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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 3397944" data-attributes="member: 3424">Regarding: "Search behind the painting" vs "I take 20 and Search the room".Sometimes, I think one of the major determinants of how smoothly a game is run is how well the players interface with the game. In more open-ended systems, like previous editions of D&D, the DM has more responsibility to be that interface and to adjudicate the players' interactions with the game world. If the DM is flexible, creative, and able to adapt the challenges on the fly to create hints or add new complications, as necessary, the players will be challenged, but will not feel frustrated. However, if the DM has only one solution in mind, or is otherwise rigid and inflexible, the players might feel that they are playing one of those text-based RPGs where you have to type in exactly the right commands, e.g. "Move painting" instead of "Search painting", "Use knife" instead of "Cut rope", etc.More codified systems like 3e solve this problem by defining more clearly what the PCs are capable of doing. Effectively, they allow the players to interface with the game in a command-driven or menu-driven manner. By narrowing the universe of choices down to a limited number of ways in which the players can interact with the game, and implying that the solutions to problems should be defined in terms of these limited interactions, at least one source of frustration (the game interface/DM not recognizing the player's input as valid) should be eliminated.The irony is that one of the main advantages that a table-top pen-and-paper RPG has over a computer RPG is the flexibility of the DM to accept all kinds of input. However, if I'm playing with a DM that insists on acting like a computer, I'd rather have a command-driven interface than have to guess exactly what input he will recognize as valid. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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