Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9466048" data-attributes="member: 2067">Heh, I remember when I noticed in my 4e games that all the modifiers basically amounted to "If you roll a 9 or better on the d20, you hit."D&D became quite the number cruncher in 3e and 4e. 5e has some of this, though I appreciate that it's toned down significantly (ability + proficiency is mostly all you need). I wonder if this was something that hit some nostalgia buttons for those who were bigger fans of earlier editions...Yeah, I think anyone saying that rules don't matter is at the LEAST being hyperbolic. I just dropped like $50 on the new PHB, I don't just drop that money on things that don't matter."Balance" is a slippery thing to define for an audience, but I think people do want rules that work. That deliver the experience they're hoping to get with the inputs they're given. Folks get squirrelly when you try to get them to define those experiences and how rules produce them (self reflection is hard), but I do think people - generally - care about that. Or, at least, people generally act like they care about that, whatever they say.None of which, of course, removes the maxim that any particular rule might not matter to any particular table at any particular moment. Which is, charitably, what I think a lot of people are getting at when they say the rules don't matter. You don't always need to add up the modifiers - pretty sure that 3 will fail, and that 17 will succeed, and that's because the game is designed so that the dice have a significant impact on success or failure at all levels. Doesn't mean that the modifiers don't matter, just that they don't ALWAYS matter, and it's OK to let them not matter in a given moment (and to let them matter in the next!).</blockquote>

Verification