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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5731314" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'm not totally clear on what he means, here.A red dragon immune to fire can still be killed by ice and swords and such. Those are all character abilities (attack rolls and lightning bolts!). An invisible force-field can still be solved with player abilities: various divinations to figure out the ways around it, or Dispel Magic or Disjunction can get rid of it, and those are all character abilities. Even straight skill checks -- Wisdom checks to notice the solution, Intelligence checks to figure out the solution, Strength checks to beat in the walls, etc. -- are character abilities the characters can use to solve the problems in front of them.Character abilities are the ways the characters interact with the world they are in. I know when I played 3e, I didn't worry about figuring out how the party could overcome the challenges I placed in front of them. I knew they had ways to do it -- they had ingenuity, and the abilities they had were multi-purpose tools rather than narrowly defined effects, and I had the "say yes" improv mantra, and that worked really well. I know that was lost in 4e, but that's a feature of the abilities changing from general purpose tools to narrowly defined effects. Like Chris Perkins says, you can't put darkfire on a door, 'cuz it's not a creature, right? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />But the solutions the party found in 3e weren't "outside" of a character's abilities, they were part of them. Perhaps used in a more creative way, but still part and parcel of a character's capacity for action. Perhaps that's the more useful takeaway, here: the difference between an effect-based abilities system where what the ability does is narrowly defined, and a cause-based abilities system, where what the ability is is defined, and what it does is up to DM and player ingenuity. It's the difference between saying "Fireball deals 4d6 damage to creatures in a 4 by 4 cube within 10 squares of the caster" and saying "Fireball creates an explosion of fire. This deals..." etc. Because I don't see how the players are going to accomplish anything, if not through their characters' abilities in some respect.</blockquote>

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