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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7934835" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I agree with everything you say here, but I would argue that there is much more to 5e’s DM empowerment than just “rulings not rules” (which I frankly think is very overstated; it was mostly a buzzword used during the playtest to win over folks who were disillusioned with the rules bloat of 3e and 4e, but doesn’t hold up super well in actual 5e play.) Rather, I think people reach for “rulings not rules” as a snappy way to summarize what is a broader philosophical shift from 3e and 4e to 5e. Mike Mearls has talked about this a bit, where during 3e and 4e, WotC aimed to make the D&D experience as consistent as possible across different tables with different DMs, where with 5e they abandoned that goal in favor of embracing the uniqueness of the group.One place where 5e’s philosophy of DM empowerment can be seen is in how it frames task resolution around the conversation between players and DM instead of around the skill system. I don’t recall how 3e handles this (because I never DMed it), but 4e encourages players to ask to use their skills and encourages the DM to say yes to these requests unless there was a compelling reason to say no. Now, these are not bad guidelines by any means. They’re very good guidelines for running 4e. But they do put the player in the driver’s seat, and asks the DM to exercise their power as little as possible.In contrast, 5e says the DM describes the environment, the players say what they want to do, and the DM determines the results, calling for a check if necessary to resolve uncertainty in the results. This was a HUGE change for me, and it immediately made me feel more comfortable in the role of DM. Instead of being told to let the players decide when they wanted to use a skill and only saying no if I had a compelling reason, it encouraged me to take a more active role in the task resolution process. To use my own best judgment about a task’s likelihood of success and decide whether a check was necessary. It made me feel empowered to just let things succeed that seemed like they should succeed, to have things fail when it seemed like they should fail, and determine DCs on the fly, rather than making me feel like there was a system that had to be followed to insure the game ran correctly. Again, maybe this was something more experienced DMs had already grown comfortable with, but to me the idea of players describing actions and me determining the results, with the skill system as a tool to help me do so, as opposed to the players declaring checks and me interpreting their results was revolutionary.</blockquote>

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