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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8666062" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This is a fair criticism, but it falls prey to a weakness of its own: players often struggle to know what the real utility of such things might be. That is, because augury may be excellent at one table (which is generally the direction I personally would lean as DM, I want my players feeling awesome when they try something unexpected or exploit an interaction), totally useless at another (and not just because &quot;bad DM is bad&quot; either: feeling it's &quot;cheap&quot; or &quot;too easy,&quot; or fearing the story will lose its interest and momentum without it), and unreliable in the middle (which is, for many players, equivalent to it being useless: if it may lead you astray 20% of the time, risk aversion will make every answer too risky to heed.)And that's one of the fundamental problems I have with a lot of D&amp;D's design. It's not that it relies on not having a bad DM. You cannot fix bad faith through rules. My issue is that much of its design depends on having extremely good DMs, and that's a standard a lot of folks, particularly new DMs, are going to fall short of. Particularly when I find the DM support content is lacking (and doubly so in 5e, where the gaming culture was actively antagonistic to the idea of helping DMs improve for several years after publication and IMO still retains a major strain of that sort of thinking to this day.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8666062, member: 6790260"] This is a fair criticism, but it falls prey to a weakness of its own: players often struggle to know what the real utility of such things might be. That is, because [I]augury[/I] may be excellent at one table (which is generally the direction I personally would lean as DM, I want my players feeling awesome when they try something unexpected or exploit an interaction), totally useless at another (and not just because "bad DM is bad" either: feeling it's "cheap" or "too easy," or fearing the story will lose its interest and momentum without it), and unreliable in the middle (which is, for many players, equivalent to it being useless: if it may lead you astray 20% of the time, risk aversion will make every answer too risky to heed.) And that's one of the fundamental problems I have with a lot of D&D's design. It's not that it relies on not having a bad DM. You cannot fix bad faith through rules. My issue is that much of its design depends on having [I]extremely good[/I] DMs, and that's a standard a lot of folks, particularly new DMs, are going to fall short of. Particularly when I find the DM support content is lacking (and doubly so in 5e, where the gaming culture was actively antagonistic to the idea of helping DMs improve for several years after publication and IMO still retains a major strain of that sort of thinking to this day.) [/QUOTE]

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