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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5857766" data-attributes="member: 51942">I think the cliff example is actually particularly amusing because it highlights the problems with ad-hoc rulings.Let's say you wanted to push someone off a cliff.  Well, you might think of an opposed strength check: two equally matched fighters have about as much chance of pushing the other over as two equally matched (but much weaker) wizards.  Depending on the modifiers, you might have a reasonable change of success here: perhaps with saving throw after the attack as usual, but that's still approaching a 25% chance.At a different instance, you might think of bull-rush: here the fighters still have a reasonable chance of success, but the wizards are very unlikely to succeed: they'd need to make a strength attack (virtually hopeless) vs. Fort (which benefits from cloaks and possibly reasonable constitution).Indeed, I suspect most people would look towards bullrush first: its in the rules and does almost exactly what you want.  Unfortunately, it's also very likely to fail beyond the lowest levels since its attack roll scales very poorly.If bullrush didn't exist, I suspect most DMs would come up with a more effective ruling that would scale across levels; as it is, the existance of the rule bullrush means that not using it requires explanations.  It's in that sense that improvisation and rules don't go together well: people have been improvising all the time, but generally only for actions not covered by the rules (indeed, that's in pg.42's title).  Adding bad rules is in that sense actively harmful: you're not just making a rule nobody'll use, you're making a rule which implicitly deters improvisation achieving the same effect.</blockquote>

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