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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6681356" data-attributes="member: 996">They don't seem /that/ vague.  Vague, sure, as natural language mixing with jargon in vague ways will be, but not all that bad.  And 5e seems to call for WIS (mostly) vs INT/CHA (more rarely) fairly consistently, such that it shouldn't be too hard to decide which mental stat a novel effect forces a save from. Not exactly shockers. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I think this third one was well, maybe not intentional, exactly, but in keeping with the overall philosophy or feel of 1e.  IIRC, Gygax even articulated the idea that the players weren't supposed to understand the game, at least, not as well as the DM (part of the convoluted form of DM empowerment that 5e emulates in a somewhat more straightforward way). So matrices opaque to reverse-engineering efforts, and difficult to use without a judge's ruling, rather than clear categories and consistent formulas, make a certain sort of sense, in that they help make the players dependent on the DM's knowledge and rulings.   Amusingly put.But, really, you could rationalize any of these inconsistencies and oddities:</blockquote>