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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6860132" data-attributes="member: 996">I think 'actively hostile' is a bit of a stretch to pin on any prior edition.  Now, the community at the time the edition was current may be another matter.  3.5 explicitly spelled out Rule 0, just in case you had any doubts about whether you could go ahead and change rules to fit your style, that's stopping at least a bit short of open hostility to other styles - but the community at the time was RAW-happy, and that could be quite hostile to, or at the very least dismissive of, anything requiring 'house rules.'  4e was comparatively (for D&D) robustly balanced, and open to re-skinning, so unless your style of play depended upon marked class imbalance, it could probably accommodate you without too much difficulty - but there was a tremendous level of hostility in the community the whole time it was the current edition. 5e is both very open, even insistent, about DMs being free to change/ignore/override the rules, which helps it accommodate any style, at least, as you say, to the extend of not being hostile, and it's community has suffered from a much lower level of hostility, as well.  If that hasn't pitched a big enough tent, there just may not be enough canvas in the world.I guess it depends on what you consider necessary.  If you consider DM Empowerment and player Empowerment to be antithetical, some sort of 0 sum kinda thing, then it's necessary to discourage (or at least, subordinate) styles that depend on player empowerment.  That includes the system-mastery-rewarding style of 3.x, and the kind of more 'narrativist' player-driven-storytelling styles that 4e hinted at supporting (but is really more the realm of indie games).Thing is, the DM can always just choose to change the system to support whatever style he has in mind.  4e was a good edition of D&D, but I started with 1e, and the observation I'm making applies to all editions.  It's just the nature of players.  If a player knows the system that will be used to resolve a potential action, he'll approach that action differently than if he doesn't.  Similarly, if the player knows the DM well, that will color how he approaches actions.  If players are used to DM-mediated actions giving better results than those resolved via an explicit system, that will inform their decisions, too.You're reading too much into commentary about rules.  My preferred style is improv.  I don't generally prep encounters or write up NPCs or monsters in detail (unless it's just trivially easy to do so, and even then, I won't stick to what's written down), don't use published adventures unless the venue expects it, and generally like to riff off what my players show interest in.  It's a fun style, and 5e is ideal for it (perhaps more properly, the attitude 5e promotes is ideal for it).  But it's not the only style I'll run or play under, and it doesn't prevent me from having informed opinions about rules, nor from accumulating over 30 years of personal experience seeing how players react to different situations, from both sides of the screen, nor from seeing correlations between the two.And, yes, when a system presents clear options players will weigh the likelihood of success and make a decision, and when the system leaves vague areas that depend on the DM for resolution, players will avoid or seek out those grey areas depending on what they know of the DM's attitudes, and what they think of their chances working within the clearer areas of the system.  Not always consciously in a decision tree like that, but players get a feel for what works and what doesn't.  In systems with a lot of codified rules, gaming the system works - until an errata nerfs your exploit or the DM has had enough of it, anyway.  In systems that depend heavily on DM interpretation, gaming the DM works. For Diplomancy it certainly did, thanks to that one table of static DCs.  That was really kind of a "one mistake..." thing, though, since 3e didn't have huge numbers of static difficulties, in general the DM was free to set appropriate DCs.  What you leave out is that the DC to get that stated outcome is set by the DM, and just might be "40 more than you could ever possibly roll."  ;P  DDI Compendium or Essentials Rules Compendium?Certainly if that's what the DM believes it demands, that's what it demands.  It's really not an edition problem: every edition has suffered from it.  It's a D&D problem.It's a matter of taste.  I'd prefer a David Drake.  But I'll happily set it aside to run 5e.  And, hopefully, deliver a higher level of entertainment than the 'too easy' baseline.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Oh noes!  Not the all-important, crystalline, immersion!There /should/ be times when withdrawing makes sense and discretion is the better part of valor.  D&D just doesn't do a great job modeling those times, if it did, they wouldn't be such a bad idea, by the numbers, when they're appropriate.A certain kind of hero or adventurer, anyway.True, but historical battles make a pretty grim basis for a game.  300 was a great movie (OK, yeah, and ahistorical in the extreme), but it was a TPK.More difficult than what?  Other editions of D&D?  Not really.  D&D has always used nice, precise ranges and areas and movement rates which make TotM a PitA without a lot of arbitrary DM hand-waving.  Funny you should mention 'RAW' though, the community's insistence on RAW probably shrank that tent a good deal.</blockquote>

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