NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8271015" data-attributes="member: 82106">Lets take a concrete case: The PCs, for whatever reason, must cross The Perilous Land. In 4e this would be a Skill Challenge. Now the GM does have leeway as to both the difficulty (IE level) and Complexity (1-5) of the challenge. He will also set the Primary and Secondary skills, using the process in the DMG/RC. Assuming we ar using RC's mechanics he will also get some choices along the way, like when to deploy obstacles and when to require high difficulty checks. How the fictional position of the journey evolves is also pretty much in the GM's court, though the players clearly have a strong input here by their action declarations and which resources they decide to expend (again the GM does get to decide how useful these are). The GM also gets to pick failure consequences, such as HS loss, etc. In 5e all of the above GM discretion also exists. On top of that, there isn't an SC mechanical framework, so the GM must decide the overall weight and consequence of each action in terms of what progress it provides towards overall resolution of the journey. He's free to simply state that any given action has any sort of consequence he desires, that it fails, that it is impossible, that it requires a DC of whatever value, and then what success or failure bring. Even if the GM decides to always use skills, and to use fail forward, there's no context within which we can gauge the weight of a failure or a success, or the task's difficulty, so FF has very little material utility here. In fact, as [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] has pointed out, taking it literally and applying it consistently would seem to preclude overall failure as a possibility at all!It is in this sense that [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] has said that 5e 'lacks rules', and the whole notion of the value of those structures has come up. And yes, you can construct subsystems in 5e. But such are entirely situational and still GM constructs. 4e has a GENERAL SUBSYSTEM which is amenable to all situations worthy of systematic resolution. I admit it takes some skill to use well, and here games like DW and BitD should probably be said to be better, but it at least HAS such a system, it is always available.</blockquote>

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