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Message: <blockquote data-quote="apiratto" data-source="post: 4081841" data-attributes="member: 60734">Celebrim (and those concerned with believability), though i think your concerns about certain 4e rules are valid, i would suggest you pick your battles, and try not to make your predicament into something larger than it is.i realize that you are averse to developing the extensive house-rules that would be necessary to realistically represent a system whereby characters could be genuinely inept at certain skills within 4e (for instance).  now, my suspicion is that this matter will not go totally unaddressed in the PHB, but even if it does, this is really nothing a little party consensus and/or DM fiat can't summarily deal with.  if, because of a character's background, it would be wildly implausible that they'd be any good at jumping, swimming, etc. (even after extensive adventuring), then just make the character do a straight ability check. or impose a -5 penalty to the skill roll.  or whatever seems appropriate.the point here is that formalized house rules are not the only way a group might deviate from the standard rules.  the rules are there as guidelines; in cases such as complex tactical combat, it is important to have well-defined, systematic rules so that the multiplicity of declarations, checks, and rolls can flow together in a way that feels challenging, fair, fun, and not overly cumbersome, but even in combat there are many cases where it makes sense to adjudicate certain events on a more ad-hoc basis than the standard rules might indicate.  this holds even more so for slower-paced or otherwise non-combat related adjudication.  again, in the latter case, it's useful to have rules in place (for social challenges, skill checks, etc.), but they are guidelines above all else.  if they lead to wildly implausible conclusions, the DM and/or party can rule on the matter in an ad hoc fashion.  i'm sure that the 4e core books will say the same thing.the same goes for dealing with things like snakes or other low-hd creatures.  4e combat rules were developed as they are because they handle most combat situations well.  for outlying cases, use your own discretion.  you don't need formalized house rules to decide how fighting individual small animals is covered (and note that fighting swarms of small animals is covered in the rules); you can simply decide how to handle it when you write the small animal fight into your quest.  or if it's not something you planned for in the quest, just handle it with on-the-fly judgments.  systematized rules cannot cover everything.  i agree that 'simulation' is part of the fun of an RPG, but rule systems aren't there to do the simulating; they are there to assist with the players' adjudication of their simulation, which really takes place within the narrative frame established by the players.  in some cases (like when the party has the services of a cleric on hand and can thus be reasonably expected to fully heal over the next six hours), the rules will pose no great affront to believability and may as well be followed to the word.  in other cases (like if the fighter has become separated from the party and decides to rest for six hours) the rules will conflict with a believable representation of events, and so must be circumvented.  if you find you have to make the same ad-hoc judgment regularly, then you have a house-rule, but there's no need to try to anticipate every single deviation from the standard rules before it becomes an actual issue, or to try to explain every single ad-hoc judgment by the DM in terms of some universal law that is consistent and integrated with all the other rules.  it's a lost cause for ANY game, not just d&d.so i can't help but feel that your claim to 'have no desire to make house rules' exaggerates the significance of rules-deviation.  very little effort on your part is actually required to maintain believability in the context of your game.  regular ad-hoc judgments will turn into house-rules (or persistent stat-modifications in the case of PCs' characteristics) organically, with virtually no dedicated work toward this end (except maybe to tweak a house rule a little after it becomes formalized).  ad-hoc judgments which aren't frequently repeated need never be formalized.meanwhile, the rules that ARE formalized and systematic manage to do a better job than previous editions of handling those game events that formalized, systematic rules are most necessary for.</blockquote>

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