Celtavian said:
In 5E if the players come up with a good idea for breaching the door or whatever activity and he can find no reason not to allow it to work, the DM allows it to work. No time wasted rolling.
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Every door does not require a break DC. If the Big Bad Fighter or Barbarian is raging through a dungeon with doors he can break down, the 5E DM doesn't waste his time requiring rolls
Completely cannot understand what 5e does for me to allow this to happen in any way easier than it could in any other edition. I can hand wave and state "it works" in any game.
There's also the community to consider. In 3.x, for instance, as in any RPG, you, as GM, could change any rule you wanted, it even came right out and said so in 'Rule 0.' Yet, in spite of that, the community was very focused on RAW, and that carried through to the attitudes of many players. So you could hand-wave in 3.5, but some of your players might rebel if you did.
In Rolemaster, every roll of the dice is meant to correspond to some in-fiction event, and every in-fiction event is modelled, at least in principle, by a roll of the dice.
In addition, in RM, nearly every action check is open-ended (so no auto-fails) but has a fumble range at the bottom.
This means that handwaving success is not part of the spirit of the game; the dice need to be rolled to see if a fumble/auto-fail comes up. Nor is handwaving
failure OK, because the player can always roll and hope for an open-ended result - and every RM table has the tale of when a double-open-ended roll was needed to save the party, and one of the players pulled it off!
This is a game, then, in which you can't just handwave without breaking the spirit of the game.
Contrast (say) Marvel Heroic RP, where the GM is encouraged to handwave stuff that is just colour and is not pertinent to the resolution of the conflict that is driving the scene at hand. In MHRP,
not handwaving that stuff would be contrary to the spirit of the game.
4e is more like MHRP in this respect.
An interesting system that straddles the RM(simulationist)/4e-MHRP(fortune-in-the-middle) divide is Burning Wheel. DCs are objective, and skill bonuses are objective too (eg a good riding skill in BW doesn't just mean "My PC is likely to experience success in scenes involving riding" but also means "My PC is a skilled rider"). But handwaving action declarations that don't matter is a core part of the system ("Say
yes or roll the dice"), which means (for instance) that bad stuff never happens when nothing is at stake, unless the players
choose to make it happen (and the game has mechanics that give players incentives to do this).
I think 3E had at least aspirations to be a RM-style simulationist system, and rather than handwaving I think the system expects use of taking 10 and taking 20. So I'm not sure it's just the "cult of RAW" that explains player hostility to GM handwaving in 3E.
I think this thread is bringing out some interesting divergences as far as 5e is concerned. [MENTION=5834]Celtavian[/MENTION] seems pretty clearly to think that it works like 4e. I don't think [MENTION=6784868]Erechel[/MENTION] agrees. My reading of the rules leaves me uncertain what the designers had in mind - and maybe they deliberately didn't have any particular approach in mind!
the DM can leaven any target success rate by declaring success or failures when such would improve play.
I think declaring
auto-fails when the mechanics (eg bonus compared to DC) leave success open as a possibility is particularly fraught, for all the obvious reasons.
a DC table that doesn't take levels into account isn't inherently flawed or backwards or useless or that it must lead to bad play where the PC's can't pass by some DC that is too hard for them or any of the other things AA seemed to presume must happen because 5e doesn't set DC's relative to level, and that setting DC's relative to level isn't clearly a better or more advanced or improved option.
I don't think [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] was saying that 5e's DCs lead to bad play. I think he was saying that, for him as a GM they are not helpful, because he can't tell at a glance what the effect on pacing and degree of challenge will be if he sets a DC for a given PC or party at X rather than Y.
Another way of stating the complaint is that 5e DCs don't come with a challenge rating or encounter level attached. (Whereas 4e's do.)
If you don't think that challenge ratings/encounter levels are helpful or necessary, then presumably this won't bother you!
As false I see things like the comment about the more "narrative" approach of 4th Edition.
It seems to me that either 5e is the same as (or similar to) 4e, or it's not. I don't think it can be both at once.
One feature of 4e is that it defines game elements (traps, monsters, environmental features, obstacles involving DCs, etc) in level-relative terms. The express purpose of this is to support their use by the GM in making decisions about challenge level and pacing.
Whether or not you want to call this a "narrative" approach, it is a point in respect of which 4e resembles HeroWars/Quest and Marvel Heroic RP, and a point in respect of which it differs from Rolemaster, Runequest and (in my view, at least) Burning Wheel.
If it's a feature that you find helpful in a system, the lack of it in 5e - the fact that DCs aren't given a challenge rating or encounter level - will be a mark against the game. (Or it could be more complex: you might think that a game that lacks such features should have robust "fail forward" rules instead, as Burning Wheel does, and feel that 5e isn't so strong in this respect. I'm sure there are other possibilities too.)
Whether or not you think it's a bad thing, it's a clear difference from 4e!
level-relative DC's can create a feeling of impotence in a player when they know that their achievements and experience don't actually affect the chance of victory very much, and world-relative DC's can by the same token create a feeling of mastery and achievement in a player when they know that they're taking on much harder challenges than they "should."
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I know I've felt more than once that 4e is largely a "level-less" game for all its 30 levels (of which I played about 18). And 5e, over the course of 7, is already showing me that setting the DC's relative to the world is a part of the edition's strong antidote to that. In 4e, I always felt at about the same level of badass ("fairly"). In 5e, I've felt the growth that comes from a tier-shift in a way 4e never achieved (going from "not very badass" to "a little badass!"), and in a way is a little more subtle and interesting than bigger numbers.
Overcoming obstacles and dramatic tension are presumably two of the keystones behind why many of us play RPGs
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I think the art of delivering meaty obstacles and drama are completely tried to the ability of the GM and in no way tied to the ruleset (Hm, maybe that's not completely accurate - perhaps mechanics like the Doom Pool in MHRPG actually DO help deliver meaty obstacles and drama).
4e is largely level-less, yes.
PC progression in 4e plays two roles, as best I can tell.
One is that it opens up new mechanical space (eg now I can dominate! now I can fly! etc). The other - not unrelated - is that level gain opens up new fictional possibilities. This is summarised in the PHB descriptions of Heroic, Paragon and Epic tier. It is given concrete meaning, too, in the Monster Manuals, which locate the various classic D&D antagonists at levels which the designers intend will fit within the "story of D&D". So you start with kobolds, graduate to gnolls, then trolls and giants and serious dragons, and end up fighting demon princes.
The relation between these two aspects of progression is that being able to dominate, or fly, or whatever, corresponds to a character having a certain status and capability within the fiction.
The actual maths of the game, though, is not meant to change significantly in the way that the mechanical minutiae and the fiction change in these ways. (When 4e players think they
have discerned such changes in the maths, they decry it as errors in the maths, and get "fixes" like the Expertise feats.)
Pleasure in PC progression in 4e, then, has to come from these two sources. The game certainly takes for granted that mechanical intricacy, and changing mechanical intricacy (daze vs stun vs dominate, shift vs slide vs teleport, etc), is fun for the players - if it's not fun for you, I don't unreservedly recommend 4e because it's hard to get away from this sort of minutiae in that particular system.
But I think the change in the fiction is meant to be more important. A player knows, and feels, that his/her PC is becoming more "badass" not because the numbers are changing, nor because success comes more often, but because the challenges confronted and (hopefully for the player) overcome are different.
If the GM doesn't succeed in making the fiction engaging in this way, I imagine the game might fall pretty flat. Whether "objective" DCs will cure that I suspect is also pretty GM-dependent, though. And player dependent, too: after all, there is a real difference between "I couldn't overcome that door before, because it was DC 25 and my bonus was +4, but now I can because my bonus has grown to +8!" and "I couldn't overcome that door before because a lowly street thief can't hope to infiltrate the Overtemple of Vecna, but now that I'm a Master Thief I have a chance!", but I think different sorts of explanation (mechanically grounded or fictionally grounded) speak to different players (or perhaps to the same player in different moods).
4e tried, through balance/clarity/playability, to minimize the need for the exercise of DM power.
I think 4e gave the GM very important roles. From the PHB, p 8:
Adventure Builder: The DM creates adventures (or selects premade adventures) for you and the other players to play through.
Narrator: The DM sets the pace of the story and presents the various challenges and encounters the players must overcome.
Monster Controller: The Dungeon Master controls the monsters and villains the player characters battle against, choosing their actions and rolling dice for their attacks.
Referee: When it’s not clear what ought to happen next, the DM decides how to apply the rules and adjudicate the story.
The first of these allocates the GM authority over very important elements of backstory. The second then links that backstory authority to authority in respect of scene-framing. (Which connects back to the Czege principle.)
The third role is somewhat distinct to D&D (and comparable systems), because of its very granular combat resolution system. (There is no real analogue to the third role in a skill challenge, for instance.) In general terms, though, it's a particular element of scene-framing authority, reframing the scene on a round-by-round basis.
The fourth role is the only one directly connected to action resolution. It gives the GM responsibility for adjudicating resolution, and adjudicating the fiction more generally, when the content of the fiction is not self-evident. (This can also be seen as an application of the Czege principle.)
The 4e GM also have an important role in adjudicating fiction relevant to
applying the action resolution mechanics (as opposed to narrating the fiction that results from their application), although this is not stated in the PHB but rather in the DMG in relation to skill challenges (p 79 makes it clear that the GM is the arbiter of what action declarations are permissible, given the current state of the fiction) and in relation to pacing (p 105, for instance, encourages handwaving action declarations that aren't core - an apparent application of "say
yes or roll the dice").
It seems to me that when you itemise it like this, then as far as actually running a game goes the only additional power of a 5e GM that has been identified in this thread is the power to declare auto-failure despite what the mechanics would otherwise imply.
