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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 8855546" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I want to throw in quickly, as a counterproposal to the "run everything through the skill system" idea that we've gotten to, right on time as usual in these discussions: skill checks, particularly in 5e, are generally low agency and not a particularly fun resolution system. They're mostly reactive, in that, as a player you often don't get to decide to roll a check or which check, you instead have to roll one in response to an event as it unfolds, and generally offer basically no ability to modify your chance of success. Because 5e lacks specified DCs, you can't really try to maneuver the task you're dealing with to angle for benefit (i.e. spotting that it's easier to climb the stone walls than open the gate's lock); because of bounded accuracy you often do have party members with meaningfully differentiated skills, and almost no one outside of some specific expertise builds gets to escape the RNG and ever reach a level of assumed competence, where they can take declarative actions.While we can argue about the distribution and timing of spell effects (it's weird that one class gets all of them, and that half the classes get none, and not a lot of thought has gone into when specific classes of utility magic come online), I don't think removing the spellcasting gameplay loop is a good solution. If anything, I should think we'd want to go the opposite way, and give other classes some way to do stuff without resorting to the skill system or put declarative effects into the skill systems from the ground up and make those classes good at using them.Here's a think I wrote elsewhere in more detail explicating this using lockpicking as an example.[SPOILER="Lengthy Discussion of Picking Locks"]"Open a locked thing" is a pretty discrete ability in and of itself. Maybe you add a few levels of locked (average house vs. secure building vs. vault), but really, the ability to unlock a locked door without breaking it is a pretty specific problem solving power. Assuming we have some kind of take 10/take 20 rules and making an arbitrary assumption about the difficulty of level appropriate DCs, we can write the mundane/magical versions of that ability out something like this.Mundane:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">1 Action: 50% chance to unlock a locked thing.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">10-20 Actions: Guarantee of opening a locked thing.</li> </ol>Magical:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">1 Action, 1 Resource Point: Guarantee of opening a locked thing under pressure.</li> </ol>The struggle is that these two systems are playing entirely different games, and the underlying design of those games are fundamentally not the same. The magic player is trying to assign limit resources to overcome a series of problems. The underlying incentive is to use those resources as efficiently as possible, and to attempt to shape the emergent situation so that the problems you face don't exceed your resources. The mundane player might be managing time as a resource, but has limited control because the outcome of their choices is random. Mundane play often isn't actually making decisions and just reacting passively to the game state, or worse, because of differences in action resolution (e.g. stealth can add exponential danger, persuasion has limited risk) means that when problems have multiple solutions, the optimization problem is trivial and unbalanced toward particular approaches.Worse, the mundane game exists alongside the magic one, and is mostly only invoked as a fail state to the magic game. If the magic player hasn't managed the resource expenditure problem perfectly (they didn't prepare Knock, or ran out of slots, etc.) then we invoke the mundane game. It's definitely a problem that using spells to conquer obstacles is often better than using mundane approaches, but that doesn't mean the fundamental game mundane skills represent is actually very good.[/SPOILER]The tl;dr for all that though is that if you focus on just the gameplay loop, the thing where you picks spells and then look for opportunities to spend them to get what you want, is a more engaging game than rolling skills. I would contend we should be moving all classes to a place where they have specified declarative abilities that just do whatever the action says they do, not making spells more closely resemble skill checks. Utility magic points more to a problem with the fighter and rogue than the wizard.</blockquote>

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