iserith
Magic Wordsmith
Re playing 5e, my play time is finite and there are some features of 5e that make it quite unattractive to me as a set of RPG rules.
But as far as the topic of this thread is concerned - roughly, the adjudication of ability checks - is concerned, I don't see what you do in 5e that makes it particularly distinctive from (say) 3E. (I can see the differences from 4e: fewer ways to mitigate the dice rolling; no tendency to assume a closed scene resolution framework.) My experience with 3E is pretty modest, though, so perhaps there's some subtle (or even gross!) feature that I've missed. But I don't see why your approach wouldn't be fairly easily deployable in 3E, perhaps in RQ or Rolemaster, even in 4e if one (as many did) ignored the skill challenge mechanics.
I'd have to read the D&D 3e books again to see how compatible it would be. I haven't looked at them in over 10 years and back then I did what many seem to do now - play that game as I had played some other game since I came from AD&D 2e background and that's what I knew. Just as I did when I started to run D&D 4e and became dissatisfied with the game until I realized that it was my 3e-influenced approach that was holding me back as it was not appropriate to that rules set. Reading them with my understanding of games today would be interesting, but like you playing D&D 5e I lack the time and inclination. Off the top of my head, certainly there was a culture of players asking/declaring to make checks in D&D 3e (if not rules), for example, and that is not supported by the D&D 5e rules. So that's at least one difference which seems minor but has pretty big impacts on the play experience.