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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 9440171" data-attributes="member: 55680">Yup, exactly this. RPGs are Make Believe with rules there to provide structure, controlled randomness, and predictability. The only point of having rules is to support the make believe. When the make believe has to run after the rules there's a problem.Yeah, I've given up trying to convince people that my opinion is right. I'll just settle for convincing people that I actually hold my opinion and that I'm not just confused.Having monster minis be candies that you can eat if you kill the monster is top shelf DMing.Well that all depends on what's around that could be chucked out the window. It could be something really important.Yeah, but having to have someone else play your PC for you is a hassle. It's a hassle that might be worth it but it's still a hassle. I liked the 1e standard of having one session be (roughly) one expedition from safety into danger and back again, it made it so much easier to juggle people with different schedules.The ten minute adventuring day was a BIG issue in 3.5e for many tables and still crops up a lot in 5e. Telling newbie DM "don't get hung up" about it and the problem doesn't go away. Takes some workarounds and focus. Nothing insurmountable but they're things that need to be taught to newbie DMs as I have personally seen ten minute adventuring days derail campaigns in both 3.5e and 5e.I think that vagueness and the ability of players to manipulate it was there FULLY intentionally if I know the first thing about Gygax. I also don't really separate it from the world, as crafting exactly the right Command word for the situation you're in requires you to pay attention to the specifics of the scenario.Yes, I'm sure. I've had very similar things happen at my table. The players groaned a bit, slapped their foreheads for not choosing a better command word, were happy that the NPC was wasting their turn and not attacking them, and then the game went on. This isn't so hard. The players trust me to not be a jerk but if they cast a magic spell to make someone throw indeterminate naughty word out the window and that results in the NPC throwing something random out the window that's everything working exactly as it should.Do your players really cause problems about something like this where they've SUCCEEDED in making a dangerous enemy waste their turn? That's not what I've experienced as a player or DM at all. But then threads like this make me realize that how people play D&D is much more various than I expected.A lot of things in 5e don't work as intended if you have more long rests than the designers intended. Looking at polls a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT of tables have more long rests than the designers intended. This mis-match of how the game was designed and how people actually play it is the biggest single issue in 5e and a lot of the other problems people have had with the game flow from that single cause.For any hypothetical 6e fixing that mis-match should be the absolute top priority, honestly higher than any of my own personal gripes.And yes I know good DMs can avoid having this kind of mis-match. But there are a loooooooooooooot of new/mediocre DMs playing D&D and making it easier for them to fix that mix-match would improve the experience at the average table a whole lot.I think we just have very different definitions of what "pacing" in an RPG implies. We're not really disagreeing about anything here except for semantics.Yes, how long the average fight takes has a really massive influence on how a game flows. If combat takes a long time there's a lot of pressure to make every fight meaningful, while if fights are fast you can have a whole series of running skirmishes and things flow very differently.Yup, complete agreement. I would, however, let people make the elephant trumpet so loudly that people get advantage on their saving throws vs. command since they can't hear a command well with an elephant blasting in their ears <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=":)" />I think we want some of the same things we both want the Fiction to trump the exact wording of the Rules but we're going about it in somewhat different ways:1. I want to follow the flavor of the various abilities rather than the exact rules so I want the rules to be somewhat flexible if the players are doing something that fits the flavor of an ability rather than the specific rules laid out.2. You want to follow the flavor of the abilities rather than some random naughty word that the players have pulled out of their asses so you want the rules to be tight enough that that sort of random naughty word doesn't intrude.We're mostly in agreement with what constitutes random naughty word that shouldn't intrude on the game, but some of the stuff that I think is good play in which the player is following the flavor of the ability and using it in a creative way that makes sense in the fiction is something that you file under "random naughty word."We both want RAI to trump RAW all week long and twice on Sunday, but our "I" doesn't quite match up.</blockquote>

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