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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sunshadow21" data-source="post: 6742924" data-attributes="member: 6667193">See, this is why I tend to question your position that 5E is player driven. I do not consider narrative alone to be enough to put someone in the drivers seat. If a player can't declare a check, than they are not in the driver's seat. If they have to rely on the DM to tell them when to make a check, they are not in the driver's seat. I don't care what role the check has vs what role narrative has; if the player cannot initiate dice rolls themselves, they are not in the driver's seat.It still boils down to putting these types of interactions in a strange position of not being rule driven but not being purely roleplay driven either. Maybe it's because I am part of a group that has a lot of true bards that really know storytelling, but the results of that particular position are generally unsatisfying to me. You don't get the limitless imagination that comes with pure story telling, as the effects are still going to be bound by the rules to at least some degree, and you don't get any of the benefits of having rules as a player unless you actually control when dice are rolled. To be fair to 5E, this is an issue I have with D&D in general; none of the rulesets handle this aspect well. When there are rules, the assumption is that all the rules must be followed to the letter; when there aren't any clear rules, the assumption is that the rules don't matter at all, and roleplay is king. My personal position is that if I sit down to any rpg system, I accept the inherent limitations of that system in order to gain it's benefits. For D&D, that generally means that I accept that dice rolls matter, for both PC and NPC, and that will often limit my roleplaying options in exchange for being able to participate and shape the story in ways beyond simply being a good story teller myself. I don't have to be a master carpenter in real life to effectively play a PC that grew up learning the carpentry trade; the dice are there to cover whatever gaps I may have as a player. And the most frustrating part to me is that every single edition of D&D since AD&D can be played in this middle ground, yet almost no one does. Even the examples I've seen you use in this thread and others very much come across as being very much DM focused with relatively little benefits to the player aside from being able to bask in the glow of amazing DMing; in real life, they probably aren't actually that harsh, but they would still likely be close enough to that side of the spectrum to leave me wanting a bit more from the game than your position seems to offer.</blockquote>

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