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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Drammattex" data-source="post: 4036963" data-attributes="member: 55363">As a DM, I often felt my hands were tied with 3e rules. My goal, coming to a gaming session, is to provide a really good story where really badass stuff happens, which results in the players calling and e-mailing me relentlessly throughout the next couple weeks to freak out about how awesome the game is (meanwhile, they conspire with each other on how to thwart me). The thing is, oftentimes really badass stuff doesn't get to happen because of some rule or other. Once, the bard wanted to sound burst some opponents on the other side of a window. The fight was pumping, blow for blow the heroes were matching the enemy, the atmosphere was tense. I described the bard emitting a shriek that moved through the air like a rippling wave, shattered the window and collided with the new adversaries gathering outside.Then a player called an objection and informed me that he didn't think the sound burst should be able to pass through the window because it was a solid object. The game stopped. We got out the PHB, we sorted through the rules and tried to figure out whether the bard could target those adversaries outside the window. We judged that she could see them, so she had line of sight. I think I eventually ruled that if the sound burst damage could penetrate the window's hardness, then the spell could pass through and affect those on the other side. So then we looked up the hardness for glass...All to affect a crowd of 7th level commoners. I mean seriously... how important was that? How important was it really? Not so important. Would the game have been seriously affected if we hadn't stopped for 15 minutes to page through the rules? No. The sound burst would have shattered the glass, fragments flying everywhere, cutting the skin of the brutes gathered outside as they clapped their hands over their ears and cried out in pain. And that would have been awesome. But unfortunately, it ended up being rather pedantic and boring as we cross-checked the rules.On another note...Don't ask about the 7th level commoners. Apparently in 4e, monsters of a given level have similar stats; had that been the case in the aforementioned game, I wouldn't have been scaling commoners up; I would've just grabbed the stat line for a creature of that level, slapped "town brutes" on it, and called it a day.This is all just to say I think a looser system may empower DMs to focus on showing their players a good time, not getting bogged down in boring minutae.</blockquote>

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