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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgoroth" data-source="post: 6135092" data-attributes="member: 6674889">There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not D&D. DMing is not a collaborative affair, because players and DMs are not both privvy to the actual state of the world and the locations of key items, the true purpose of items or villains. I'm sure it can work in a completely different game, but I don't want to tell a story except through my character, that's how I roleplay. I take the role of a character in the fictitious world invented in the theater of the mind of the DM. My imagination parses his descriptions, and I can easily ask him what's lying around in the alley. I know it's a lot of work being a DM, but conjuring mundane items on the fly is not IMO one of the real challenges. If we're in a crowded street market, I expect there to be a cart to knock over, just not necessarily "there". I can describe what I do to it, but not that it will forcibly fall in the exact way I want to (even a DC 10 strength check will not auto-succeed).I will accept that other people on here have had much better success than I have at improv, I just have seen enough rules lawyering about silly and trivial things that it turns out were not at all obvious why they shouldn't work. E.g. to actually fight while flying you need a fly "speed", not the ability to hover. It takes english words and garbles them to give them game-only meanings that are counterintuitive and often contradictory (I could go on...but won't). Anyway, if you enjoy it, play it! Have fun. I just don't want a "fruit cart knockdown" power to even exist, anywhere in D&D 5.0. It is unnecessary and superfluous, and relies on a bunch of baggage that does not make the game more fun. We always improvised in D&D quite fine without it. Better, by far. I played 4e so much that I realized only upon returning to PF that my brain was in sleep-mode most of the time. Chess is not my idea of upper brain stimulation (others will disagree on this, but studies have shown that the only skill that being good at chess generates is...being good at chess. I felt the same way in 4e. Unless it's "crunch", it's fluff. If so, it's meaningless and has no bearing on the outcome of the game. The power card telling you where debris is in the alley is a travesty against the DM and players querying him about where things are). For this reason, and many others, I believe 4e is intrinsically anti-thetical to  the theater of the mind, and more than AC, more than HP, more than longswords, theater of the mind is the real core of D&D, to me. That power card relies on a grid being on the table, and for it to be effective you need to draw it in, and lure enemies to walk exactly "there". Do not want this level of specificity, it's pointless, tedious, and un-fun.Say what you will in favor of 4e, but being able to play without a grid on the table is not possible. And I LOVE minis, and tactical play. Just not for every little thing. Soooooo annoying.</blockquote>

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