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I thought D&D had evolved beyond "just make up some stuff, roll some dice, and let it all be DM fiat" about 40 years ago. I'm getting the impression that the people who actually like games with well defined rules were chased away from here when 5e came out. I'm trying to give 5e a chance, but...

Unless you're meaning for starting characters to be middle-aged, that wouldn't make sense. I don't see anything about starting ages in here, maybe that's another undefined thing in 5e, but I'm pretty used to the idea of starting characters in D&D being fairly young people in their late teens to...

In the real world, learning the profession of being a Soldier takes a few months, same for being a police officer. You can learn a lot in a few months of downtime. D&D games I've played in have often had weeks or months of downtimes between adventures, especially between plot arcs. Maybe...

Except, as I noted, there's no ability, in the RAW, to gain that knowledge after character creation, and there was no indication in the rules that I could see that you could even use a background as proficiency like that, that backgrounds are flavor text and some added skills and equipment, not...

When could that kind of knowledge be useful in a game? Let's say Bob the Fighter is undercover in the evil Imperial Army, trying to get to their headquarters to steal important plans. He's wearing the armor and tabard of an Imperial Soldier, he's passing himself off as a troop because they...

I wasn't saying it's bad. The more consolidated skills is one of the things I can actually like about 5e, especially the hide/move silently and knowledge: Arcana and Knowledge: The Planes consolidation. I was just responding to the question that being a soldier (aside from combat and athletic...

The 5e skills as-is are very broad and encompass things that would be other skills. The Investigation skill covers criminology, research, searching, and engineering. The Athletics skill covers jumping, climbing and swimming. The Stealth skill covers both hiding and moving silently. The...

I'm just trying to wrap my mind around a very different mindset of D&D. So, for example, if it's someone's background, letting them add their proficiency bonus to related tasks/knowledge from their background (that aren't already covered by other skills/proficiencies)? Maybe letting players...

As for when rolling for a Soldiering profession could make sense. . . For how well someone could perform drill and ceremony maneuvers. From my own time in the Army, I know some Soldiers could barely do D&C, while others could do sharp, snappy, well timed moves that would look impressive. Or...

A character might need to make a roll at a bookkeeping profession to see if records have been altered. . .or to alter records to cover up something. They might need to roll as a candlemaker to make a particularly high quality candle (like if they were helping a mage make a candle-based magic...

So, there's no rule really, just ad-hoc making it up? Sounds like a monumental U-turn in game design compared to actually having a skill system that could handle things players wanted to do, instead of relying on arbitrary DM fiat for everything. I thought D&D had evolved beyond that.

Okay, as I'm trying to learn 5e, and coming from a 2e and 3e heritage, I'm seeing a HUGE gap as I read through the Player's Handbook. Are there no skills/proficiencies at all for a character to know a profession? There is the short list of very broad skills for characters, and craft skills...

This. I've got no compunctions about going back to equipment manuals for older editions. It's not like the cost of a cloak should really have changed between editions, certainly not to any meaningful degree. It's a 2nd edition sourcebook, but I still consider Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog to...

Yeah, and given how they ended the first season, even though it's picked up for a second. . .how do you really continue a series called Star Trek: Picard, when the first season ends with . I'm skeptical about a Pike-based series because it's even more of a prequel and they've already shown a...

I'll admit that I'm not really up on 5th edition and it's culture, I basically dropped out of D&D culture when 4th edition came out. . . . . .but why would it not being used by a majority of players be a reason to not publish a book? Since when is "it has it's own book" a downside? D&D has...

Violating this rule can be dangerous to the health of the hobby. My wife steadfastly refuses to play D&D or any other tabletop RPG. She tried 3 times when she was in High School. The first time, she spent several hours creating a character, writing an elaborate backstory, making sketches of...

I saw psionic characters pretty regularly. In our 2e days, rolling for wild talents was a part of every character creation. At least half our parties had someone who actually got a wild talent. Probably roughly half our parties also had a psionic character, usually multiclassed. One gaming...

Okay, I'm a D&D 3.5 grognard. I love my 3e. I didn't go to 4e because, well. . .edition wars and all that. I stopped paying attention to new anything from WotC when 4e came out. Between 4e, the Spellplague, and discontinuing d20 Modern (and later discontinuing the Star Wars RPG) there was...

I've been coming to ENWorld since it was Eric Noahs' 3rd Edition News and Rumors page. I was just a lurker on the forums for the first few years, but I registered in September 2003. . .I think it was the whole controversy over product standards and WotC changing the terms of the d20 STL over...

A big problem with measuring anything like this is assuming that online polls, surveys forums etc. really are accurate at measuring gamers. That assumes people are participating in WotC's surveys (if they aren't into the current edition, having been "fired" by WotC as a customer during the...