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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6300655" data-attributes="member: 6775031">Appeal to Authority, then? Instead of judging the rules on their own merits, you appeal to Word of God. While we're talking tropes, though, are you familiar with Death of the Author?To sum it up for anyone not following along at home, there are two games in question whenever you mention Gygax: there's the game he intended, and the game he wrote. It should be pretty clear from anyone who's read his various articles and opinions over the years that the rules of the game are supposed to enforce the tropes of fantasy fiction. My favorite example is when the hero is chained to a wall, but still gets to save against dragon breath. According to Gygax, it would be impossible to dodge the blast in that situation, so the save represents that maybe the hero finds a weak link in the chain, and breaks free to hide behind a rock just in time. If that were true, then it would imply that there is no objective reality, and the weakness in the chain and the existence of the rock are both determined after the save is made.But that's not how the game is actually played. I mean, maybe Gygax ran it differently, but I've never seen anything like that in anything between Basic and 3E. Rather, the DM would run it as if everything was pre-determined - the weak link in the chain, the nearby rock, everything - and further alter the mechanics to take that into consideration. If the DM had determined that the chain had a weak link, then you might be permitted a Strength check to break it. If the DM had established that there was a large rock nearby, then you would be granted a bonus to your saving throw. If neither of those had been the case, then your save might have been penalized, and a success meant that you had miraculously dodged it anyway (for half damage, at least); or, the DM might determine that it was just automatic failure, since there was no way to escape.Regardless of intent, and regardless of how you may have personally played it, the fact of the matter remains that there was a not-insignificant group of people who used those rules to reflect an internally consistent objective reality.In fact, the first edition where it really felt like the mechanics represented what Gygax was talking about, indisputably, was 4E. The problem that the above group had with that was, though the mechanics matched the original premise, it no longer allowed them to play the game that they had played with every edition from Basic to 3E.And just for the record, I repeat that I say 5E should aim to allow players to recreate the experience from those previous editions. As they actually played it, and not as some dead guy wanted them to play it.</blockquote>

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