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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8247572" data-attributes="member: 18">I think this is a lot more complex than you're making out, and ignores the DM as part of the equation.In 2E and before, basically only casters can ever say what happens. Everyone else is playing "mother-may-I" with the DM. So the casters are empowered and the DM is even more empowered. If the DM wants you to live, and favours your "mother-may-I" requests, then you do great. If they DM doesn't feel that way, or is just incompetent or arbitrary, well, the casters still get a say, but no-one else does.This is the key issue with codified abilities vs. not. Because there have always been codified abilities - just they used to only be spells (and magic items I guess also). That gradually changed every edition. And the power, even in 3E, did shift, every edition, a little more from the DM to the players overall.As for "fudge to keep the story going", I think it's totally bizarre to assert that's a modern thing. I had to do that far more in 2E and 3E than 4E or 5E, and I almost never have to do that in modern, fail-forward-designed games - some of which is simply a change to how you write adventures/scenarios.And it's misleading to claim procedures are taken away - that's only true if you want it to be. 4E and 5E outside combat are pretty fiction-first games. If someone says they're using a pole to activate the pressure-plate of the trap in 4E or 5E, the situation is no different to OD&D or 1E. It's bizarre to suggest otherwise. In later editions players have a choice - either describe their actions, or roll and let their character try it. That you think they're only allowed to do the latter is perplexing and wrong.Definitely agree. But the big difference is that games like Apocalypse World give all the players equal amounts of codified power, and have a design which gives players in general vastly more power than they did in old-school play.This is illogical, because it assumes that D&D was even aware that it had "principles" at the time the change started, and there's absolutely no evidence to support the idea that any of the designers were remotely thinking in those terms.</blockquote>

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