D&D 5E The Magical Martial

[Minigiant]

There can be a healthy middle ground?

??

??

The community cannot even agree way a level 11 fighter is and WOTC & TSR refused to define it.

Thus this thread.

 

[Gammadoodler]

This response doesn’t make any sense to me.

Just that we can know the exact distance a Wizard can teleport, how much they can lift with telekinesis. How fast they can fly, the volume of dirt they can move, and 90 pgs of other specific spellcasting adjudication..baked right there into the rulebook, with no wiggle room for DM interpretation or stylistic discretion...

But if we want to know the rules for how any character can jump....

Well obviously that's where your DM should be spending their time deciding how things work on a case by case basis.

Edit: the whole "guys it's 5e, you don't need a rule for everything.." response rings pretty hollow when the context includes 90 pgs of rules content that only even apply to half the classes in the book.

 

[FrogReaver]

Just that we can know the exact distance a Wizard can teleport, how much they can lift with telekinesis. How fast they can fly, the volume of dirt they can move, and 90 pgs of other specific spellcasting adjudication..baked right there into the rulebook, with no wiggle room for DM interpretation or stylistic discretion...

But if we want to know the rules for how any character can jump....

Well obviously that's where your DM should be spending their time deciding how things work on a case by case basis.

Edit: the whole "guys it's 5e, you don't need a rule for everything.." response rings pretty hollow when the context includes 90 pgs of rules content that only even apply to half the classes in the book.

I never suggested they should. I gave a reason for why it’s currently like that.

Edit: I find it logical that you would need explicit rules for spells but not everything else.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I never suggested they should. I gave a reason for why it’s currently like that.

Fair enough. Perhaps the reply was misdirected. It does seem that some folks in this line of discussion believe otherwise.

 

[Yaarel]

Thing is I get that there cannot be rules that cover every possible situation, but there can be benchmarks that help the GM to extrapolate consistently. And some situations are not actually that nuanced, like jumping which this was originally about. Like the rules give you a jump distance, and then say you can increase it with an athletics check. But do not say what DC and how much. Why? This is not a nuanced situation that requires giving the GM a lot of leeway, it is very simple situation that just requires we have some concrete numbers.

I hope the 2024 "Glossary" and re-presentation of skills helps spell out many of the common stats for what players can assume in the default setting. Including how far one can jump. Moving rules for social skills to the Players Handbook helps. The designers also mention clarifying hiding and finding (and dealing with illusions). It helps to quantify the stuff that players typically do frequently during a game.

Detailing better what players can normally expect, also helps to define what "magic" is that goes beyond these expectations.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

The community cannot even agree way a level 11 fighter is and WOTC & TSR refused to define it.

Thus this thread.

Ah. Yeah. I lost track in which thread we were. No. We can't agree.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I never suggested they should. I gave a reason for why it’s currently like that.

Edit: I find it logical that you would need explicit rules for spells but not everything else.

To reply to the edit...

Why?
The same mechanisms (skill checks) are equally available for spells.

Should the DM have less flexibility in dialing up or down how effective spells should be?

Edit: Even just narratively.. every Move Earth spell behaves exactly the same way for every caster at every table..no matter their attributes, skills, class, level, DM, or setting.. that doesn't seem odd to you?

 

[Stormonu]

And yet we have 90 pages of spell definitions..

Many of which exist because original D&D lacked a skill system and have been carried on throughout editions because the current skill subsystem(s) sucks.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I know that is sarcasm, but to a certain extend this is true.
The move from theater of the mind to battlemaps codified certain rules.

So instead of describing how you duck behind cover and the DM gives you an ad hoc 9/10th cover bonus the resolution changes to looking at the battlemap and drawing lines from one square to the other. Which is time consuming. Which is assuming the battlemap depicts the given situation 1:1. Which ignores that envitoment is 3d and that a character take on different poses to adapt to the cover and so on.

So having less codified rules is an advantage, as long as the DM adjucates fairly.

Probably the fairness was lost and the game became less cooperational between players and DMs for a while so codified rules were needed.

Then its just the DM playing with himself. Which I seem to get is the preference from a lot of old school DM's. You have to do what they want, how they want it. You have to guess what they are thinking with regards to traps and how they think a trap should be disarmed, never mind that neither of you know squat about traps in real life. You have to convince them, not the NPC.

You don't play the game, you play the DM. It's very ego centric and pandering.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Just that we can know the exact distance a Wizard can teleport, how much they can lift with telekinesis. How fast they can fly, the volume of dirt they can move, and 90 pgs of other specific spellcasting adjudication..baked right there into the rulebook, with no wiggle room for DM interpretation or stylistic discretion...

But if we want to know the rules for how any character can jump....

Because we know which classes matter and which are okay to be sacrificed to lipservice to simplicity and old school play.