Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7296697" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Actually I very much appreciate it. This to me is a much more interesting line of discussion than trying to justify  dm-calls-for-rolls approach over player-initiated rolls.That’s fair. Honestly I think the dreaded “gotcha DM” gets a worse rep than he deserves. It’s just another style of play, and as long as everyone knows what they’re getting into, it can be very fun.Sure! This comes down to a question of priorities, and for me personally, empowering the players to make informed decisions is a higher priority than creating a realistic world. Realistically, weapons and armor should become damaged and eventually break with use of not constantly maintained. Does that mean the game would be improved by including rules for weapon and armor degradation and repair? Maybe. Depends on what you want out of the game. Personally, it’s not what I would want to spend my game time focusing on, even if it would be more realistic. Likewise, it would certainly be more realistic if hidden dangers weren’t always clearly telegraphed, but that added realism would come at the cost of the kind of game experience I want to create. I like my D&D games to have that From Software challenging-but-fair vibe, where you succeed and fail based on your choices, and when you do fail, or fall into a trap or whatever, you can look back and see what cue you missed or what choice you made that lead to it. I find it makes success feel more rewarding and failure seem fair. For me personally, that feeling is much more important than realism.Keep in mind, that auto-success is only possible if I’ve already determined that the approach has a reasonable chance of achieving the goal (and a reasonable chance of failure). So we’re talking about something that it is entirely possible could lead the players to find this hidden compartment. If there’s no pressure, they can just keep at it until they find it. Sure, theoretically they might get bored and give up before that happens, but that’s not a very interesting outcome. I would rather assume they are eventually successful, and montage through the process.It’s right there in the 3rd (.X) Edition rules. But it’s not in the 5th Edition rules. I prefer 5e style, personally. I always found that very unsatisfying  in 3.X; too disconnected from the fiction. How come that natural 1 was my best effort on this DC 15 lock, but on the next one my best effort was a 19? What’s actually stopping my character, in-universe, from trying again anyway and why don’t I get to roll a die for that attempt? Just too... if you’ll pardon the term... meta for my taste.That’s not the kind of cost or consequence I’m talking about. It doesn’t prevent the players from trying again.</blockquote>

Verification