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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 9440976" data-attributes="member: 55680">3e? Yes exactly. All of weird-ass Rolemaster-inspired stuff that was imported into 3.*e (freaking skill points and all the rest of the rules bloat) and dropped by later editions should've never been added. I still shudder at the thought of 3.5e grapple and climbing rules. 3e strayed too far from its 2e roots and in doing so borked the math scaling in some really fundamental ways that WotC and Paizo never figured out how to fix.2e? That wasn't much of a departure from 1e rules-wise, certainly not in core. As a kid I was playing with a 2e PHB, a 1e DMG, and a Rules Cyclopedia (before I got my hands on enough monster books). naughty word worked fine.5e? Yeah that was the game rebuilt from the ground-up, but I'll give WotC a pass on that one since after rebuilding the game from the ground up twice and then having a huge backlash against 4e they didn't really have a choice but to make a bit of a weird Chimera edition as a compromise between the warring TSR-D&D, 3e, and 4e camps. I'm actually amazed that 5e was as good of a compromise as it's turned out to be, despite all of its flaws. But if 3e and 4e had been evolutionary instead of revolutionary and built on the good bits of 2e instead of dumping them, then it wouldn't have been necessary for 5e to rebuild the game from the ground up.<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suicide" target="_blank">H</a>uh. Did not know that. Good to know.Yup, but I think it's the fiction-sensitive bit that mattes the most. The first person perspective exists in a massive pile of games, but the fiction-sensitive stuff doesn't exist in much besides RPGs (as those kind of fiction-sensitive wargames are pretty much dead these days AFAIK).RPGs can have rules about who gets to make rulings when, but I don't really see how they can have what makes RPGs special without having those rulings. Without those rulings RPGs lose the fiction sensitivity that make them special.GMless games are more "everyone is GM" rather than "nobody is GM." That might sound like hair-splitting but I don't think multiple people being able to put on the GM hat means that the important things that GMs do have been eliminated.I wouldn't count those as RPGs.Let's take a step back and take a look at a scenario with no magic, imagine the following:The PCs have left a dungeon with barely any resources and are limping back to town. On the way home suddenly an owlbear jumps out at them and attacks! RAWR! The players panic, they're in no shape for another fight, but then one player looks over their character sheet carefully and see that they have a jar of honey that they'd looted from a giant bee hive earlier. The player throws the jar of honey at the ground in front of the owlbear and hopes that owlbears like honey. Then the whole party flees in terror and hopes that the owl bear likes honey.Now does that owlbear like honey? Will it stop to eat the honey on the ground or will it ignore the honey in favor of chasing after the fleeing PCs. It's all up to the DM, there no rules to decide the effects of honey on owlbears. The DM has to make a decision one way or another. What will the DM decide?D&D is chock full of those kind of DM calls. My players are constantly doing things like that in order to either avoid fights entirely or tilt fights in their advantage. Tactics that there are just no hard and fast rules for. Over and over and over and over.  Some more abstract Indie games DO have hard and fast rules for this kind of situation, but D&D never has. Every campaign of D&D I've ever played has had a looooooooooooong list of this kind of situation.I just don't don't see the division between the PCs using the jar of honey creatively and PCs using command creatively. In both cases the PCs are using a tool at their disposal to do something that logically makes sense in the fiction as something that's at least POSSIBLE (do owlbears even like honey? I have no idea, but it's possible...) and then the DM has to decide if it works or not.Do you have a problem with how the players acted in the honey scenario? How would you rule that one? I don't know, but I'd like to hear your reasoning.I suggest having an edition that is flexible enough to cater to different styles of play. 5e was a messy compromise and could've been better (why the naughty word is there STILL no official warlord 5e class after all this time?) but it worked well enough. I don't want to stomp on the faces of people who want to play D&D in a different way from me, but I will complain if the devs take a compromise edition of the game and then remove a bunch of the things in D&D that I like the most.I just asked my son what he likes the most about D&D:"You can do anything, right? Like in normal computer games there are limits on what you can do, right? And like, um, let me think, you can say anything to NPCs you want and in computer games you can't do that and in computer games you can only say what was written. In computer games you can just hit, but in D&D you can explain anything. The most fun thing I ever had happen in D&D was when a PC cast sleep on flying kobolds and killed them all by falling."Me: that doesn't work anymore in 5.5e.Junior: that's stupid.The kids are alright.</blockquote>

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