Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6365090" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with all these points.The passages I picked out in my post above are fairly clear taken in themselves, but they're somewhat buried among other cruft in the DMG. Plus there is no unified presentation, with the explanation straddling DMG and PHB.Like you, I benefited from long experience with a skill-based game (in my case, Rolemaster) plus a fairly good understanding of "narrative" games (HeroWars/Quest, Maelstrom Storytelling, and later on Burning Wheel, Marvel Heroic etc).The changing DCs were also an issue. I think the "advantages" system in Essentials is, essentially, an admission by WotC that the DC maths is too hard to get right in and of itself, so the GM (or players, depending how the table handles it) are given "advantages" to even out the bumps! But it was always clear to me from the outset (between my own maths plus stuff that was being posted on these boards) that for success chances to be decent overall, the success chances for individual checks had to be very high.That is what seems to be a potential stumbling block for 5e, at least based on this thread so far.Yes. The presentation of particular examples didn't mesh well with the general description of the procedures. There was another aspect to this failure of presentation, too, which I want to address below.My general preference is for auto-successes or bonuses. This relates back to my post upthread, about process vs pacing approaches to resolution. I see skill challenges as playing an important pacing function, and so rather than short-circuiting I prefer to introduce new sources of adversity/conflict, to keep the challenge alive.But this is another flaw in presentation. WotC itself gives examples of play in which skill challenges are adjudicated on a pacing/meta-game rather than process basis - eg in Essentials the skill challenge ends when some thugs who were scared off earlier in the challenge (successful Intimidation) turn up again and stop the party's investigation (overall failure). This is a metagamed resolution: there is no ingame process connecting the final failure to the thugs. Rather, the challenge has failed and so the GM needs to create a reason, within the fiction, for that failure, and does so by bringing the thugs back onto the stage.But nowhere does the book actually talk about this: what the GM has done, and why, and how a GM might do something similar in other contexts. (For me, a really stark contrast exists between this woefully inadequate approach and the cleverness and detail of Luke Crane's discussion of narrating failures in the BW rulebook and Adventure Burner.)Especially for the introductory RPG, D&D has a history of terrible GM advice. (Moldvay Basic is just about the only exception, I think. I know a lot of people like the 4e DMGs, especially DMG 2, but that only drives home how poor the other D&D entries in the field are! Because the DMG 2 is nothing particularly special compared to BW, Laws' advice in HeroWars/Quest, etc.)</blockquote>

Verification