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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Distracted DM" data-source="post: 9657474" data-attributes="member: 6894926">It's a strange thing, and when this gets discussed I often find myself saying things like "back in my day, things were better! We were more creative, we had less rules, blahblahblah!"But I scarcely remember my 2e days, when I started TTRPGs. I played heavily in the 3.Xe era, where rules reigned supreme and dictated what you could and couldn't do. I have played other games of course, but they typically had rules constraints... I think the most creative within rules I got was PbtA games, but even there you'd perform an action that'd fit inside one of the rules you could take advantage of.DCC has a lot of creative stuff- it has Might Deeds of Arms, the warrior can basically "wing it" and if they roll well on the Deeds die they'll do SOMETHING cool in the vein of what they were going for... and yet, there are a lot of example mighty deeds to give guidance on what can be done. There's an entire 3pp book dedicated to even MORE mighty deeds lists. I guess I wonder if our imaginations were ever as great as we think they were? I really do agree with the "creativity thrives within limitations" concept- but being told "you can do whatever cool thing you can think of, get to it" is really the opposite of restrictions = creativity. There has to be a happy medium, doesn't there? My issue with allowing "whatever" creative stuff is consistency. For whatever reason I feel the need to make sure that if I ruled "ok yeah, you currently have giant strength, you can grab that troll corpse and use it to smash an area of nearby enemies doing XdY damage on D save," I'd want to make sure that the next time it came up I knew what the rule for it was. I allowed this troll corpse-smash in a 5e game, and I'm glad that one of my long-time players felt like they COULD break out of the "I use X feature, I attack, etc" box to try that.. but do you know what happened after? They wanted a rule for doing things like that. Sort of an "cool action pool" that they could draw out of. They want a rule that'll guarantee that the next time they have a creative idea like that, that it'll be guaranteed work because there's now a rule/mechanic for it. They want a guarantee of consistency. I'd implement that rule if it wasn't A5E that I was running, where martial characters get big lists of cool things they can do.. casters are pretty evenly matched with martials in most tiers of A5E. Giving an action pool mechanic like that would throw the weight heavier in the martials favor- unless of course, I made the mechanic work for martials AND casters.. "sure in addition to the damage for the sahuagin your fireball creates steam over the pool, basically a non-magical fog cloud.." but I think my fear there is that some combos will be better than others, open to abuse etc. because I DO have a couple munchkin players and this Action Pool is a player thing, like inspiration.. the enemies wouldnt have access to said combos or the players would groan. Also, more on my already-heavy DM plate.Just my rambling thoughts here.</blockquote>

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