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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9483984" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, the classic D&D method has been extinct in mainstream play for about 40 years now.4e doesn't have the issue.So that leaves either the 2nd ed AD&D approach - which is to have rules and procedures that in a formal sense are pretty hard to get right (in terms of encounter balance) and that the GM is expected to work around via fudging; or else the 5e approach, which is to use guidelines that are sufficiently "down-tuned" that even a non-technical group of players who have already spent a fair bit of their resources for the "day" will be likely to succeed at the typical combat encounter.Personally I think the 5e approach is superior to the 2nd ed approach, although neither actually appeals to me.I think they are useful - they mean that a GM who follows them is not likely to accidentally TPK their group. And for non-technical, non-wargame-y players - which I think is a lot of the current player base - the "lenience"/"down-tuning" won't adversely affect the play experience.I think 5e is a pretty tightly-designed game.On the PC build side its maths draws heavily on 4e D&D, with many correlative departures from tradition (eg fighters get their 2nd attack at the same time magic-users get 3rd level spells, ie 5th level - although tradition for a second attack is 7th level in AD&D (fighters go from 1/1 to 3/2) and 6th level in 3E; and fireball etc do a fixed number of dice of damage rather than a level-scaling amount) yet the player-facing aspects of PC build are close enough to tradition that it causes little outrage. On the action resolution side, it has a stat/skill system that is deployable in something like the 2nd ed AD&D way (ie more-or-less as a descriptor system that the GM establishes some fiction around, calling for rolls if they like), in something like the 3E way (ie using "objective" DCs for task-oriented resolution) and that is not wildly different from 4e in the actual skill list itself. And its combat system is a cleaned-up version of 3E and 4e.And on the GM side, it supports the mainstream approach of low-stakes, frequently free-form exploration leading from combat encounter to combat encounter - there is nothing too toothy to get in the way of that, like a skill challenge framework or other out-of-combat conflict resolution - and (as we're discussing in this thread) the combat encounter guidelines mean that accidentally TPKing a group is pretty unlikely, even though resource management is largely on the traditional per-day model.Now none of the above is very appealing to me, but that's not because of bad design. It's because of deliberate design away from my preferred approaches to D&D and to RPGing more generally.</blockquote>

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