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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8272629" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I think the problem is this.  I want to do 2 Flashbacks!  I'll pay the Stress!FLASHBACK 1:Its 2012/13.I and others are taking extraordinary pains to explain:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">4e Skill Challenges</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">How Change the Situation, Say Yes or Roll the Dice, Cut to the Action, Genre Logic, Success With Complications, and Fail Forward undergird them</li> </ul>That was orthodox 4e Skill Challenges.  Stock.  Its in the text even if a little bit opaque here and there (which DMG2 9 months after release removed all the opacity and RC formalized everything with perfect transparency).  It was never a dice roll exercise linked by freeform roleplaying where nothing interesting happens and/or the GM can just do whatever they want and the players can never infer what a failure looks like; which is what the detractors said it was.  There was a lot of shifting sands under player's feet metaphors (people in this very thread said that when I went in excruciating detail over my giant Gorge in the Badlands Skill Challenge as it emerged from one of my sessions of play) by the huge crowd who (a) loved Naturalistic/Process Sim Logic, and (b) who hated Genre Logic/Fail Forward/Success With Complications.  There was a lot of utterly mistaken Fail Forward is actually just GM deploying Illusionism to keep the story of the Skill Challenge "online!"FAST FORWARD TO PRESENT DAYNow, some of those same 4e detractors who adamantly argued with me in those threads are now advocating for Fail Forward and Success At a Cost in 5e!  And Fail Forward isn't even in the non-basic 5e D&D!  Its ONLY in the Basic PDF. And Success At a Cost is only an optional module!  Its not stock/orthodox.  And the spread of failures its on is vanishingly remote compared to the spread of a dice roll; failure by only 1 or 2 (PBtA is 3 and its waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more bounded in dice and bonuses than 5e action resolution).  And Degree of Failure as its written and exemplified isn't helpful to our cause here.  The way it is written is an incoherent mish-mash of Success With Complication - the first example and basically some kind of instantiation of Blades Position/threat level (the second example being like the difference between Blades Controlled and Desperate Position).  On a (Controlled) failure, you just don't get what you want.  On a 5+ Failure (Desperate), things really suck!FLASHBACK # 2Its 2 years after 5e's release; late 16.I'm going over a big session of 5e that I GMed (some of the same participants in this thread were in that thread).  Its level 17 so endgame w/ a Rogue, a Wizard, and a Fighter as the PCs.  I GMed this game probably once every 3-4 weeks impromptu when the primary GM who conceived of the game would flake out (this was for a group of 12-14 year olds and the dad of one of the kids was the primary GM).When I talked about using Success With a Cost when running the game in that thread (and in other threads of that era) it was roundly disliked.  There was a lot of "EZMode" epithets and even people mistakenly thinking using it is actually an episode of GM Force deployment (its patently not).People_were_not_using that module.  If they were, they were awfully quiet about it...keeping their heads down or something because WE DON'T KINDLY TO THAT INDIE CRAP AROUND HERE!  They number of people who were actually using it while running 5e had to have been vanishingly small.MODERN DAY 4.5 YEARS LATER?I don't know?  Maybe that has changed.  I haven't been on the 5e forums much since my mega DC 30/35 thread in 2015 got eaten by the ENWorld fail that year and then that big thread I involved myself in a year later (as I write above).[HR][/HR]Moral of the story is I don't think the general appraisal in this thread of [USER=22779]@Hussar[/USER] 's and [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] 's positions is fair or accurate.One game (4e) featured these techniques as stock, required-for-play (you literally cannot run Skill Challenges without Success With Complications and Fail Forward).  Yet, they were roundly and massively hated by the vocal ENWorld userbase;  misused, underused, not used at all.  I mean most folks just didn't use Skill Challenges at all because they hated all of this!  And they let us know about it CONSTANTLY (folks commenting in this thread these years later).The other game (5e) doesn't have Skill Challenges (therefore Fail Forward and Success With Complications aren't required), doesn't have Fail Forward as a technique in its primary game, and its Success With Cost module is profoundly bounded compared to the resolution spread and, again, is only a module.  Its not stock.  Its not required to play.  And, if late 2016 is any indication and the way 4e was roundly hated for these exact features, its usage is profoundly minority/deviant among the 5e userbase!Further, the game is overwhelmingly about Rulings-Not-Rules and informed by an AD&D 2e/early 3e ethos (where none of that stuff existed).You add all of that up, and Hussar's experience with GMs doesn't feel like he's being a baby.  He's in the world, in the wild out there, dealing with GMs who run games where if you fail at a Stealth check...the jig is up.  Its curtains on the sneaky Spec Ops portion of play.  Bring out the big guns and go to work.That anecdote does not remotely seem deranged or crazytown from where I'm sitting.  Given what I've written above, my experience with 5e GMs/players in the wild, my experience on ENWorld, my experience with the backlash over 4e (which a big part was exactly these techniques that we're now championing for 5e)... I would be shocked if Hussar's anecdote is this deviant thing.Cultural inertia matters.Massive backlash to techniques inside a decade ago matters.Whether something is stock or an optional module matters to how often it will see daylight across the distribution of all tables playing a game (and BY GOD do we all know this because 2012-2014 playtest was TRENCH WARFARE over what should be stock and what should be modular!  Huge swathes of people endlessly fought on these boards saying "if x is stock in 5e...I WON'T BE PLAYING IT!"So I think, in light of all of that, the appraisal of Hussar's and Ovinomancer's positions are a less charitable/accurate as it pertains to how 5e is played "in the wild" (hell, even on here to be honest with you...unless there has been this indie revolution within the last 5 years for 5e that I'm unaware of...could be...I've stayed away from the D&D forums).</blockquote>

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