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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 9440130" data-attributes="member: 55680">Right, which means that you should provide a flavor description that has as little vagueness as possible so that the DM can adjudicate things well and mechanics with a bit of wiggle room so that they can apply to everything that that flavor would apply to since you can't write mechanics for every conceivable situation, i.e. I don't care what strength modifier it has, the elephant you summoned with your "Summon Elephant" spell can't jump because it says right here in the spell description "you summoned an elephant" and elephants can't jump. 4e power descriptions drove me nuts since a lot of them were "you do stuff do a dude" with no specifics in the flavor text.Exactly. I'm not trying to do cheese monkey tactics, often when I cast some off script spell I have no idea WTF is going to happen. I'm just lobbing the ball into the DM's court and letting him have some fun with something unexpected. This is one reason that my favorite class in 5e is a barbarian. I LOVE engaging in "hold my beer" D&D tactics and I fully expect a lot of them to blow up in my face and having d12 hit dice makes it easier for me to life through that and see another day.Yup, now there's no reason to be inventive. Everything is put in a neat little box just like in a board game.A lot of the 4e-isms in 5e are under the hood. Proficiency works a good bit like how things scaled in 4e (just with bounded accuracy), 5e hit dice are based on 4e healing surges (but more boring, I miss healing surges so much), short rests are encounter-based stuff, sub-classes work closer to 4e subclasses than they do to PrCs or Kits, etc. etc. Now how the game actually plays is pretty different from 4e (much less rich tactical combat) but a lot of the basic assumptions of how the rules work have a lot of 4e in them.That's why I think that some 4e fans are confused by comments about WotC heading in a more 4e direction with 5.5e. The stuff they liked about 4e (tactically rich combat) isn't really coming back but a lot of basic assumptions of how the game is set up are such as more keywords and less natural language, more rules and less rulings, flavor being stripped out and made more generic, off-brand uses of spells and abilities being blocked off, etc. etc. A lot of 4e fans didn't care so much about that stuff (they're just there for the tactical richness) and they're not cheering that, say, a dragon's more specific bite and claw attacks are being replaced with a more generic "rend." While a lot of people who didn't like 4e see things like the "rend" and on the 5.5e monster statblock and think, "heeeeere we go again."Yeah, I think WotC has made some missteps and 5.*e's domination of the TTRPG market will start to recede a bit but it won't be a collapse, just a slow chipping away with the overall market probably shrinking a bit. After the OGL fiasco the blood was in the water and the tiny little baby sharks have started nibbling.I think we're talking about very different things when we mean "pacing." I mean more "how many fights can you squeeze into one session" (big picture stuff) while you're talking about more micro-pacing where the DM tries to keep people's attention on the game 9 seconds at a time. I don't see anything to disagree with in your post except for...This. This I completely disagree with. Different kinds of mechanics have WILDLY different handling times and can have absolutely MASSIVE effects on pacing in a session.Depends what edition you're playing. 1e works just fine with whole swathes of the rules being only known by the DM. Hell in 1e the rules that determine if the player can hit something or not with a given roll are siloed off in the DMG (THAC0 was 2e). I'm not saying this is the ideal way to run things, just that it's VERY doable, especially with non-spellcasters. Spell casters just need to know the basics of how their spells work, not necessarily all of the nitty gritty.Those kind of games are fine for most players, but I find that a few people just go "does not compute" with Indie games and just can't wrap their heads around the basic assumptions of the game, while I haven't really had that with D&D.Shadowrun <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="o_O" title="Er... what?    o_O"  data-smilie="12"data-shortname="o_O" /> When I played that I was a Luddite shaman because no way in naughty word was I going to wrap my head around how tech worked in that game. I had a lot of fun in that game but I had to treat a lot of it as a black box with the GM doing for me what I did for my 1e kids as in "hey GM I want to do X please tell me what to roll because I don't know how this naughty word works." Ended up working fine since I had a great Shadowrun GM but I STILL have no idea how a lot of its rules work. I think a lot of Indie games can't really work that way since they need the players to be more engaged with the rules.My Platonic ideal of a D&D magic system is: "Okay, I can talk to spiders, fly for as long as I can hold an ice cube in my mouth, curse people to be unable to see dogs, and read the mind of anyone who's holding a fork. I want to get Joe Smith removed from his position on the Board of Directors of ACME Corp. within two weeks. Hmm..."-old rpg.net post by "Random Nerd"I like those kind of limits, they reward creativity, even though the example is a bit hyperbolic. Illusions are generally too open-ended and powerful and I agree with [USER=22779]@Hussar[/USER] about them for the most part, but something like "curse people to be unable to see dogs" is so narrow that you HAVE to be smart in order to make use of that and that's just chef's kiss</blockquote>

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