AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Of course the rules are only support Umbran. Let me point out, my experience with D&D started with reading three mysterious little brown books in 1975...But... is that what the people who wrote the game wanted? Rules and mechanics that speak?
That would seems to fly in the face of the general idea of "rulings, not rules" that they had put forth for the edition. I suggest part of the problem people experience is in trying to listen to the rules, when maybe that's not the point. What if the rules are there to help you speak?
If you are listening to a symphony, and trying to find the voice of the second chair violin, it may be hard... because the main thrust of the piece is coming from the first chair. The second is usually playing harmony and accompaniment, not the main melody line. The second chair is meant to highlight and support, not to be heard in detail for itself...
Imagine, for a moment, that the rules are merely support. That, for the cases where things seem a tad ambiguous (because yes, natural language can be ambiguous) that you are intended to take it whichever way is mostly consistent that you deem fit? That nobody cares if two of us use slightly different surprise or exhaustion rules?
D&D, any RPG really, can, and probably should, be looked upon as a set of tools and guidelines. HOWEVER, that being said, modern RPGs have largely been successful by providing a definite platform, a set of rules which provides an answer to each participant at the level of "how do we handle this situation?" Now, exactly what that covers may vary from game-to-game, but I think my point is that, there is a viewpoint, shared by a large segment of the RPG industry, that it is ENABLING to give a general rule which is clear and applicable to all situations (obviously it may have situational variations, etc. depending on the game).
So, where Gygax propounded rules SYSTEMS as toolkits, most modern RPGs propound PROCESS as a toolkit, which the rules simply enact and support. Take Dungeon World as an example. There is no variation in its mechanics at all. Everything follows the "make a move, resolve the move, GM responds with hard or soft move in response" cycle. Every move involves the same toss of dice. The available moves are situational, and the outcomes vary depending on the nature and purpose of that move, but the core rule is very simple and basic. The problem is, if a rule system doesn't do that, if all the different parts don't speak the same language, or make music in harmony, then the focus of the players and GM shifts back to this sort of Gygaxian tension of GM as 'school master' and players as 'unruly children' where the GM's 'job' becomes to reign in the players attempts to 'achieve victory' through interpreting the rules in their favor. Even if this is not a major thrust of play, it muddies the waters in terms of the narrative sort of process that is being aimed at.
I didn't find the analysis of @Bacon Bits terribly compelling because it doesn't seem to be cognizant of this. They are analyzing (at least 4e) as if the goal was some sort of perfect rules coverage, which is of course a unicorn. That wasn't the goal. Instead if you read it as a Story Game (which it certainly at least partly is) then you come to understand the rules, things like keywords, etc. more in terms that would make sense in a game like Dungeon World. That is, system as platform upon which story is writ. It cannot be biased or incomplete, because it forms the agreement upon which that process happens, the paper so to speak. It is at least best if that paper is robust and provides some pretty strong process for any situation. Hence the existence of powers, skills, skill challenges, keywords.
Seen in that sense, 5e presents some difficulties, because it puts impediments in place in terms of treating the system as a known quantity. Really, I don't think this is something that cannot be dealt with, in the sense that it has a pretty universal basic mechanic, but you do have to go back and resurrect the 4e SC system, or provide something else in its place. In my own game there is no longer such a thing as a 'check', there are only 'challenges', and in that context checks can exist as tests to evolve the situation and determine objectively if the PCs moved towards or away from achieving their immediate goal. That clarifies the agenda, because 4e certainly wasn't totally clear on that, and I am pretty sure half of WotC's game designers didn't 'grok' the system and made the same analytical error as Bacon Bits does.