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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7714562" data-attributes="member: 4937">You're, in general, absolutely right that small differences in the answer don't matter.What really matters is whether the rules address the issue of attacking through cover at all.  If the rules don't address attacking through cover at all, that matters.  You are know in a situation where the GM must either ignore this scenario as irrelevant to play (most usually by making sure consciously or unconsciously that it doesn't come up), or else must rulesmith out an answer with no clues on the fly when it does come up.The mental cost of that rulesmithing in uncommon situations isn't that different from the mental overhead of knowing the answer from the rules.   But the mental cost of rulesmithing answers to common situations is much heavier than the mental overhead of knowing the answer from the rules, and this is generally addressed by the GM by simply defacto making the ruling a rule.   In other words, every time the situation comes up, the GM uses the rule he used before.But this has a problem, in that now rules are play tested in play, and often the player (or the GM) begins to have cause to contest and/or regret the original ruling.  Sure, whether the GM introduced the idea of -2 penalty to hit or disadvantage on the attack might not matter much, but we're assuming here the GM made choices like that instead of say a -10 penalty to hit or the target gets to make a Dexterity save to dodge the attack.  Suddenly, the game has become all about obtaining cover, and the GM and the players are going to discover that and deal with the consequences whatever they are.   That may seem like a silly case, but anecdotal history is filled with examples of GM's rule smithing out far less logical and intuitive and balanced answers to unanswered questions than that.   Back when we had an explicit house rules forum, much of my posts involved trying to explain to would be rule's smiths that their brilliant ideas perhaps weren't as brilliant as they thought they were.You make it sound like the basic appearance of whether the GM knows what he's doing is a small matter.  What you are talking about is the crux of GM/player trust, and that's the foundation upon which tables are functional rather than dysfunctional.  Players benefit from a middle ground as well.  Whatever actions or moves you provide the players tend to become implicitly the set of moves that the player feels entitled to offer, and often as not any other moves are never even imagined.  If the rules don't explicitly tell the player, "You can try to trip your opponent!"  or "You can try to take your opponent's weapon from them!" or even "You can try to do things that aren't covered anywhere by these rules!", the players propositions will tend to be very rote, "I attack the X."   The real issue is whether the rules explicitly state that anything not forbidden by the rules is permitted, or whether they imply or even state that anything not permitted by the rules is forbidden.One of the problem with seemingly elegant systems is that they tend to implicitly or explicitly state that they only cover a very particular sort of game as the only game that should be played.  Whereas a game like AD&D with all its baroque and obscure rules meant that you weren't not playing D&D when you were playing a game of mass combat and dynastic, multigenerational play, where your latest PC was the child of a former adventurer and was concerned with getting a good marriage to strengthen diplomatic ties at court and increase the scope of his feudal holdings.  It meant you were still playing D&D when you're former adventurer bought warehouses, factories, and sailing ships and ran a mercantile cartel, or when you went traipsing around the cosmos dealing with gods and the fate of the universe.  Or, on a smaller scale, they never encourage a player to say something like, "I lock blades with the foe and try to leverage him around so that we have switched places."  (Which, AD&D, with it's explicitly abstract and supposedly 'simple' combat system never provoked as a thought in 99.9% of player's imaginations, and so never occurred in AD&D stories.)Rule 'light' systems might be extended to cover things that they don't explicitly cover, assuming the participants ever realize that they can, and are willing to work out how.  It's just generally, they don't, and aren't, and can't.</blockquote>

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