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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8261641" data-attributes="member: 7016699">A) I am not convinced that success-with-complication helps if one wants heroic play. In fact, I think I still come down on the side of "it doesn't."B) I'm also not convinced that the players need to know everything about what they're about to attempt. They should know everything their character should know, without question, but I'm not sure that's what you mean by "[having] action resolution encoded."C) I have found that 5E has plenty of pressure points, if the players are running their characters honestly; the higher-level party I'm DMing for felt themselves to be enough in debt to an NPC that they fought a mythic (similar to stuff in the Theros book) Death Knight and some of its allies in a cage match, to save the NPC's wife's soul. (When I talk "heroic," that's what I mean.) I've also run gantlet-type adventures, and had the PCs running on fumes by the end.I haven't run into those problems in 5E to the extent you have, which could come to differences in how we run 5E, or differences in the players. I agree, though that the PCs are extremely robust: That just means I can throw more stuff at them.I'm not opposed to letting the PCs plan for things they know are coming. They prepped like hell (heh) for that fight against the Death Knight, and they took like a whole session prepping for the assault on Steeltear and the Masked Ones. I don't mind a PC being played as reckless, so long as it's a character thing; there are some types of characters I'd argue shouldn't/wouldn't be reckless in the ordinary course of things.If "turtling" is an extremely cautious playstyle, where no risks are taken, I agree, and I don't encourage it in campaigns I run. I don't mind if someone chooses to optimize for AC. though, which can also be considered a form of turtling, maybe.And I award XP for the PCs advancing story things. So, I suspect the incentives are operating a bit differently from by-the-book 5E.So far, so good, but I haven't explicitly hacked in anything from any PbtA or FitD games, either. I haven't felt the need--I just was pointing out that playing that way works in 5E, too, because the players in the campaigns I'm running are doing exactly that--without my having posited them as the principles I want to see.Oh, if I were going to be explicit about those principles being the ones I want in the game, I'd have to hack in stuff to make them work.And I'm pretty sure there is a through-line in play, at least narratively, in both campaigns I'm running--though long unplanned campaigns do unquestionably have a tendency to end up kinda on the picaresque side. I'm reasonably OK with that.</blockquote>

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