Why doesn't the help action have more limits and down sides?

[Tony Vargas]

"The system is incredibly bad... and it's deliberate so that the game is better".

"Bad rules make games good!"
It's not a new idea, it had a lot of currency back in the 90s, Storyteller design was said to be based on the maxim. The underlying idea is, bad system or good or no system at all, a great GM can run a great game, and a bad GM will typically run a terrible one - so the system doesn't matter, at bottom. But, a GM, even a good one, is likely to go ahead and use a system as presented, instead of running to his full potential in spite of it, unless the game is bad enough to spur him to ad-hoc 'fix' or ignore it.

In essence, games are crutches to get you to Freestyle RP.

The problem is that it takes a high level of system mastery on the part of players and DM for this to work, since it's not really made clear in the rulebooks.

It's right there in the basic resolution system. The DM determines whether the player's declared actions succeeds, fials, or is uncertain, checks & bonuses only come into the last bit. There would be litterally no point (not that D&D hasn't a long tradition of pointless mechanics) to having the mechanics deliver even the possiblity of an automatically-successful check, since rolls are /only used to resolve uncertainty./

Finally - why would you bother having such a detailed proficiency system and DCs if this were the case? Like I pointed out above, have a list of things you're supposed to be good at and just flip a coin if things become uncertain.

Mostly like because players of 3.x/PF expect such a thing, and 5e is not just for old-school 1e/OSR types.

BA?

Bachelor of Arts. Mearls has an actual degree in the art (it sure ain't a science) of game design.

Seriously, though: Bounded Accuracy.

 

[iserith]

"The system is incredibly bad... and it's deliberate so that the game is better". The problem is that it takes a high level of system mastery on the part of players and DM for this to work, since it's not really made clear in the rulebooks. There's no advice to "avoid rolling if you can" for either party. It also means that high level rogues (amongst other roll boosters) are designed to break the fun of the game.

Finally - why would you bother having such a detailed proficiency system and DCs if this were the case? Like I pointed out above, have a list of things you're supposed to be good at and just flip a coin if things become uncertain.

So for those reasons, I think you're barking up the wrong tree. It might be how you've made the game work, but if the game was designed to work like that, then the designers utterly failed to convey that in what they wrote down.

It's not clear to me what's objectively bad about the system, so your first statement here doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Maybe it's not what you would prefer - perhaps you prefer the system in some previous iteration of the game because it fit your preferred approach - but I don't think it can be said to be "bad." I'll add that the DMG does go into this a bit in the section on "The Role of the Dice." There are three approaches listed there, but only one of those approaches is presented without any potential drawbacks: The Middle Path. "By balancing the use of dice against deciding on success, you can encourage your players to strike a balance between relying on their bonuses and abilities and paying attention to the game and immersing themselves in its world." Contrast that with the method where the DM relies "on die rolls for almost everything." Players get "the sense that anything is possible," since they roll dice a lot, but "roleplaying can diminish if players feel that their die rolls, rather than their decisions and characterizations, always determine success." I've seen that myself in various games in which I've played and on vodcasts.

Add to this the role of the player in the basic conversation of the game: The players describe what they want to do. At no point is an expectation set that the players should ask to make ability checks. Lots of people do ask to make checks, I suspect, because they learned that from other people. And certainly, in previous iterations of the game, I played that way, but my reading of these rules indicates that is not intended.

These two things combined, plus I'm sure other aspects of the rules I haven't mentioned here, tell me that the DM should discourage players from asking to make rolls. (The math showing that this is a good idea underscores this, though that's not mentioned in the rules so far as I know.) The game simply works better in my experience when the players describe a goal and approach for the things their characters are reasonably good at, but try to avoid the roll if possible. If they have to roll because of some uncertainty they couldn't remove or meaningful chance of failure they couldn't negate, they at least have a decent chance of success given their applicable bonuses. This is the smart way to play as a player in my view and it's the surest route to achieving the goals of play.