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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9893143" data-attributes="member: 29398">Anything can be taught provided people are willing to learn.As players, we can and do use all kinds of skill and in-character abilities and so forth to push the odds in our favour; even sometimes to the point of obviating or avoiding having to roll dice.But once the dice roll, all that odds-shifting etc. is done.  At that point it becomes a sheer gamble, where you'll either win or lose.That's precisely what the enjoyment is derived from!  The old "thrill of victory" piece holds true here.  And if you win too often that thrill becomes diminished to the point of irrelevance, while if you never win there's no thrill to be had.I mean, has your table never given a roaring cheer when someone rolled that nat 20 at the perfect moment when everything was on the line and anything less meant doom and destruction all round?No worries. <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=":)" />What I'm sensing, though, is a reluctance to accept those streaks in any form.I ran a session last night where for the most part everything that could go wrong for the PCs did go wrong, short of a full TPK.  Between them they lost 8 levels, and one of the PCs may have been rendered unplayable as anyone who sees him (including the other PCs) becomes filled with dread that this PC is about to die in a very messy way, taking out the surrounding neighbourhood in the process, and thus the best place to be as farther away from him.An email from one of the players today included "What a session!" and "edge-of-the-seat exciting", which doesn't sound very disappointed to me.To the bolded: I kinda think that's a you thing and doesn't extrapolate to everyone.Make it a roulette wheel where there's in-game rules-supported ways and means of affecting the odds, however, and you've got a proven winner.That said, part of the reason for having chance in the game is to at times take the players' best-laid plans and squash them dead by, in effect, flat-out saying "no, this ain't gonna happen this time".There's a reason not much gets produced for high-level 5e, that being that the vast majority of play in in the low-to-mid levels, up to maybe 12th-14th range.As for 1e, there's design up to 20th-ish level but the intent is that the playable range is about half that, with the rest of the design in place mainly for two reasons:--- to tell DMs how high-level NPCs work in order to facilitate creating foes, mentors, trainers, and so forth--- for those few tables that want to (or dare to) try playing at those levels.I keep seeing this statement, not just from you, and disagree with it every time.A game is either random or it is not.  And any degree of randomness, no matter how small, makes a game random.Chess is not random.  Nor is Checkers, along with a very few other games where the only variable is player skill.Any game that involves rolled dice, shuffled cards, and the like is by definition random, even though in some of those games player skill is also very important.  Take Bridge: the unavoidable random element is the hands the four players get dealt, the skill piece is how they then bid and play those hands.Dice-based RPGs are an odd duck in that they have an occasionally-avoidable random element where skilled play can sometimes negate or avoid invoking randomization by making an outcome certain.  Most of the time, though, the random element is unavoidable, and all the players can do is use what the game gives them to try to bend the odds in their favour.So, my take from there is that once the odds are set and the randomizer is invoked, lean into it!  Enjoy the thrill of the gamble!Nothing.By the book, yes.  If one takes steps to make magic not necessarily quite so reliable, though, it's not quite so cut and dried.Most new DMs these days are likely to follow the rules as written as best they can.  I don't think there's anything controversial there.This is different from the 1e days, when brand new DMs were told right there in the DMG to tweak things to make the game their own (and then in the same book told not to, in typical Gygaxian contradictory form), and many of them did just that either right out the gate or very shortly after.  Today's new DMs aren't getting that same advice right up front, and thus it takes longer for them to even think of tweaking the rul;es never mind actually doing so.I prefer items be more easy come, easy go.  And - again in the spirit of randomness - I'm quite happy if a low-level party stumbles across some high-powered item; while I don't want it to happen every time, I want the chance to be there.As for "riding roughshod over my work as GM", I think if I'm planning things down to the point where the presence or absence of a few items is going to that-badly upset the apple cart, either I'm doing it wrong or the game's math is far too finely-tuned.Thing is, I think you and I would disagree fairly deeply over what we'd consider to be a good playable game, and we ain't the only viewpoints out there.Better design, I think, is that which can be tweaked to suit the vast majority of cases.</blockquote>

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