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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7875658" data-attributes="member: 4937">Achieving "works intuitively without fiat" usually involves mechanical complexity, because simulating real processes usually involves a lot of granularity and special cases. Elegance is the opposite of mechanical complexity. Something is elegant if, despite lacking mechanical complexity it can achieve broad or powerful results. The core D20 system is elegant, but this elegance results in situations were the results won't work intuitively or well if you apply the core mechanic to them - rules for jumping are one case that continually bedevils me that you may be familiar with. If you want to deal with jumping in a way that provides a sensible range of results for a given assumed degree of athletic ability, then you need to develop a subsystem that treats jumping as uniquely different from either typical pass/fail tasks or even other range of result tasks.More subsystems means less elegance.The DM is the active party in your imagined relationship.  Only the DM can validate when the PC is allowed to shine.  As such, the PC is forced into a "mother may I" role, where he knows he cannot reliably make propositions about the fiction.   And because he cannot reliably make propositions, the PC has to either choose to play the DM and coax the DM into seeing the fiction the way the player wants, or simply avoid making risky propositions because the player knows that the DM if he doesn't feel like success ought to be warranted in this case (maybe it goes against the DM's own prior plans) will declare in this case - unlike in the prior case were it didn't go against the DM's plans - that a fortune test is required.Conversely, if I know what sort of situation involve a 15 DC, and I have a +14 skill bonus or higher, then I can reliably back propositions in every similar situation without fearing that because it might interfere with the DM's preferences he'll not in this case validate my proposition.   (Of course, the DM may by careful planning make sure such situations don't appear, but that's a different issue.)</blockquote>

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