NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9531496" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Point of order, improvised action DCs (and very particularly skill challenges) are anathema to my preferred D&D, and I'm a direct product of an older D&D edition. I recently saw someone put forward a very useful summation of the position as "it is necessary for the rules to be laid out completely to the players before play begins so that the characters can know what they can do."It's not sufficient to simply write rules for all these things, without very clear advice in both the player and DM facing books indicating what to include, what to disclude and why. I do not want to have to explain to a player that there is no significantly cool description of their intended outcome than can cause Religion to include new effects, and equally I need to know if it's worth knowing the list of Climb DC modifiers to hit a specific breakpoint, or if Climb DCs are going to scale to the perceived stakes of the situation. I would argue that's a whole extra design task; the game needs to create effective language for calling out those toggles, something like an expanded version of Fantasy Craft's campaign qualities. Then you probably need session 0 advice on getting rules/adjudication buy in as a separate matter from genre/tone, establishing player expectations, and so on. Even basic things like "who determines which rules apply?" Needs to be laid out clearly.Just offering all these options is, if anything, worse. A real toolkit needs to explain how to use its content, and unfortunately is going to be harder to use than a game that can commit to one style of play and super that throughout. Content curation and ruling are established at the table game play elements/skills players and GMs are expected to develop, but systemic curation is pretty rarified and not well understood. I don't think any RPG designer has shown any real skill in leading players to it consistently.I'm usually on the "design is hard, we should be paying people to do the hard stuff" side, but I'm both doubtful at this point that anyone has the skill or ambition to take on that task, and ultimately not confident that even if such a product were produced, people would be willing to engage with it at the level it would require.</blockquote>

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