The original meaning was clear and additional details were added to help with clearing up your misunderstanding of the point by showing how your examples fail at providing flexibility in play style through mechanics that undermine the play style & examples themselves. Now you are arguing semantics in defense of 5e's flexibility rather than discussing how its mechanics undermine flexibility in ways that would cause others to allege it to be inflexible.
there are, and many people would probably assign them pretty similar probabilities, that is what the ‘only to a degree’ was about
me cropping it out does not mean that I did not read it. If your rationale is it required fate / the gods to intervene for it to become plausible, then that is pretty much the highly improbable stuff I was talking about, and if that is the explanation the player gives, then good luck with that
So we're doing it this way, I guess.
Oh, please. I'm talking about something fitting the established fiction, or the theme thereof. The protagonist just kinds stumbling over people works in Paradox Bound but would crash and burn (at least, without a lot of work) in a mystery, and Gordon does things in his Joe the Bouncer books that teeter on the brink of implausibility--though I've read at least one Lehane novel (Since We Fell) that was centered around one coincidence and everything else fell out of that.
My "rationale" was that if the the game was about fate then the theme of the game might be taken to demand some wild coincidences, and even if not that, then they might be appropriate. Also, good job just blasting past the idea that even those wild coincidences need to be consistent with what's already established. Also, sometimes even in somewhat more grounded fiction, a character might have incredible luck--or a wide net of contacts, or whatever--as at least a part of their shtick, and it might make sense for things to break their way, or for them to know someone here. GM introduces NPC; player does mechanically allowed game thing and says, "I went to college with him!" The GM now has the challenge of running the scene, with that change, being consistent with all the things that are established--none of which necessarily needs to be anything in the way of an explanation of how did the PC's college classmate wind out as a waterfront thug?
I have told the people at the tables I run that I always consider PCs to be Weirdness Magnets (I've never played GURPS, I must have picked up the phrase somewhere along the way), and at one point I had some D&D PCs acquire a ship and promptly rechristen it the Weirdness Magnet.
I never said only 5. It covers them all or nearly all. Just like every edition, because mechanics =/= playstyle.
You showed no mechanisms that inherently undermined even a single playstyle that I mentioned. Because mechanics don't affect playstyle that much. Mechanical preferences are a different metric.
so you are basically establishing a scenario in which it works by default and then try to use that as proof why it cannot ever be improbable nonsense?
I agree and should have said 5e mechanical approach instead of style. You are right though I'd argue some mechanics support some styles better than others.
You really don't see how the near universal ability to basically ignore the dark barring this kind of tenuous edge case while being unhindered adding to removing from & carrying around an inventory charging straight into hammerspace superpower undermines a dungeon crawling adventure? Likewise with sandbox campaigns being undermined byPCs with kyrptonian level durability in combat who can nap anywhere under any conditions other than GM fiat level "no" to snap back from basically anything?
