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It doesn't even need to be a sustained period - given how short 5e levels 1 and 2 can be in terms of encounters it's very straightforward for them to be obtained over a day or two for which we can account for all of the Wizards time. The point is that there are no rules as to what actions a...

Agreed, though it's fairly trivial to conceive of a situation whereby the knocking off of the mask is the salient thing (perhaps it is valuable, or magical, perhaps it is the source of the difficulty in the scenario) whereas the identity of the wearer isn't (our party of right thinking...

I think the point here is that the GM has to agree with the stakes first - it's not that the roll is made and then on a success the player has free rein to say what the runes are, it's that the players and GM before agree that the request is reasonable (so authorship is shared) so on a success...

It's been a while, but I think it was the party was stuck outside a secret door and the adventure couldn't continue till they found it, so everyone was standing around awkwardly till someone rolled high enough to find it.

Didn't we get an example of this in one of the 5e launch streams? Something like Acquisitions Incorporated?

It's not quite player rolls or dm rolls - it's attacker rolls or defender rolls. The example in the 3e UA is player rolls, but it's extensible. We are talking about miss for half damage, I agree. I use the 3e UA rules to convert saves into attacks vs defences. I cast a fireball at a...

I think @Maxperson covers this, but I'm talking about the case when reshuffling saves to attacks on defences. This is nearly identical mechanically, takes precisely the same fictional inputs and delivers precisely the same fictional outputs. The only mechanical difference is who physically...

Perhaps I'm not being clear here. I'm not even talking about a narrativist case here, just purely 3/5e D&D. In basic operation of the game, if I make a normal physical attack, I miss if I do not beat the AC of my target with the sum of my attack bonus and die roll. If I convert saves to...

I think the idea here is that in some implementations of this (I want to say some early CoC, but that might not be right, or possibly some 2e NWPs) do not take the difficulty of the task into account - this might not even be text, just culture of play (So for CoC all the example checks in a...

Sure, but mechanically all a miss means is that you didn't reach the target number on the die - you can absolutely shuffle who rolls and what bonuses apply to what target to make the 3e+ save system into an attack vs defence system that has misses in it. At which point, save for half becomes...

Right, which is I think why we did see early attempts to make what the mechanics represented fictionally more transparent (We can disagree about how effective they were, but it's a commonly stated influence for the development of RM and so on) My general point is that the split we saw on this...

You claimed that there was a difference between Save for Half and Damage on a Miss based on the fiction. I demonstrated that this wasn't true based on the Fireball example - the only difference was whose hand the die left and a reshuffling of the bonuses and target numbers - the fictional...

Sorry, should have clarified, the detail of this analysis is really only relevant from 3e onwards where both the attacker and defenders stats matter for spell saves. You could extend it to 1/2e style by making the caster roll against a save target with no bonuses though. Essentially, the idea...

Absolutely - I certainly agree it's something that people can find feeling awkward after being used to something one way. It's certainly not a matter of better or worse, it's just that as I hope I've demonstrated, it's purely administrative in terms of the impact on the fiction. This really...

Sure, but as I note above, the difference between a making a save and missing an attack is purely administrative. You can even invert it the other way and make the defender roll to defend against a sword swing (or even make one or both an opposed roll) - constructing this so that the final...

No, not at all. You can trivially change who rolls and produce identical results and identical fiction. The only difference is a rules widget. -Edit To expand, if we take a 3.5 Fireball with a DC of 16 against a target with a Reflex Save of +5, we get a 50% chance of saving and doing 50%...

I think this is pretty common - Save for Half is, essentially, identical to Damage on a Miss - the only difference is who rolls the dice

I'll not speak for @Hussar here, but I think the point here is that there are many circumstances whereby, in D&D (let's use 3.5 for this, as it's probably where the effect is most pronounced) if you want to succeed at a task, you are better off using a spell rather than a skill. The simplest...

Isn't "eeking out any way to improve the mechanical position of their PCs" exactly what players in a trad game is meant to be doing? Looking beyond their character sheets, engaging with the fiction, attempting to get successes without having to roll by making clever action declarations?

I'm interested how you determine how many checks you need for this more granular style - we all know that the more checks are made, the lower probability of success is. Consider a simpler example - let's assume 5.14 and the character attempting to sneak up on a target at the end of a long city...