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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7759191" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Interesting... I really disliked running 4E. It didn't do what I wanted and forced me to think like the designers. I don't copy other people well. I can't do it in really any area of my life. As I say to every student I teach at the start of the class "I basically always hate every textbook I use." So I'm pretty much never going to do it the way you suggest. I want what I want. I recognize that nearly any game will be a bit off from that and will deal with "good enough" That said, 4E did have some useful and interesting ideas. Right what I'm suggesting is an intermediate point where there are some spells (or powers more broadly) that can help boost a social character but I would totally agree that what you should do is exactly what you describe most of the time. 4E had some powers like that, such as Arcane Mutterings. These were cool because they let a non-face sub in as a face for a limited time. These kinds of abilities are also helpful because they mean that a face can sometimes do much better than just their baseline fundamentals as determined by their skills, but only at some cost. Remember that the natural face character, the bard, cannot self-help. But as I said... I don't actually care what the designers wrote in terms of limitations or the game they imagined I want to play. Part of why I do wish they'd make some things more official is because many of the online tools, such as D&D Beyond, are utterly painful to deal with for anything not in the rulebooks. There are torturous hacks to work around issues, but still, it's nasty.  I was initially skeptical of 5E, having been burned by 4E, but as soon as I played it I was 100% fine seeing 4E go off to the dustbin of my personal history, although as I said previously, it had some decent ideas. My big issue with it was how slow play speed often was and how much it just focused on the equivalent of mini combats. But that's a different set of posts.(Aside: I do have a fairly complete collection of 4E books in quite good shape if anyone in the USA is interested.) I don't think I'm expressing what I run well enough though. I always felt 4E was much more events and set pieces with sandbox not really being on their minds. My game's not something I felt aligned with 4E. There are events that happen or not, depending a lot on what the players do. What I don't run is some super complicated dungeon where the PCs are room-crawling, but I long ago stopped running that kind of game.</blockquote>

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