NOW LIVE! X Marks the Spot: Piratical Resources for your 5E game

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8497807" data-attributes="member: 6670763">I feel that this is going down the path of whether you want to play with dice and mechanics, or to play with a fictional world.It's not really an old-school thing, as the earliest D&D games were designed with clear mechanical structures and procedures to produce a 15-minute-gameplay-loop in a dungeon environment. But the idea that encounters are chalenges that have to be solved with game mechanics and dice rolls is something that became very prominent in 3rd and 4th edition.I feel that this approach to playing the game and preparing adventures is one of the main things that originally motivated people to look back at how the games handled things in the past.If there's any one thing I would consider central to the old-school ideal, it would be to not look at obstacles in the characters' path as game-mechanical problems, but to return to a mindset of thinking of the PCs as characters in an unfolding story first. Ideally, an approach to overcoming an obstacle should either not require any rolls at all, because it is obvious what will happen, or come down to a single roll that takes into consideration all the deliberations and planning of the players.I believe skill checks have come up several times in the discussion about things that people often complain need better mechanics. I think the way by which the GM calls for skill checks can have quite an impact on how the game as a whole feels. First of all, skill checks should always be called by the GM, never announced by the players. Too often an obstacle devolves into "I want to roll X so you will tell me the solution"."Is there a trap?" "How do we get the door open?" "Where is the item we're looking for?" "Is the guy lying to us?" These are things that could be played as scenes. Or you could skip them with a die roll. Now, the characters all have skills and the players customized their charaters to have various different skill modifiers, so we of course don't want to throw them out completely. But you can always call for a skill check after a player has explained a plan to deal with an obstacle, and you want to check if the character has the skill and luck to actually pull it off in that moment. What you don't want to have is skill checks being made without any plan or interaction with the obstacle or environment. Or as it has been put before, "you can not roll dice to avoid playing the game".Insist that the players are being specific about what they do. "I search the room" is not specific. Neither is "I use my engineering skill to see if I can bypass the mechanism"."I search the desk drawers" is a lot more specific. That's when you can call for a Search check to see if the character spots something that appears noteworthy in all the junk. In a room that has only a desk with drawers and nothing else, that doesn't make any meaningful difference. But in larger rooms with a lot more stuff in them, it does. Especially when there is time pressure and a chance of being discovered (wandering monster checks!) for every container you search. A player could study a mechanism with a skill check to find a way to disable it, and on a successful roll you can tell the players that the character spotted something that could be expoited, like a rusty gear that already has a crack in it. But the players still need to come up with some kind of plan on how they want to break that gear to disable the mechanism.</blockquote>

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