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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Don Durito" data-source="post: 7826160" data-attributes="member: 6687260">I'm not sure unreliable magic would do anything to provide balance in combat.  Things like save throws mean that magic already has a degree of unreliable - it's just more often on the target's side than on the casters.Outside of combat...magic does provide a kind of narrative power.  There's something different about the ability to just say 'this happens'.  It makes a big difference when planning to be able to say "I'm going to climb that wall because I will cast Spider Climb (or just levitate)" - than to say "I can probably climb that wall" - because a plan that relies on the wall being climbed has the potential in the latter case to fail at the first hurdle - therefore it doesn't pay too plan too much beyong that point - and if there's 3 or 4 such points of failure then you're almost certainly going to fail.But I'm not necessarily sure that magic is a fault here. One thing I often saw in 3.X was one player deciding that they really want to be, guaranteed never fail (or as close to it as possible) good at one skill and stacking a whole lot of things together.  (Basically they wanted the certainty of magic).   It's a lot harder to do this in 5E (especially for classes that don't get expertise).4E had Martial Practices which were a way of giving non-magical characters some of this narrative certainty.  (At the cost of a healing surge - so a daily resource - although this did not always make sense in the fiction which was an issue.)And of course the 5E rogue builds towards this kind of heavy degree of "I just do it" reliability - especially at higher levels.</blockquote>

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