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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mlund" data-source="post: 6852153" data-attributes="member: 50304">I've played in both modes a fair share. I really enjoy the D&D/AD&D tradition of role-playing searches and social interactions for effect - but a lot of aspects of that style of game rewarded you for failing to separate in-character and out-of-character knowledge. After a player learned about trolls the hard way once, all their subsequent characters would burn trolls to keep them from regenerating - no checking to see if this character had ever heard about trolls regenerating before. Low-int characters played by much craftier players were solving puzzles. Charisma-as-a-dump-stat was no match for a drama major. Trying to enforce the difference between player knowledge and abilities and character knowledge and abilities would often come across as arbitrary and spiteful. Some dungeons and adventurers relied heavily on the players picking up on things that would go right over their character's heads. That sort of thing rewarded good game skills but often punished playing the character role.The 3.X skill-systems era swung the other way. DCs and challenge ratings relied a whole lot on what your character was capable of on-paper. It was up to the DM to adjudicate whether an elaborate plan or work-around would bypass a dice roll, provide a modest circumstance bonus, or be completely disregarded. Now you have the whole "arbitrary" problem again, just this time it could come across as treating some players with favoritism or "nerfing" challenges.Frankly, the first place where I found a truly happy medium between these two extremes was when I started playing 13th Age. The background system was set up in such a way that the players had an incentive to describe why they were likely to have applicable experience, skill, or knowledge to succeed in a task and thereby apply their background bonus to a test. These brief justifications tend to include that little bit of the what and how of their character's actions, which is enough to scratch that itch that's been nagging me for the last decade or so.I think you can accomplish the same sort of "show, don't tell" problem-solving behavior in 5th Edition D&D with granting advantage.Sometimes making the right decision just solves the problem without rolling dice. Sometimes there's no chance of solving the problem with dice. There's a huge area in-between where I want to be incentivized by the game mechanics themselves to take character-appropriate role-playing opportunities while solving problems.</blockquote>

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