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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9464329" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, criticising seems a bit pointless for a game that has been in print for 10 years, is now being reprinted in a revised form, and that has tens (? I believe) of millions of players.That doesn't mean you have to enjoy them or use them; but the appropriate response seems to be to explain their limitations, and why you do something different.As far as 5e's encounter guidelines are concerned, it seems to me that they are serving a few purposes:There is a part of the customer base who *expect that such guidelines be included - it's part of their measure of the formal adequacy of a set of D&D rules. So 5e includes them for this reason. Note that this reason is satisfied even if the guidelines are pretty weak in themselves. *There is a part of the customer base who want to run classic dungeon crawls, or something in that neighbourhood, who benefit from guidance in how PC capabilities and GM-side capabilities (ie monsters in combat encounters) are related. The guidelines support this sort of play. *There is a part of the customer base who rely much more heavily than those in the previous dot point on GM curation to manage PC "spotlights", the general trajectory of play. For these people, there is no particular need for technical/mathematical guidelines on how to pace encounters, but there is still benefit in having some tool for assessing the overall threat posted by one or more encounters. The guidelines help with this.Coming up with a tool that does these three things, even passably, seems like a reasonable design achievement. The resulting game won't support every conceivable approach to D&D - eg <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/pemertonian-scene-framing-a-good-approach-to-d-d-4e.333786/" target="_blank">4e-style scene-framed D&D</a> - but the only way to support that is to give every player the same resource structure, and there is good evidence that this makes some core members of the D&D customer base go bonkers.No RPG can do what you describe as the alternative to rulings - that is, actually dictate the fiction that results from a resolved action - outside of an incredibly limited domain of activities. I mean, jumping might look like a promising candidate, but suppose a jump fails - does that mean the jumping character didn't make it and fell to their death down the crevasse, or rather that they landed by twisted their ankle in the landing? Or even if you specify that (eg via a Rolemaster-esque table), when they land do they trigger the pressure plate in that area or not? - there will always be a limit to the precision of resolution of distances and areas.But D&D has never aspired to anything like this level of completeness. It has always permitted open-ended resolution, relying on the participants to extrapolate the fiction within the limits that the game rules establish.I don't agree with this claim about D&D: presumably a GM can adjudicate actions for their monsters that the rules don't expressly address, just the same as they would such action declarations from a player for their PC.And thinking beyond combat: can a NPC/creature willingly leave its home to go on a trek, or to offer itself as a hostage, or even if that means leaving its beloved(s) behind? A D&D statblock doesn't answer any of those questions.</blockquote>

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