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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6370074" data-attributes="member: 42582">There are terrific games out there that illustrate how flexible rules, based on GM and player interpretations of free descriptors, can work. HeroWars/Quest, FATE, Marvel Heroic RP, and plenty of others. (4e skill challenges, especially post-DMG2, are another.)But 5e isn't written as one of those games. (Which to my mind fits with what  [MENTION=3586]MerricB[/MENTION] says upthread, though he may not agree with the use to which I'm putting his remark.) For instance, if the game is meant to be about flexible adjudication in a free-flowing way, then why do fighters have a class ability that regulates the distance they can jump down to single feet? Why do we have rules about defeat in combat (reduced to 0 hp) that track unconsciousness, death, stabilisation, recovery etc in such pedantic detail?4e suffered from this problem to an extent, at the divide between combat and non-combat resolution. But at least within each domain it was consistent: non-combat resolution (skill challenges) was free-flowing and descriptor driven (to the extent that the best advice for running skill challenges was found in HeroQuest revised, and Robin Laws' advice on how to run extended contests in that system); combat was fiddly, granular and pedantic. Only when the two blended into one another did the game start to feel a bit incoherent.With 5e, I'm not getting the same sense of how the various elements of the system are meant to be used. Nor of how they fit together. I mean, if I (as GM) go all flexible and free-form on a fighter's Remarkable Athleticism, or a rogue's use of Cunning Action to hid, am I allowed, or expected, to do the same to a wizard's spell slots? To the damage dice and saving throw rules for a fireball? In which case what was the point of all the detail in the first place?</blockquote>

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