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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5467839" data-attributes="member: 22779">Stepping back a second and I realize that this is a debate that has been going on in RPG's forever.  The basic argument is, "Mechanics get in the way of role play, therefore, mechanics are not needed."  And, you can see this argument all over the place.  People have argued that the inclusion of thief abilities limit role play - before you had to interact with the trap and solve it without using any character abilities, just your own smarts.  Then, you threw the thief at the trap.  Then, you have things like Take-20 checks to find the trap, no longer do you need any role play at all.Or, look at combat.  People have argued (Hi RC) that the inclusion of more complex combat resolution mechanics leads to less role play.  That it's better to have a simpler system that allows the players greater flexibility in describing their actions and then reward that description by DM fiat.Or look at social interactions.  Early D&D had very little in the way of social mechanics.  Very bare bones.  It wasn't considered needed, you just played out social interactions and relied on the DM to adjudicate.Now, it's pointing fingers at the SC framework, saying that the mechanics are getting in the way of role play.And, to some degree the arguements are very true.  Having trap resolution mechanics reduces traps from a role play situation to a bare dice roll in many cases.  Having more complex combat mechanics does slow down play.  Having social mechanics does mean you can simply state, "I bluff the guard, 25 vs insight." But, and you knew there had to be a but in here somewhere, there is the other side of the coin.  Sure, it removes those options of role play, but, it also removes the Mother May I situations that plagued early versions of D&D.  It means that the guy who's playing the Cha 6 half orc with no social skills cannot leverage his own personal gift of the gab to simply ignore his character sheet.  It means that groups don't wind up in arms races with DM's as they come up with ever lengthening lists of SOP's for dealing with traps.Gaming story:  Way back in the day, my group always experimented with potions  IIRC, the 1e rules (or at least our understanding of them) said that if you took a sip of a potion, you had a chance to figure out what it was.  So, we would take a sip and then start going down the list - jump up and down, try lifting something, look at our cuts and bruises to see if they healed, that sort of thing.  And we had fun with that.  3e totally does away with that with easy Identify spells.  4e goes a step further and doesn't even bother with Identify but rather just tells the DM to tell the players what they found.I have to admit, I miss the testing.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  But, I can totally see why they did it.In any case, this is not a new discussion at all.  It's been framed differently at different times, but, it's essentially the same discussion.  Do you need mechanics to resolve X?  For some, it's yes, for others no.  Where you come down on on the issue is probably largely simply a matter of preference, rather than any objective value statement.</blockquote>

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