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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6310348" data-attributes="member: 18">I feel like it's the DM's job to make powers make sense outside the context of a battlemat, personally, but I think as we've discussed, I differ from many DMs on this, who apparently what, throw their hands up in frustration? (I dunno what they do, I guess).As for the rest, the funny thing is, I don't strictly disagree, but it's relative - experimental and imaginative, that is. What I've seen, and I'm not alone in this (just go ask RPG.net if you want), is that players going from 3.XE to 4E became more experimental and imaginative, despite the things you say work against that.I believe the reason for this is extremely simple and it's been stated by multiple people in this thread (possibly even you? I can't remember) - 3.XE's rules were so broad in scope and so detailed that they covered a really huge variety of actions - it was very hard to perform a typical adventuring action that wasn't covered by 3.XE's rules, if you looked for the rules, and usually what those rules amounted to was "make between two and six (no hyperbole this time) d20-based skill, stat or attack roll checks to see if you can do this one thing" - or worse, the very rare "you explicitly cannot do this without a feat" obviously, given the nature of probability, it was thus very hard to succeed at improvised stuff in 3.XE.So what I've been trying to say, whilst being yelled at (from my perspective <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=":)" /> ) by a variety of people is not "OMG 4E IS THA BESTEST FOR IMPROV ACTIONS LOSERZ!", but rather "4E sure was better for improv actions than 3.XE!". Do people even disagree with that? The only argument I've seen against is "In 3.XE your non-improv actions blew so hard that improv seemed good by comparison!", which I get, but it's kind of tangential to what I was saying.With 5E, okay, let's be real, there are two basic, likely, scenarios for how good it is at improv actions:1) No real guidelines, it is exactly as good as your DM wants it to be, and may well vary strongly from player to player, depending on how persuasive they are. This is the 2E situation. I will be honest - I do not like this, because I don't like it, as a DM, when I'm being asked to make this kind of judgment call all the time, and as my group loves improv actions, that's what I'll be doing! <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=":)" />or2) Some guidelines, which are obviously not in the playtest, and probably won't appear until the DMG (though, like Mistwell, I hope they appear in the PHB in some form), which are in no way "hard rules", but merely suggestions, and good, detailed ones with lots of nice ideas - and which give a DM something to work from.If they are the latter, it is certainly possible 5E will be better at improv stuff than 4E. That'd be great. I just don't think it's a sure thing. It is, however, a sure thing that it will be better at it than 3.XE/PF (assuming the goal is that adventurers frequently succeed at improv actions, not hilariously fail!).The third scenario is an unknown unknown, I think, but I can't speculate on that.Finally, just let me mention that my contention that 4E encouraged non-AEDU play is not reliant on p.42, and I've pointed this out several times (from the start, in fact), it's just that people want to argue about p.42 specifically - what I am saying, though, is that 4E encouraged it through a great deal of DM advice, both in DMG1, and DMG2. I'd have to look in the PHB to see if it was encouraged there, but from my group, the fact that the PHB had less general rules in it clearly encouraged players. You mentioned the "hundreds of pages" of "tactical rules" in 4E. There are not "hundreds of pages", let's be clear, of tactical rules. 4E has far fewer "tactical rules" and general rules that get involved in combat than 3.XE. Just wanted to note that, not to argue about it, btw</blockquote>

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