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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 9464057" data-attributes="member: 93670">Moving on.... The rules forcing the DM to personally act as the bad guy to finish a rule or subsystem an endemic pattern through section after section of the rules & not limited to monsters or encounter related stuff.The trouble there is it matters to a critical degree where & how the half baked gaps fall in a ruleset.  I'll use one of what is possibly the most illustrative & glaring examples in 5e to demonstrate, encumbrance specifically.  The default rule is so overly generous that by design it fills the goal of creating a scenario that is self nullifying of any reason for it to even be used.  There is a second variant of course, but it's so tight & restrictive that it just annoys everyone if the GM tries to force players to use it.With the default method players regularly ignore it & never bother to even calculate their baseline standard loadout weight... Why would they even bother if not for that despotic tyrant of a GM forcing them to do it when the character sheet doesn't even pretend to support it in any form?  So instead players make use of the incomplete container rules to cram hundreds of pounds of stuff in a pack that holds 30 pounds until some point where the GM notices something is off in a bad way & asks Bob how much he can carry vrs how much he is carrying.... Of course bob has never even recorded the weight of everything his PC is carrying so the answer requires the group to watch him to endlessly flip through the book just gathering that info so he can start adding it up... .Meanwhile Bob is grumbling about how wotc did polls to find out what is fun & didn't support any of this because it's not fun.  Of course since the sheet lacks any support for recording it bob will need to repeat the entire process should he ever be asked again.The second method avoids some of those problems, but it does so largely by just substituting in a different set due to the way that the limits are punishingly low.  Thanks to various design decisions  players no longer face any of the interesting choices of what to carry & who is strong enough to carry that thing the party felt weas important even if the noodle armed wizard & rogue couldn't carry their share of the seemingly important-thing(s).  Since everyone can carry everything they might want to under the default & nothing interesting is gained as a result of the variant it just serves to prove that the GM is being a tyrant forcing them to track pointless things. While the new PHB kinda leaves a big void for encumbrance itself the character sheet maintains the implication that your GM is being mean if they are making you track something the sheet itself does not support.See above or pick a different subsystem like the yoyo death & dying clownshow the whole system is designed around.  2014 took steps to twist the system into a defensive thicket around the yoyo to ensure that a break there will require significant retooling of things.  The new PHB adjusts one of the thorns in that thicket by giving players bigger heals that could theoretically support monsters that are tougher in more ways  than just how many hp they have & better support tearing out the yoyo without it feeling like playing tag with a three phase power cable... but absent any indication to the contrary from wotc it could also be doubling down on the yoyo.  The new DMG could have alternative death & dying rules that take a mallet to the yoyo... but once again we are back to the GM forcing a variant/optional rule that makes players feel nerfed & now when Bob suffers a reckless & completely avoidable PC death the blame is easy to shift exclusively to the fact that GM:Alice forced the group to use that yoyo-free variant.It shames them like so: Well if only GM:Alice used the default yoyo rules Bob's PC wouldn't be dead & if only she accepted that encumbrance is unfun nobody would have needed to watch Bob look up & calculate everything he was carrying to find out that he was many hundreds of pounds beyond his capacity just so he could shrug & roll their eyes while throwing some HeavyStuff on someone like the wizard & rogue to completely ignore the problem while changing nothing of interest thanks to linear growth of strength to encumbrance capacity... Obviously Alice should have just used the default guidelines instead of making tougher monnters changing how death works & forcing us to watch bob calculate his encumbrance for the very first time.</blockquote>

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