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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8666825" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I am genuinely not convinced that a different skill point system would actually fix the problem. It's having to navigate between the Scylla of 3e's punishing system and the Charybdis of "put points wherever you want, because it doesn't matter."As for your 5e book quotes, yeah, I know that's what it says, and I'm not happy about it. The deliberate vaguess is worse, because that means actively trying to design a game that isn't functional by itself.Again, the way to dodge the horns of this dilemma is to actually include variety. Send the players to a location where some of the doors are just wood and others are adamantine, and give them that chance. Or, say, have the Paladin get captured by opponents who vastly underestimate her. Etc. Judicious use of weak opposition lets the rising tide actually be noticeable.In general, I assume the answer is yes, but would be willing to hear out an explanation from the DM why that isn't the case.I mean, the rule can be very simple. If there's no interesting consequences for failure, just tell the player it happens (perhaps with gusto, if they heavily outclass the obstacle.) If there's no benefit to success, give them the opportunity to back out. (My players quickly learned to listen when I say, "Did you really say/do that?" or "Are you sure?" The former is mostly for separating OOC from IC, while the latter is my ritual phrase for such moments. I don't say it very often, because 99% of the time my players are cautious to a fault rather than too aggressive, but I know my players notice. Sometimes they even say yes, they really are sure!)Well, it would have helped if they both (a) actually read it (many did not, as their blatantly false claims demonstrate, e.g. claims that healing surges allow infinite healing), and (b) actually used quotes from the text rather than aggressively misinterpreted paraphrasing and summarizing. E.g. people still to this day claim that every combat encounter in 4e is required to be keyed to the party's level exactly. This is not only false, but trivially easy to disprove simply by reading the relevant sections of the 4e DMG. There is no ambiguity here; the book explicitly says not to do that, and instead to give a wide variety of combats (in encounter level, number and types of opponents, and terrain on which the encounters occur) so that the players have a rich and varied experience. This isn't hidden. It isn't buried in a mountain of text. It's right there, on the surface. This is why so many fans of 4e get so annoyed with the pushback 4e still gets. A ton of it is not merely wrong, but trivially wrong. Wrong in ways that anyone who had genuinely read the books should not be capable of.I find Dungeon World is quite balanced in this way. But it is also a much looser system than D&D ever has been. If you like rule structures for non-combat encounters, you might consider adapting 4e's Skill Challenge rules. The "Obsidian" houserule variant is a great place to start. SCs got a crazy bad rap in 4e but were actually a really good idea marred by (as was so often the case in 4e) EXTREMELY, PAINFULLY BAD examples given in the early WotC adventures.I am not, unless it is clear that they should have such things but it hasn't been specified what yet. If there was no way for the players to know prior to it being added, it's no different from the vast majority of other DMing where the DM improvises the content as they go.</blockquote>

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