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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9893220" data-attributes="member: 29398">Our experiences differ, then.If I declare an action for my character (let's say I'm attacking a foe in melee) that, before any modifiers, needs me to roll 13 or higher on a d20 in order to succeed.  As a skilled player, I then take (or have already taken) some steps and actions to improve my odds - I use a magic weapon that I'm proficient with, I come in en flanc to negate my foe's shield bonus because the shield's in use against my ally, I've already boosted my strength - and get it so I only need to roll 7 or better to hit.I've improved my odds of success from 8/20 to 14/20.  Pretty decent, huh?But that's all I can do, and the odds are now set.  And so, when I roll the d20 it becomes a straight-up gamble as to whether or not I can beat those (improved) odds.And note that it's a gamble regardless of what the odds are, as long as success and failure are both still possible outcomes.  Even if I can only fail on a natural 1, I'm still gamblng that I won't roll that 1 when I toss the die.In a sports league where tanking to get a better draft position is a thing then yes, victory in a poor season can taste like defeat.I've never seen a situation in an RPG where tanking is desirable, though.  For me, a victory that takes 10 tries to achieve tastes far sweeter when it happens than one that only took two tries, or just one.I'm not even talking about character lethality here.  A character can keep right on truckin' even though its player had a shite night with the dice and never rolled higher than a 5; and sometimes player skill can be very useful here in keeping the character functional and-or useful even when the dice don't co-operate.To bust out a famous quote from an old Prime Minister of ours: "Just watch me." <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=":)" />There's a bit of chicken-and-egg involved, to be sure; but ever since day 1 high level adventures haven't sold nearly as well as low-mid level adventures, meaning there's less monetary incentive for anyone to produce and publish them.And while I certainly don't own anywhere near all of them, the WotC-made 4e and 5e AP books I do own all seem to tap out at around 15th level.If it ain't core, it don't score.  Have it in the core books but as optional, maybe.And if I then ask 19 other min-pin owners how long their dogs had lived I'd get a variety of anecdotal answers that would, for my purposes, be in aggregate good enough to give me a vague idea of how long I could expect one to live were I to adopt one and take good care of it.Not everything has to be done to scientific or peer-reviewable standards.By "low" you mean zero, in that there are no random elements to chess and checkers - the outcome is 100% determined by the players' moves.I didn't get that impression from the 5e books.  I only have the first three, though; and haven't (and probably won't) get the 5.5e set.We're talking about different things here, I think.When I talk about tweaking or kitbashing a game system, I mean changing the rules before play begins and then, as rulings are required as play goes along, locking those rulings in as part of the developing system.  Whatever the rules in use are and however much they've deviated from what the books say, they are and remain consistent with themselves.I am not talking about being inconsistent with the rules on a session-to-session basis.  IMO that's awful DMing.Items are valued for their value.  They cost money, either to claim from treasury or buy in town or have commissioned.  And when an item gets whacked you-as-character are out the money you spent on it.If an item has enough sentimental value that you don't want to risk losing it, don't take it out in the field and expose it to risk.  Yes that's a tough choice, but that's something the game IMO needs more of: tough choices.It still pre-packages things far more than I prefer.I think the mistake here, when talking about a big-tent game like D&D, is the designers "intending" any playstyles over any other.  If they just design as playstyle-agnostic a game as they can and leave it to us DMs to tweak or kitbash it as we like (they could maybe even offer some tips and pointers on this!), that's IMO far better than trying to soft-force a playstyle.We agree on this, and I too want the game to be able to support lots of different playstyles.Where we disagree, I think, is on the 'how'.  Personally, I think it's way simpler for a DM to make a game easier and-or gentler and-or less complex than it is for a DM to do the reverse, mostly because she doesn't have to fight against her players (who naturally want things to be easy on them); meaning that making the game difficult and un-gentle and maybe quite complicated right out the gate is a net DM benefit.To me, 'tweaking' is largely syonoymous with 'kitbashing', and covers everything from a trivial spell adjustment to entirely rebuilding major parts of the system.Adding-deleting-modifying entire classes and-or playable species = tweak.Designing a new initiative system from scratch = tweak.Giving Command a duration of 2 rounds rather than 1 = tweak.</blockquote>

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