You can list attire, or not, just as you can list weapons and armour, or not.
D&D lists weapons and armour. I don't believe it even mentions attire in this context.
It does, although any impact on play is left up to the players and DM.
Seems to me to be a case of placing focus on what's important to the game. In D&D, weapons and armor are more central than the finery of one's clothes. It's more important that the fighter is wearing plate armor than that the wizard is wearing a robe, or a scholar's outfit.
Prince Valiant doen't list weapons at all (or rather, it indicates that a decent weapon grants a 1-die bonus to the pool) and it lists armour only as light, medium and heavy. It also mentions that attire and other signs of status or prestige can give a bonus when trying to influence others based on that status or prestige.
Groovy.
Would you say that the Prince Valiant game is striving for the same thing that D&D is? I'm not familiar with the game beyond seeing it mentioned from time to time.
Burning Wheel has very detailed rules for weapons and armour (comparable to RuneQuest or Rolemaster in compelxity). It has sparser rules for attire, having "costs" (which in BW take the form of "points" in PC creation and difficulties for Resource checks in play) for normal gear and (what it calls) "finery", plus general rules for advantages and disadvantages on checks, and mentions that what one is wearing might confer an advantage or disadvantage on a check.
That's cool. For me, the sparser rules for clothing don't seem important enough to be set in stone ahead of play rather than deciding during play the impact if it ever came up. I'm also not against a simpler weapon system if D&D had adopted such. Something like what Dungeon World does would have been fine with me. But I don't mind that they instead went with a list of weapons that each has their own properties and advantages or drawbacks.
Marvel Heroic RP doesn't (as best I recall) mention attire, but it has a generic rule for creating resources. I once had a PC use this rule to equip Nightcrawler with an image inducer to get a bonus die when meeting people at a nightclub. Attire might be established via the same mechanic.
Sounds like lazy design to me.
I'm increasingly unfond of static bonuses on roll-to-beat-difficulty checks, because they muck up the maths. So of your possibilities I would favour advantage over a +2. This is closer to introducing another die into the pool in the other systems I've mentioned.
Sure, I was just giving examples. An additional dice to a pool would be another example. And I agree about static bonuses versus a simpler mechanic.
But, my point was that the mechanics are determined ahead of time, so is the issue you have with my comment about the GM not having much influence here more about where the influence is applied? Do you not like the idea that the GM may have to decide a mechanic to apply when a player comes up with an idea?
Do you prefer the mechanics always exist prior, so the the GM's job is more clearly defined in that he sets the DC (or at the very least consults the book to determine the DC)?
If it's not GM input that you do not like, then what's the issue with the GM deciding what mechanic to apply based on the situation?
I don't think that suggestions (for either players or GMs) about ways in which advantage might be gained, and suggestions about how this might correlate to money spent, are limiting. That's certainly not been my experience in systems that have them. I especially think that guidelines that help GMs manage the maths of what are rather intricate systems are helpful. To pick just two examples: Rolemaster is pretty hopeless at this; 4e is pretty strong at this. And when the GM is supported by robust guidelines over the top of robust maths, I think it's easier to run with player ideas without worrying about them breaking the system.
(Which presumably is one worry, maybe a major worry, for those in this thread who have expressed concerns about powergaming.)
I don't know if I agree. I mean, I like the idea of a GM being supported by guidelines...I think that's largely what 5E does. Large portions of the DMG are about exactly that. I think that works well, and it's pretty much exactly why I like 5E. So it seems odd to me that we each view this as desirable, but seem to have opposing views?
However, when rules are heavily codified, I think it does limit the players. There are plenty of anecdotes where a new player wows everyone at the table by coming up with some totally unexpected idea. This happens because they don't know the rules. They don't know what they are allowed and not allowed to do. Creating a list of actions to add to an attempt at Influence/Diplomacy/Persuasion is limiting by its nature. It says "here's what you can do to improve your ability to influence". Which implies that things not on that list cannot affect influence.
For me, I prefer that such things be left up to me. Since they often rely on the GM using judgment anyway, I don't see the harm in allowing the GM to decide the effect of an action on the check, or on the outcome of the check.
As for powergaming and narrative approach, I think that Mearls meant that they focused more on narrative differences from character to character within the same class, rather than an overwhelming number of options in that class in order to differentiate. So instead of worrying about having a fighter subclass for each possible weapon type and so on, they said here are a few mechanical options, and here are others such as background, and bonds and flaws where you can make your fighter different from the other guys.
I don't think he's saying the sole way to differentiate is through these narrative means, nor is he describing D&D as a narrative game in the sense commonly used on these boards, but he's saying that the "options" that exist to create a unique character are more narrative based than they've been for D&D.
