That’s pretty much how I do mine. I throw a bunch of hooks at my PCs and any they follow up become important: the rest evaporate.
Keeps me on my toes and saves me a lot of head space.
I always thought the bit about style over substance was a response to ‘hold on, though: doing that doesn’t really make sense if you think about it’ comments when swordsmen cut a swathe through guards armed with smart guns.
Well they obviously had a stab at it when compared with 3.5 but shied away from the one size fits all of 4E. The actual internal drivers of what made them settle on 5E are probably multi factorial.
They reined in pure spell casters and boosted the relative power levels of martials to some...
Disagree. The rule of cool is part of being a hero. It’s not a game: it’s a story. And it’s the players and the DM’s jib to make the story satisfying.
Otherwise you may as well be playing Hero Quest.
Is this how it works? A DM has to know the players’ bonus? I just set a difficulty in my head head and ask them to role ability+proficiency and tell them if they succeed or fail.
Who said we have to know their stats?