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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 5884358" data-attributes="member: 55680">All else being equal, certainly. This was a big problem with 3.*ed since fighters and wizards were about on par if played with zero cunning or tactical acumen (i.e. go straight for hit point damage and nothing else) but then on top of that wizards have a hundred and one ways to leverage their spell effects to get a massive range of results. Ways to get around this:A. Have fighters be Hercules (example: Exalted).B. Strip out most CaW-friendly applications of non-ritual magic (example: 4ed).C. Give fighters a boost to raw damage output and keep casters in check by making them easy to interrupt and make magic quirky enough to keep it from being an "I win" button (Rules Cyclopedia D&D with the weapon mastery optional rules more or less, the balance isn't perfect but those fighters are probably the most powerful relative to wizards of any edition before 4ed). I'm hoping for a cleaned up version of this for 5ed without fighters being forced to specialize in a few weapons.Not necessarily. I've had a strictly by the book DM who did his very best to not do any rules adjudication and stuff like the Westmarches (<a href="http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/" target="_blank">ars ludi  Grand Experiments: West Marches</a>) tries to avoid what I'm labeling DM as Storyteller here.The general trend in D&D (starting with 2ed) is more and more catering to the DM as Storyteller and less and less catering to the DM as Judge, but it appears that 5ed will reverse that a bit...Very much so. The only quibble I have is that dungeon crawls can be sandboxy as well, they're just small sandboxes. My main complaint with things like adventure paths is that the needs of the plot can get in the way of "players' ideas and stories." I love world building, but for me that's me building up a series of sandcastles for the players to have fun kicking down.Oh certainly there's a big difference here but for the purposes of this post I'm throwing the sort of scene framing that is advocated in, say, The Burning Wheel and Illusionism in the same broad category. Sounds like pretty much the standard Indie RPG style of GMing. What I like about a lot of Story Game or Story Game-influenced RPGs is that they distribute a lot of the power of the GM to frame scenes and whatnot to the players so things are very much driven by the players through Burning Wheel artha, FATE's fate point economy or what have you. Having all scene framing authority rest on the GM's shoulders isn't really my preference, I'd rather a lot of it be offloaded onto the players or stuff like wandering monster rolls.Right, so there'd be elements of both in this case. To go to an extreme (which I know you're not advocating) you could have massive bucketloads of both and play a freeform RPG in which the only rule is the players say what they do and the GM says what the result is.</blockquote>

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