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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8275288" data-attributes="member: 16814">Um, there are very few games that give the GM less encouragement to adjudicate things on the fly than 5e.  It's directly stated in the opening few pages of the PHB, and throughout the DMG.  I think what you're bemoaning is direct exhortation of the GM to just make it up as they go along.  This is something 5e could not do, though, because it would very much alienate a good chunk of the playerbase.As for your larger point, yes, this is an approach that you can take, but it's not a universal one.  This is the kind of thing that game designers talk about, though.  The problems that can occur with this approach are that the players become unable to adequately understand the risks/rewards of individual actions until and unless they become good predictors of how the GM thinks.  Some players are less than thrilled by having to do this, and the results are very much dependent on the individual GM.  You can have terrible results or good ones.  It's pretty random, and so you can't really build a game on the idea that the GM can just make it up and doesn't need the rule support.  5e gets about as close as you can to this ideal, though, in the social pillar and exploration pillars.  They make up for it by having a really strongly encoded combat pillar.Other game systems do this pretty differently.  Story Now games typically handle this kind of situation very well within their rulesets, because they operationalize how risk/reward works within the system, and have strong support for success/failure conditions leading to the next bit of play.  They also tend to zoom out a bit, so that bypassing the guard is often a single check using a single resolution mechanic that's used for everything.  The details of these games come not through a variable resolution mechanics, like 5e, but rather more in the way that they encode the risk/reward into the simple resolution mechanic.  Each check is unique, because it's tightly tied to the current fiction, and not because of what the pluses and minus are.</blockquote>

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