NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9241720" data-attributes="member: 6790260">XP is, I should think rather obviously, not the only way to reward behavior. Bennie points, abstracted level progression ("milestone" levelling or the like), 13A-style Incremental Advancements,I have been pretty clear, in multiple posts, about what I consider various levels of support or lack thereof.[SPOILER="Full explanation"]Active support is where there are present, productive rules(/tools/guidelines/etc.) specifically for some function. It may be good or bad (e.g. 3e's CR system is active support for encounter design, it's just bad). Combat is obviously D&D's biggest active support area. Lesser active-support areas would be investigation/reconnaissance (that's...kind of what the whole school of Divination is for) andPassive support is where there are rules/etc. that aren't specifically for that, but are adjacent and could be repurposed, or act as necessary "raw material" for building it yourself. Previous example was crafting rules and item-price rules, which help make an economics-/industry-focused game happen, but don't cover needed rules (e.g. price differences, wages, gathering resources, etc.) Another: 2e's NWPs as a kludgy "skills" system.Permitting is the default: nothing said, silence. Doesn't help, doesn't hinder. As an example, relationship stuff; D&D just doesn't do rules for Teen Wolf-style relationship drama, where a system like Monsterhearts is built around such. It isn't that you can't have relationship drama, you totally can,Opposing is where the rules that exist genuinely impede or interfere. My repeat example, Survival. 3e rules heavily opposed Survival gameplay. 5e followed suit (as it does in most things.) Spells nix most Survival concerns, mid-level chars are too durable, and existing rules that should help (e.g. Exhaustion) are so egregiously punitive as to be worthless. The rules themselves make Survival harder to run.[/SPOILER]TL;DR:Active support = rules specifically for the task in questionPassive support = rules that can be repurposed for the task, or used as foundation for homebrewed active supportPermitting = an absence of rules that fit into either of the above categoriesOpposing = rules which actually hinder the task in question, often requiring removal/banning/etc. to merely enable the taskThe existing rules of 5e mostly permit many of the "styles" folks have referenced here (even though, as I said above, I think calling all of these things "styles" is a major error, because it conflates 2-3 fundamentally different categories as though they're all the same.) Sometimes, as with Survival, the rules oppose a particular "style." Add-ons, often years after 5e originally published, have helped to add further areas of support, but their efficacy is often questionable.</blockquote>

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