, he let a successful medicine check allow spending a hit point die to regain hit point die plus Con Mod. The DC was 15 like most stuff that isn’t easy but is totally possible for a proficient character. There are standard DCs in the DMG. He didn’t need any help, he just read the core books.
ETA: He told me what rules he had read to come to those answers, but I don’t recall with any certainty. I’ve been doing this long enough I don’t really lean on RAW all that much anymore, and instead just run the game, but he read the DMG and made rulings based on it and the PHB and what felt right for the game and tone and players.
But again that only works if the group knows what they are doing and understands the medium...
Not really. Every teenager I have run D&D for at the library, for instance, once I explained the way the game is played by the rules (ie rulings, rules are guides, we build the game in play using the rules as a starting point, here is the conversation of play that creates the basic gameplay loop, etc.), has just done it naturally from that point. The only people who have struggled IME are people who are used to more strictly defined TTRPGs or editions.
“Can I try to stabilize and wake him, and then heal him with some herbs and stuff?”
“Sure, spend a use of the healers kit to stabilize him and then make a medicine check, and since you have an Herbalism Kit, you have advantage.”
The situation is cleaner and easier to run in 2024, though it still could use a clear success ladder with descriptions of what sorts of things higher success means for each skill, but it’s not like we just have two sentences of vague “do stuff like this” and a separate statement elsewhere in the book that the DM decides if what you attempt can work and if so what the roll is.
That's the whole point of the thread
People don't understand Rangery stuff enough and too few GMs can rule Ranger stuff on the fly for the majority of tables in the absence of some hard rules.
Let's face it
Most D&D fans don't know
- Botany
- Zoology
- Cryptozoology
- Geology
- Meteorology
- Ecology
- Hunting
- Camping
- Linguistics
I went to school for this stuff. My major was tiny.
I don’t need to know any of that to play a ranger, run a game with a ranger in it, or build a ranger for other people to play.
