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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6652820" data-attributes="member: 996">As there is usually only one DM at that table, obviously, the DM is the judge of 'better.' That's his choice, of course.  If a DM wants his campaign would to emphasize the importance or supernatural aspect or primacy of magic, that would be one way to do it. Ultimately, what your character chooses to do (attempt) is up to you.  What he is able to do, and whether any instance of doing them succeeds or fails is up to the DM, yes.Arbitrary GM fiat and arbitrary mechanistic application of the rules are not the only alternatives, and even if they were, a GM could use a mix of the two. This is nonsense.  The DM determines how difficult things are.  He can take the party's abilities into account to make the game challenging ('tailored') or he can create the world independently and let the players try to figure out which challenges they should take on and in what order ('status quo').  That's how it is in 5e, that's how it was in every prior edition, that's how it is, period.   It's a genre trope, as well.  In the broader fantasy genre, and in heroic stories of any kind, really, heroes face many challenges, most of which seem to range from risky to overwhelmingly dangerous, with the Hero surviving by the skin of his teeth repeatedly.  Design a game with random resolution to match that appearance, and every PC will die before any adventure is completed.  No one will ever reach 2nd level.  Rather, the game has to tune it to the rate at which heroes survive, not the way their challenges are portrayed.  And the hero generally lives through all the challenges that take him up to that final confrontation at the climax of the story...   It's not like a game could actually get upset with you for failing, but I think I get what you're trying to say.  In the early days of RPGs, they were still very much like wargames, they set up a scenario, and did your best to achieve victory conditions with the units provided.  The challenge was to achieve victory, and there were no particular constraints on how.  As RPGs - and gamers - got more sophisticated, they started thinking in other terms, genre, character concepts, and stories, and the 'victory conditions' shifted.  If you're playing a game that seeks to emulate a genre where characters are killed off only rarely, and even then in meaningful ways, a TPK is a complete failure.  Not just a mere loss for one player, but a failure of the DM & all players involved.  D&D, eventually (far behind the curve, as always) introduced some improved mechanics and guidelines to help the DM do his part to run successful games.  The resulting CR guidelines often failed - producing a 'speedbump' fight that turned into a TPK, or a tough, climactic battle that turned into a rollover - but they were improved over the 15 years that D&D struggled to deliver on the idea.  5e's CR guidelines are back to being less than dependable, probably as an alternative to just chucking them entirely, in keeping with the classic D&D, wargame-like, philosophy.  Consider, though, that those statements are not hidden in the DMG somewhere, 'behind the curtain,' but are up-front in the most basic 'how to play' explanation of the game that every player should read.If you have a stable group, that may not matter, but, if as I do, you run 5e at public venues (and, that's actually the only context in which I run 5e), it's very helpful to have everyone on the same page when it comes to the function, role & responsibilities of the DM.  What 5e does, in that sense (that classic D&D also did, and which 3.0 tried to do unsuccessfully) is to shape the community consensus on the issue - that a big part of its "DM Empowerment" agenda.Nod. They leave rules open to interpretation, even fairly basic rules that will see frequent use.  That way the players become accustomed to the idea of the DM making rulings that need to be respected being necessary just to play the game.  That they also help the DM shape the game experience - impose class balance, present challenges, tell a story, assure the players are having fun with it, and so forth - may not be so evident, but are supported by that acclimation to DM is sole arbiter. Well, there was that 7-year campaign of lies and misinformation known as the edition war. True.  You can snip out a sub-set of the range, you can tune adventures around a narrower bound about the point on that range the PC are currently at.  Adding range to something like 5e would be a matter of adding levels.  Currently, like 3.x, it's 20 levels.  You could pile Epic levels on top of that, like 3.x did.   How could they?  Party resources are going to vary with party composition.  Some parties may be heavy with short-rest-recharge resources, other with long-rest-recharge.  Some will have more hps and more short-rest healing, others more in-combat healing available.  There's no way to present much of an idea of what's 'expected.'  The DM in 5e is just a more responsible role than it was in the prior two editions.  More depends on the DM's talents, experience, system mastery & artistry. He might not have agreed with taking it as far into the moment-by-moment resolution system as 5e has, but the basic idea that the rules are a 'starting point,' that the DM works from, rather than something he must abide by has always been there.  EGG might have preferred the DM actually write down any variations he had in mind, for instance, rather than making them up on the fly.  Then again, he also counseled DMs to keep ahead of their players in terms of rules-knowledge.  So, whether you have some variant in Gygaxian D&D (and don't volunteer the details of it to the players) or are ruling arbitrarily in 5e, you're an Empowered DM, and the player experience is comparable: one of mystery and discovery.</blockquote>

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