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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 6308517" data-attributes="member: 2525">I never viewed Page 42 as a limitation.  I think it's good to have guidelines (for the DM only) on how to adjudicate things not in the rules.  It's a starting place for the DM - not a dictate of what must happen.  I hope they expand such guidelines in 5e, and make it even more clear they are guidelines to start from and not dictates, and that they are a tool for the DM and not for the player.My criticism was simply that it didn't get used very often, because the sheet mass of options for players to choose from on their character sheet meant players were not looking to choose an option not on that sheet very often.  When I have 12 different powers to choose from on my character sheet, many of which already interact with the environment and move or impact foes in a variety of both damaging and disability ways, I am less inclined to look for yet more options to manipulate the room and foes off that character sheet.And I found 3rd edition had a similar problem, though with a variation.  Third edition seemed to have a rule for everything, and those rules were often directed at the players more than the DM.  Want to swing on a chandelier and attack with your rapier? There was probably a prestige class or new character class or magic item or feat or spell that let you do that, so letting a PC that didn't have that thing just do it with a check, but without that prestige or regular class or item or feat or spell, seemed "unfair" to the player who devoted a resource to get that thing for their character. There was also an impact from being specific rules, somewhere, for most things no matter how obscure the action.  That could cause someone to want to look up that specific rule if they tried something unusual, a game delay. Or it could serve as a discouragement from trying it due to the prospect of a pause to look up a rule.  Or it could encourage the need for a rules lawyer who knew all the various rules from all the expansion books - which could also be a barrier to entry for a casual game.Even 1e had this issue to an extent.  Only thieves had a listed percentage chance to climb a wall for instance, or find traps.  These were meant to represent an ability beyond the normal ability of every character to do this, but it wasn't often understood by many at the time to be that, and so it could serve as a constraint on characters who were not a thief to even try to do those things.5e to me has fewer of these limitations built into it, at least so far in the playtest.  That could just be from the lack of content so far for the game, but I suspect it's a change in philosophy.  Your character sheet is brief, and covers very broad concepts with ability checks and proficiencies.  Your player options are similar brief and broad.  And while each type of character is best at a certain thing, it's much clearer that there is a huge amount of room for any PC to try any thing they can think of, though someone trained (proficient) in that type of thing will be better at it.  For us, it's working very well, and leading to players being more inventive with their actions than in previous editions. And nobody seems to benefit from that added room to try things than the rogue character, who is trained (proficient) in the most number of broad categories of "things you can try".</blockquote>

Verification