SandeebaRezYouri - That is not the point the above user is making. That is the point you are trying to make, but you do not get to just decide to insert your own points into another user's post because it fits your narrative. I will also note that, once again, you are being inconsistent to the point of being hypocritical in your posting--after all, you ranted in another post about how 5e leaves too much up to the DM (which you said could result in inconsistent rulings or confusion)... and are now trying to justify your love of earlier editions by saying that DMs could just translate things into DM-contrived mechanical terms (resulting in the very same problems you said 5e had).
There's some other nonsense you write, like your trying to say "encounters did not need to be combat" as if that was a unique feature of earlier editions not existent in 5e... even though 5e explicitly makes the non-combat encounter a clear part of the game.
Your anecdotes, your inconsistency in articulating your own points, and your clear lack of understanding of 5e are, however, are helpful. In an earlier post, I said your problem seemed to be a lack of understanding of 5e--after all, the near totality of your posting on 5e has demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of 5e's rules and systems, as nearly every single person on this thread has pointed out to you. I realize now that I was wrong--your problem is not that you do not understand 5e; it is that you do not seem to fundamentally grasp any edition of D&D.
At its core, your anecdotes about prior editions of D&D share a common thread - a dedication to using the "Rule of Cool" instead of looking up the rules. It is pretty clear you played earlier editions fast and loose with the official rules, confusing your lackadaisical approach to the game for how the game was designed to be played. Perhaps that was because you were younger and the rules were less important in your youth; perhaps it was because you did not really understand the rules; perhaps it was because your group just wanted to do what they thought might be cool, rules be darned. No matter the reason, it is clear you gained an anarchistic view of earlier editions that is not really supported by the reality of those editions' rules, many of which were far more intensive than 5e's.
Naturally, if you go from a game system where you decided not to learn the rules and do whatever you want, assuming without verifying there were no rules to support your Rule of Cool philosophy and start looking at 5e in terms of the rules... well, of course you are going to think 5e is stifling. But, here's a little tip for you - if you and your friends who ignored most of the 3.5 rules want to ignore most of the 5e rules, you are welcome to do that in 5e as well.
Now, there is nothing wrong with playing by Rule of Cool as the superseding authority. I certainly would not want to play at your table--but that is the joy of D&D. As long as you find a table that is a good fit for you, there is no true wrong way to play.
It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironicallylimiting their options.
um, I do not think that's actually ironic at all. I think that's the entire point of limiting one's self to just official stuff -- limiting one's self. Maybe you have an different understanding of irony, but it certainly doesn't fit any "official" version of it.
But more so, there's nothing in 5e, as a product or a game or even the marketing, that limits the creative player. I am at a loss here trying to figure out how folks think that it does (when the explanations have all been about how people limit themselves, which, you know, is a choice, like limiting yourself to game editions other than 5e).
First, people often limit themselves without knowing it, and without intending to.
Second, there are multiple ways a limitation can be implemented. It's true that 5e does not explicitly deny creativity, but 5e's very design has an influence on the very structure of thinking of the players. Some players can remain unaffected by that, but it is a very subtle thing that goes by unnoticed, and such influences are not some esoteric thing that people can't control. Right now, people in power around the world use these exact kinds of subtle influences to manipulate the masses. But these influences are not always done intentionally, but sometimes they are.
Take for example, early windows, as in the operating system for computers. There was once a literal cheat sheet for designing windows programs, which did things like establish that check boxes were square and intended for when multiple options could be selected, and radio buttons were circular and for when only a single option could be selected, because then as became familiar with windows programs, they would subconsciously learn these rules and it would improve clarity, as people, without knowing why, would see radio buttons and just know that it meant they had to choose only one option. Most people never even realized it happened, never saw the cheat sheet. They just absorbed the information the same way children learn their first language.
This effect always happens. Sometimes designers take control of this effect, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes designers use this effect for something intentional and there end up also being unintended learned things as well.
5e is no different. The very structure of it teaches things, and not all those things are simply how to play. The notion of the role mechanics have in the running of the game, is one of those things. And both 5e and pf2, both encourage looking at mechanics in the same way players consider the mechanics of Chess. Homebrew vs wotc written mechanics is utterly meaningless to this point.
One thing that did not escape my notice, is that you still just have pre-written classes and races. You are not telling us how you create a unique for each player's unique character concept. No, you tell us about the classes you create that your players choose from the same as they would from the core book. When my DM gave my character's clothes a bonus to hide, it was a unique thing that represented a narrative choice. I did not choose an option from the book, nor did I choose an option from houserules the DM made. I made a purely narrative choice, and the DM did something unique to represent it.
You on the other hand, still think in terms of creating a set of rules and following those rules, and you consider creative freedom to be your ability to make your own rules. You don't give examples of making rulings. Even earlier, with the "traps" that your players circumvented without rolling a check, did not describe an occasion of the players forgoing the use of a mechanical option they had, but instead the players did not have a mechanical option, which forced them to do something not based on mechanics, further, the traps in the examples were not traps that one would disable anyway. So what were the alternatives? Perhaps a better question for you to answer, is "have your players ever been in a situation in which there was an obvious solution that would involve rolling a simple check that they could reasonably have done, that they instead tried something else anyway?"
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To answer your question bout the 7 types of DM, I'm a mixture of the Worldbuilder and minimalist. You might question that since I like 3.5 over 5e. How can I be the minimalist? Because, like the description of the minimalist, I let players try stuff. They want to do something, I do not look up whether it is allowed or not in the rules, instead I consider how it could be done according to how my world works, and then I consider whether it has any impact on rolling dice or permanent results to the character, if yes to either, then I figure out how to represent that with the mechanics. If a roll will be required, I judge what roll works best, and what bonuses or penalties best represent the effects that would impact the character's performance. I use the mechanics as a tool to make the player's choice happen and also have meaning.
I could easily go ultra light and just have players roll a d20 for everything, but by having skills and such, things they do can have an impact on their success, and that makes choices matter, even when they are not simply looking at the mechanics as a menu of choices. I could do the same without mechanics, but then I'd just be making mechanics in my head. If I play freeform, and I give a player a cloak that aids hiding, then I have to remember that they have a cloak that makes hiding easier, and I have to remember how much that cloak helps (are they basically invisible, or is just hunter's camo that provides a minor boost to hiding but only in woods?), in which case I'm making mechanics, but just keeping them all in my head.
Yes, some people optimize characters now, but that’s because they have options, feats and subclasses which help differentiate them. Early edition fighters only distinguished themselves by weapon choice, because after character creation, there were no more decisions to be made (except a thief choosing where to put their increases in thief abilities). It wasn’t some golden age of role play, it was that there was no choices to make.
On the contrary, fighters distinguished themselves by being like different people, the same way people in the real world distinguish themselves. Having different personalities and different tastes. They didn't need mechanical options to distinguish themselves.
Anecdote, played a fiery sorceress once. There was nothing about her magic or abilities to distinguish her. She was your bog standard pyromancer. What distinguished her was her personality, how I played her, how she responded every time the idiot rogue pinched her butt and nearly got himself roasted alive. How she took on the challenge of needing to calm her fiery nature to get close to the unicorn, how she responded when the party figured out she needed to and looked at her. There was not a single thing about her mechanically to distinguish her. I didn't even build her as she was a pregen character for the module.
"And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. "
And this is false. They used to roll to see if encountered monsters were hostile or not, because guess what, sometimes you would encounter an orc who was not interested in fighting at fighting at all.
I keep reading that B/X and 3.5 are somehow better than 5e, but the explanations I am being given are "it gave us more freedom" and there's nothing taking away that freedom in 5e. Hell, I'm still doing it and there's arguably more freedom, as I pointed out in my edit above.
Freedom isn't just about what is explicit. It is also about the encouragements and subtle influences. 5e encourages players to look at mechanics as a menu. Sure, players can look outside of the mechanics, but normally they will do so only when there are no mechanics. That is why 4e was hailed as being more free, because it lacked rules, players felt like they had more freedom, because simply having mechanics made them feel like they had to do things a certain way, even though the books explicitly said otherwise. 5e and pf2 are the same way. They subtly push for following mechanics, printed or homebrew.
And just because a lack of mechanics makes you feel more free, doesn't mean you actually are more free. In fact, that mindset limits your freedom, because even when you are comfortable being free when the mechanics are out of the way, when the mechanics do show up, you still feel the need to follow the mechanics, even if it is just following your homebrew mechanics. Sure you don't actually have to, but making homebrew mechanics is not defying the mechanical play, it is keeping the mechanical mindset.
Lastly, I want to reiterate, that I am not claiming any edition to be better than any other in a general sense. Each has different traits, and each fits different playstyles, and there isn't a right answer or a better answer to which playstyle you prefer to play. But there are always consequences, always costs, always a give and take.
"Hasbro and WotC didn't try to "end" OGL. They tried to update it, and they stated their reasons for doing so. If you don't believe those statements that's fine, but I caution against making assumptions based on information you don't have. At any rate, that episode saw several companies that create third-party 5E content commit to making their own systems. Whatever you think Hasbro and WotC were trying to do, they ultimately encouraged more growth in the non-5E segment of the TTRPG space."
They tried to end it. I'm not saying they weren't replacing it with something else, but they tried to end it. That why the lawyers that literally wrote the ogl originally had to actually speak up about the issue and say that the intent was for the OGL to be perpetual and not allowed to be ended and they were committed to making sure that WotC would not do so even so far as defending it in court. WotC and Hasbro claiming that they were just updating it is just the double speak description of what they were trying to do.
"If it's hard to imagine a world where the TTRPG space doesn't have room for anything but D&D"
That is not what I was saying. there is this thing, which I have no good term for at the moment. It is the collective stuff that "everybody knows." It is usually wrong of course, but similarly there is the stuff that "everybody knows" and stuff the "everybody does" and similar "everybody" things that we might perhaps call the collective pool. Marvel and DC are in the collective pool. The others are not. It doesn't mean the other stuff doesn't exist, it just means they lack a certain ubiquitous recognition or reputation that exists almost subconsciously among the majority of members of a society. For example, in America "everyone knows" that animation is for kids or Simpsons kind of casual humor and not for serious mature storytelling. Doesn't matter that Japan proves that sentiment wrong every day and that there is a large and growing segment of Americans who watch the serious and mature Japanese animations, but anime and the serious mature storytelling in animated format is still not indoctrinated into the collective pool of what "everyone knows." And there are effects caused by that.
I am going to risk it, and I hope I don't dinged for it, but I have kept thinking about some stuff while working on those damned books of mine.
A guess about Summation:...
This post is well said. Puts a lot of things into words that I simply couldn't.
I don't agree with everything, but in large part I do agree.
"I do not, however, place the fault with the company or the game itself "
This part however, I think that the companies are partly, and only partly, at fault. Companies want to monetize, and that is totally fair, so they certain have the means and motive to subtly shape their products to encourage trends in the direction they desire. They may not have created the idea of playing the games in a programmatic way, but they absolutely and intentionally help it along, because that makes it easier for them to monetize. I think it hurts the industry as a whole, even though you can't really say there is anything wrong with people playing that way, but the fact that both the major companies running shape what they do to focus things into a style more readily monetized still has rippling effects throughout the industry.
Certain Paizo folks have even said they explicitly do this for their PFS thing because they want every PFS session to have a consistent feel and therefore they set everything up specifically so that disparate GMs will still have a consistency in how they run things, and that means being programmatic.
A second point here, is that aside from the acceptance or programmability of mechanics is the use of mechanics. The fact that simply having an anti-trap skill, tends to make people think first of using the anti-trap skill for every trap, and to feel like someone in every party must have the anti-trap skill, and that for most, the only escape from that is to not have an anti-trap skill.
But it interests me that people also limit their view of mechanics to how they are used. Someone in this thread, I lost where it is, mentioned Disable Device as being exclusive to traps. No thought to the possible use for sabotage of general machinery, or if it might work on constructs (they are devices after all, and if it works on magical traps, why not magical devices).
That also reminded me of a discussion long ago about the DCs for climb. Someone in that thread had mentioned how no one needed to raise climb skill very high because none of the DCs listed in the book were high, and they listed the highest modifier in the book. My response was to lay out a narrative situation in which multiple of the additive modifiers in the book could easily result in extremely high climb DCS, such as climbing a cliff in the middle of terrible storm with minuscule handholds and a few other modifiers. It apparently never occurred to them that additive modifiers could be added together, likely because they had never seen it done, regardless of what the mechanics actually said even when they were reading the mechanics to make their example.
No, I wouldn’t wonder why you would be a minimalist, the point was to have you give me an idea of how your view is structured — that helps.
freeform is what I expected.
as the point about classes: yes, I have 20 classes. Each class a set fixed list of capabilities, an axiom, and an affinity. They also have a list of some several hundred different abilities they can choose from to customize their PC.
but I do operate from an Archetype basis. To me and to my players, when you step away from archetypes, it stops feeling like D&D. 0e, B/X, 1e, 2e all operated from the basis of an archetype, and that is a fundamental structure that holds all versions of D&D together. In broad game theory, there are Archetype, Skill, and Freeform bases, and those determine much of the overall structure. FATE, for example, is more a Freeform style, less concerned with concept. D&D is an archetype based system. Traveller did the Skill style.
stepping away from Archetypes makes it not feel like D&D. Doesn’t matter what the archetypes are, mind you, but they need to be present or I am uninterested. There’s a reason that we play only four games systems regularly despite having tried and worked on hundreds: we know what we like, and from there we just move on. Of them, we play D&D the most. But none of them escaped our re-engineering.
however, the archetypes serve as starting points for the development of a person of that world. The world is the Structure, and as such it sets the space that provides the limits, not the game. Nor does that inherently mean I that I still think in terms of classes - assumption without evidence. You have too narrow a sample to determine that from.
i do think in terms of rules. It is a game, and other than Calvinball, games have rules. All games. Indeed, the nature of games is predicated on the basis of rules — so anyone who is talking about games is talking about rules, fundamentally, and thus even you think in terms of rules.
the traps I mentioned— the ones you jumped to the conclusion were pit traps, even though I never described them as pit traps — were solved using several different mechanics. Just not ones that had a damn thing to do with any trap related skill or ability. Your response, though, highlighted that there was an absence of knowledge about 5es rules, and so rather than I respond, I deleted what I had been going to say.
you also forgot: the cleric did have a tool to disarm traps. And could have used it. So the question you asked is, again, still answers by the same response. Throwing sandbags to trigger spike throwers, lifting, hauling, positioning, and using a log — these all still had mechanical tests and challenges.
as for a narrative choice, everything in the books is a narrative choice, including the use of the mechanics or not using them. The narrative choice bit of the clothing is no different from my player’s deciding “that looks like a trapped area, let’s solve that problem” and then doing it. All of that was narrative, improvisational, and creative. So, again, no distinction and an empty argument.
The meta textual influence you reference requires specific evidence to use as an argument, though. I am aware such things exist, but I am also aware of how they operate, explicitly, and so I would need to have some concrete examples in order to accept that argument. How, specifically, do they teach looking at the game as a game of chess in terms of maximizing and optimizing?
last I checked, chess doesn’t allow you to alter how the pieces move. The optimization in chess is not in the game, it is in the player, and not a part of the game but an outgrowth of playing it.
if you mean the mathematical optimization to cause the greatest amount of damage, the game doesn’t do that — that is the outcome of the way that people play it — a way that encourages more combat. Reduce the combat, and the value in optimization for that purpose fades. But also, optimization is not a bad thing — everyone optimizes time, ability, skill sets, minutes used, and even their appearance. In real life, not the game. The game is just an expression of that same principle.
so that argument, thus far, appears empty as well. If more DM ran wilderness survival games, PCs would be optimized for that, instead — there are numbers involved. Engineers love numbers.
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All of your "criticisms" of B/X are exactly why it remains so popular among old-school gamers—even more so than AD&D—and why it's the preferred iteration of D&D for hacking in the OSR movement.
More OSR games are built on its chassis or are even direct or near direct copies of it than they resemble any other edition of the game. Including the most recent one.
I know, I have more B/X based games on my shelf, than all other games combined and my library is not small. In my view, B/X is the single best version of D&D ever, it is, in a word, a Dungeons and Dragons construction kit. A perfect baseline for making any kind of D&D you can imagine.
That said, using B/X in this way, is a considerable step above simply buying game and playing like 5e. It requires you to be a writer, a game designer, a dungeon master and even to a certain degree an artist. Its not an easy thing to create a holistic vision for a game from a base line like B/X. It takes quite a bit of work and dedication, but I do agree, this is exactly why its so popular with veteran DM's as it really is a perfect tool for creating your own vision.
But you are comparing apples and oranges. You are missing my point. It's not about "options." It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironically limiting their options.
I didn't miss your point, what I was pointing out is that the evidence is contrary to it. People don't limit themselves to "officially published options and supplements", they didn't back then and they do so even less now. I'm not a professional writer, game designer or publisher, what I am is an experienced DM and even I manage to sell the books I create on DM Guild very steadily. The reason people buy my books, the same reason they buy books from the guild in general is because people very specifically do not limit themselves to official options. Not everyone is comfortable designing and writing their own material, but the desire to expand their game beyond any limits is a huge driving force behind D&D. There is a massive 3rd party market. I wrote for example The Book fo Backgrounds: Volume 1 - Family Legacies in response to the fact that I thought the background options in the book were not narrative enough, not explicit or interesting enough and people love that book. I sell a few copies almost every single day. I think if people were as you describe limiting themselves, there is no way anyone would be buying books from a complete no-body novice writer/designer like me. What you are saying is simply not true.
5e's fan base is not the only one that was flexible like this. This was true in the 3e days and even in the 4e days. There has always been a drive to expand the rules and the game as a whole. It's in the DNA of D&D culture and really the only notable difference between OSR players and Modern D&D players is what system they use as their starting point, which I will agree with you, creates very different playstyles and games from either side can and often are built on very different philosophies, but there is also a tremendous amount of cross-over. There are more things in common between these two worlds than there are differences.
I mean I create content on DM's Guild and even though its made for 5e, most of this stuff is pretty system agnostic, I know because I use a lot of the stuff I create in my Old School Essentials games.
I think people in the OSR and I'm guilty of this too, often seek out differences in old school and new school gaming out of frustration of trying to get games off the ground in modern D&D culture and struggling to because of the popularity of 5e. It's such a force of nature, such an overwhelming influence that even among the OSR the most popular games are based on 5e... case in point, Shadowdark for example.
I have and always will be an OSR die hard and I will never stop trying to get modern gamers to play old school games as I mostly agree with you that in a lot of ways, those experiences are far more vivid than anything 5e can produce, but the more I play and the more I write for 5e, the more I realize that these perceived differences get smaller and smaller.
I have already mentioned more than once now that I am not just talking about official content.
I am no stranger to DMsGuild and DrivethruRPG. I even made mention of them in this very thread.
My main point has been about allowing players to use their imaginations to come up with—within reason—their own ideas as far as how their characters' classes or whatever go.
That is how we had to do it when we had "fewer options." Meaning our options were virtually unlimited.
Sure and what I'm saying to you is having more options available in the official Players Handbook has not ended that tradition. I run 5e games all the time it is exceedingly rare that someone creates a character straight out of the book without adjustment, its basically unheard of. No matter what is there, every player brings something to the table that requires something, that doesn't exist.
The difference today is that you have an entire community creating non-stop, so when you have an idea for some alteration to X class or you have an idea for Y feat or Z spell list.. you can go on DM Guild and probably find someone who also had this idea and if you don't find it, that right there becomes an opportunity for one of your players to create it and publish it, so the next guy that comes along with that same idea, does find it on the Guild.
You're saying that this creativity doesn't exist in modern gaming, I'm telling you it not only exists, it's even more common and bigger and happens more often now than it ever did back then. This very thing is actually what brought be back to 5e. If it wasn't for the insane artistry and creativity of players in the modern era, the sheer seemingly endless talent for imagining awesome stuff, I don't think the game itself would have been enough. It really is how awesome the player base is that drives me to play modern D&D.
I disagree with this. The "a rising tide lifts all boats" was true of the OGL. Imagine if Hollywood only supported Marvel superhero films. Movies like the Green Mile or You've Got Mail or Harry Potter or LotR or Star Wars or Star Trek would not exist, or if they did, then they would be low budget off brand "b rated" films that would not attract much attention.
The same applies here, which is why WotC and Hasbro tried to end the OGL, because they do not want all boats to rise. They want a monopoly. If they succeed in truly making a monopoly, it will hurt the scope of rpgs, limiting them greatly. Sure, you continue to get the little indy dev games, but ultimately, no one but WotC would matter to the general direction of the hobby. Paizo is thankfully big enough to stand, but even then you can still get a duopoly, similar to how Marvel and DC are practically the only superhero brands. Sure other companies have done supers, such as the Megamind film, but honestly, Megamind is literally the only non-game superhero anything I can thing of that isn't Marvel or DC. We are very likely facing a similar outcome with WotC and Paizo, a situation in which most roleplayers won't be able to name a rpg company beyond those two except for a few players on the fringes of gamer society. ANd if Paizo doesn't get some good VTT options of it's own pretty quickly, there is a good chance WotC might even overshadow them.
It's interesting that you bring up superhero comic books. While you're right that Marvel and DC have the most well-known stables of superhero characters, other publishers have superhero comics that have achieved lasting popularity and led to TV shows, movies, and games. Spawn is likely the most well-known because it's the longest-running indie superhero comic, but there are plenty of other examples. But the comic book industry is an interesting comparison because the big two - Marvel and DC - cater to the superhero fans and ignore a lot of folks who want other kinds of comic book stories. And while there are indie publishers who have popular superhero franchises, Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, IDW, Valiant, etc., publish comics that appeal to folks who want more than just superhero fare. If all you focus on is lamenting that indie publishers don't have their own Superman or Spider-Man then you miss out on amazing titles like Saga, The Walking Dead, Paper Girls, Resident Alien, Archie, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. And this is just like the way so many TTRPG systems have been developed that don't follow D&D's formulas (or even use a D20, let alone a D20-based system!). Yeah, I love playing D&D, but I also love playing Marvel Multiverse, Blades in the Dark, Girl by Moonlight, Deadlands, Tales of Xadia, and Monster of the Week
It’s interesting to me that people always bring up Marvel, especially the films, as this huge juggernaut that’s destroying all competition when as you say within comics there’s probably more indie publishers producing more types of comics then ever before. You also list a great variety of titles that have all had a shot at a to show or a film in the last 15 years that they wouldn’t have had without the MCU, often becoming popular with audiences that have no idea they’re based on a comic. Rather than being a destructive force for most of its time the MCU has been another great example of a rising tide lifting all boats
I since edited my post. Firstly by adding my very first mention of options in this thread:
What that "lack of options" meant was more negotiation at the table so that players could play characters they wanted. Balance was an afterthought in what was a game more about having fun and telling stories not unlike those we encountered in fantasy masterworks than it was aboutthe rules.
Yes. Some and maybe even many 5E players are willing to buy and make use of others' home-brew content and even home-brew themselves. Although I am genuinely interested to know how those who so often show they prioritize balance over drama to the point they scold others for not liking how Wizards have decided to do something might reconcile their believing they can do any better. Others just simply can't do a better job than Wizards' design team. But they can? That's quite the disconnect from which they are suffering.
I prefer a DIY/old-school approach to the game. And always will. Bothers me not that others don't like this. But acting as if there were "fewer options" because there were fewer rules is to misunderstand entirely how most people played back then.
Now sure it might be said that many players of 5E also favor this DIY approach. It's true. I have already mentioned my playing in a heavily modified 5E game. And it's wonderful. But it's wonderful because the DM has brought an old-school attitude to the table.
As I said of this elsewhere:
I have been playing in a heavily modified 5E game in which every level up sees the players negotiating what new class feature their characters will get or how an existing one will be improved. Because the DM prefers this more DIY/old-school approach and has grown weary of how predictable 5E has become after a decade of playing it.
I'm just curious here, but as you have a clear example at your own table of a highly modified 5e game and most of the posts here reveal the same about what other people, myself included are doing in their game, essentially highly modified 5e games. What makes you believe that this is not the norm? I mean you seem to believe that there are these "other" groups of modern gamers (5e players) that are all running RAW and refusing to allow player influence, adaptation and creativity, but what are you basing that on? I mean I have been playing 5e for a decade, I'm yet to run into anyone, online or offline that plays 5e RAW, the DM Guild is a literaral infinity engine of content creation, this entire forum is littered with people's creative ideas on how to adapt, change and add to the game. I see no evidence anywhere that anything like what you're describing, this sort of adherence to RAW or obedience to official content actually exists.
So what are you using as a basis for that assumption? I mean, what makes you believe that modern gamers are so narrow and uncreative given that you are literally surrounded by evidence to the contrary? I mean can you point to a forum post where someone says "No I just run RAW, no adaptions allowed"? Cause I have been around this and many D&D communities over the last 30+ years, a very long time and I have never seen what you describe exist anywhere....ever..
One of the reasons there is a dearth of DMs is because many players expect the game to be run as written. I have personally encountered this myself. Players who won't play if they can't play [X] class or [X] race. Because these have been replaced. If option [X] isn't available to them. Besides. It was in a book published by Wizards. Those are the rules!
I hope you don't mind me engaging you, I'm not like picking you out of the crowd to bust your chops, I just find the conversation intriguing. There are a couple of questions in here and I think each of them has an interesting train of thought and perhaps answer to some degree.
So to this first part, you've changed the subject a bit now. In your first thesis, this was a conversation about players creating and adding to the game, using their creativity to produce something unique and dynamic but now you have switched it to DM's limiting options and removing things, blocking players from getting to the creative thing they are trying to do. These two concepts are at odds with each other, they are in fact, polar opposite principles. In one, the players are expected to engage and be creative, to expand on the game based on its limits, to drive the creation and the DM to be responsive and allow for that dynamic creativity. As you pointed out is what is happening in your modified game and I believe is happening most D&D games regardless of edition or version, but now you are talking about DM power to limit players and limit their creativity, preferences and desires and living with a DM saying "no you can't do that".
I think you are right about the second part, players don't want to play in games where the DM is stringent about what is allowed and says no to creative ideas and player desires, limiting what options are available in the game as defaults but that is not a 5e, modern game attitude, that has always been true about D&D. Stringent DM's that follow the rules to the letter, that run RAW and even limit options present in the player's handbook has always even going back all the way to AD&D 1st edition been seen by players as "Not Fun DMing" if not outright "Bad Dming". So you're right, modern players don't like that. Their expectations are the DM will help them to bring their vision to the table, not silence it.
And how else can players bring that power-gaming mindset so popular on these forums to a table without getting a set of rules with which they are 100 percent familiar? I have seen threads on these very forums about eliminating things from games and players getting hysterical about it. Believing anything and everything in a book by Wizards must be available to them. You might have experienced less of this or even none of this. But don't pretend many of us who DM haven't encountered a lot of this.
Yeah I have seen that too, but generally speaking what is and isn't power gaming is a matter of option, not objective truth. I think most players want a balanced game, they are not trying to find a cheat code, but again, what is and isn't power gaming isn't some established thing. In this scenario what you are saying is that the DM knows best what is and isn't power gaming and they make the final call, which I agree is a very old-school "thinking" thing. Modern players expect such decisions to be discussions and debates as a group and the decision to remove something seen as OP to be a negotiated, group decision. The days of "DM ruling the game" are mostly over in modern gaming. All players, including DM's are seen as equals as the table in modern D&D culture.
None the less, this is very different than allowing things and allowing players to be creative, its about restrictions and taking away things and again, these are different principles.
How many 5E diehards won't even play a game of D&D if it isn't using the current official ruleset?
That alone should tell you you are wrong when you say players' expecting things to be run as written just doesn't exist.
So this is the crux of the thesis here, you are talking about two different things and your trying to lump them into one.
The first thing is running RAW and refusing to allow players to add things, to be creative and dynamic in expanding the game and bringing their personal character visions to the game. This, I don't agree exists in modern gaming culture at all, quite to the contrary, I think the 5e community, especially 5e DM's are responsible for the positive response and saying yes and allowing creativity in their games by the players, they made this an openness to creativity a D&D culture norm. Restricting this kind of creativity IS definitively an old-school D&D thing. This idea that the DM rules the game and commands what is and isn't allowed, stifling player creativity comes directly from Gygax. He instructed you in the 1st edition AD&D DMG to never trust players, assume they are all trying to power game and it is your responsibility to say no often and loudly. It's modern gaming that has rejected this concept.
The 2nd thing you are talking about is eliminating and restricting options already in the core rulebook, meaning, we are not just not going to play RAW, but we are going to cut things out of the game. On this I think you are right, modern gamers don't like that at all. They want more not less options and this is why the page count of the PHB consistently grows with each edition. This however is the hallmark of creativity and this constant desire to expand the creative space of D&D. In fact, the Players Handbook at this point is more of an instruction manual, via example on how to create species, classes, sub-classes, feats, spells, magic items etc... Its a book that says "look here is a sample and example of all the stuff you can create, you can use it as is, or you can create your own". You are right that players expect that everything available in the book will be available in the game and they don't like to have it tampered with.
That said, my personal experience is that players are open to limitations as long as there is a narrative reason for it. For example, the campaign I'm running right now called Dusk Haven Chronicles is a story of Dragonborn exploration and colonization from their perspective, one of the limitations of the game is that all players MUST be Dragonborn. I had no issue selling it to my players, they loved the idea and they are all playing Dragonborn and there is nothing weird about it, there was no hostility or challenge to it. I do think they have an expectation that such an implementation is not just arbitrary. If I for example said, you can only be Dragonborn because all the other species are OP... yeah, that would not have been ok, but as I did it for narrative reasons, no one had a problem.
Those two things are two different things. I know that. I simply pointed out the other because you insisted you have never met 5E players who don't insist on playing by the rules. You don't now get to point out to me I am talking about two very different things just because I have presented you with why I believe you are spectacularly wrong to believe 5E players who demand things be run as written "don't exist." They do. You never did respond to my question about how many players won't even play another version of the game. How many would not play if it was home-brewed enough to "no longer" be 5E in their eyes. If you really want to talk about a lack of creativity and rigidity and stringent limitations in the hobby.
That's not really what I said. I didn't say they "don't exist", I said I have never met any. I have no idea how many players won't even play another version of the game, I'm sure there is a number just as I'm sure there is a number of people in the OSR who would never play anything but 1e AD&D. What I do know that this stringent view is not a norm, if its anything.
Those two things however are not "opposites." They are in fact quite similar. Because the other sees players weaponizing the rules as written against their DMs. Whether people are tethered to rules and their imaginations limited by them or they are beating their fists on the rules and demanding they be followed to the letter these are people who care more about rules than they do the spirit of the rules or thinking outside of them or rulings. Again: I really don't think you quite understand what the OSR is really about. Have you even read Finch's primer? It's only considered to be the most representative text of the movement's philosophies by many. I asked you this once before. And got no answer.
Do you understand how hyperbolic that sounds? You are making a pretty baseless assumption about an entire player base something in the vicinity of 25 million strong with little to go on in the way of evidence other than your opinion and accusing them of being a bunch of uncreative, rules lawyers who weaponize game rules against their DM out of what? spite? Now you're attacking my OSR credentials in a subtle effort to insult me because I don't agree with you?
I understand the OSR just fine, I have read Finch and I don't have any issues understanding it, quite to the contrary, I could have written it because I lived it.
Modern gamers do not concede authority to rules any more than old-school gamers do and the creative and dynamic spirit of role-playing wasn't lost in the evolution of the game. Yes Mathews's primer was written in 08' during the 3e and early 4e era pointed out this leaning, but modern gamers also noted, complained about and ultimately demanded this to be changed. It wasn't just old-school gamers that rejected the "rules first" philosophy, it's actually the modern community that rejected it and it's why 4e is largely considered a failure. 5e is a drastic shift away from 3rd and 4th editions and it's a shift very specifically because players found the rules of the game intruding too much on their creative free-form role-playing. Its part of 5e culture to bunk the rules for story/narratives, this is part of the 5e D&D communities culture.
Its true that 5e players want a structured, organized and clear rule system, but then again, that's what we want in the OSR. I mean there is a reason why OSRIC exists, why old school essentials exists. Its not like the rules where changed, they were just made clearer, organized better, they are better edits of the same rules... why? Because all RPG players want a good D&D book with good D&D rules that are clear and easy to use. Being clear and easy to use, isn't a submission to the letter of law that you implying.
Sorry I just think your wrong, what your describing, doesn't really exist.
I am very accommodating as a DM. Am all ears if I think a player's ideas are creative. I don't think that means a player can just colonize a setting with a playable race for no good reason. If the player can't provide an explanation for something they want there is nothing "creative" about the choice they wish to make.
Would you let a player at your table have it that his or her character is going to be able to shoot lasers out of its eyes that ignore all armor and do d100 damage? Probably not. Does that mean you're a mean DM? No. Let's be sensible.
Do you know what a strawman argument is? Cause that's what you're making here. What point are you trying to make? Do you really believe 5e DM's are "stupid people" who don't know the difference between a player making a reasonable request for narrative reasons and someone who wants to shoot laser beams out of their eyes for d100 damage? Is that your thesis? Because, I don't think that was what your trying to sell me on.
We have very different definitions of creativity. As I said elsewhere in this thread I played a fighter in a heavily modified 5E campaign the concept of which was infinitely more interesting than what the archetypes in the PHB provide. A concept agreed upon by the DM and me. Before this I had a cleric whose concept was similarly conceived. I think all the options officially made available are dull and predictable. And not in the slightest bit creative.
I don't think that we do. You have made a strawman argument to try to show how different we are, but we are not different at all, not even a little bit. I bet our games are very similar just as your game is very similar to the game most DM's on this forum run their game. People heavily modifying their 5e games out of an interest in player creativity is the norm in modern D&D.
On the subject of power-gaming it has a fairly established definition. It means to prioritize optimization for purposes of power over story and characterization. Just because we are seeing more and more peopel come from video games and favor the approach doesn't mean you get to redefine it to make it seem more friendly.
Do you believe that your personal definition of Power Gaming is so general that everyone would agree with it universally? For example, I don't agree that is what power gaming is. I know plenty of power gamers who love stories and will always prioritize storytelling and narrative, but they still want the biggest, baddest sword, they always pick the most powerful spells and they want to win fights.... but they are also my best role-players. So are they power gamers?
And for the record, I don't think we are seeing that at all. In fact, I would say, most people come to D&D 5e, very specifically, very poignantly because they are more interested in storytelling than they are in game rules and limitations. Many people came to this game from watching Critical Role, essentially a D&D group of actors, most of which barely know the rules to the game save Matt Mercer.
This is why Bauldersgate 3 for example was far more influenced by modern gaming's need for detailed storytelling. The exact opposite is actually happening. PC games are becoming less about rules and more about story BECAUSE of this very modern story first culture that has been reborn since the launch of 5th edition.
I want to say too that there are differences between modern gaming and old-school gaming. There is no doubt about that, but they are driven mostly by playstyle differences which are governed by rules. If you're trying to make the case that there is a philosophical difference... yeah, maybe in the 3e and 4e days that was true to a degree and on that point I agree with Finch, I definitely think the game lost its way on that front to a certain degree, but in modern gaming I'm finding the philosophical differences between old school and modern gaming to be blending to a point of being indistinguishable.
All that is left are the rules differences. Any philosophy you claim, I promise you most 5e players will not disagree with you or challenge you, they are probably embracing it in their game. What your arguing is that 5e players are not embracing these gaming philosophies and I see people disagreeing with you on that point, not the philosophy, on the fact that your claiming that they don't believe in them.
The rules differences however do affect playstyle and I think this is really the only actual difference left between old school and new school.
Old-school games are deadlier, they are usually more focused on equipment vs. character powers, and they are usually more focused on open-world exploration, dungeon crawling, and dungeon survival which are all kind of unique playstyles usually not pursued by modern gamers. They are also more traditional where you have clear medieval tropes, more Tolkien-focused fantasy depictions.
I promise you that if you played in my game, unless you looked down on your character sheet, you would have no idea whether we are playing OSE or 5e. I run these games, exactly the same. The only thing that really separates my 5e and 1e games are the rules that we are actually using/applying as written. That's the difference. Not much else. Both games do have rules though and you do use them and that makes the biggest difference.
How do you reconcile saying in one breath players of 5E are the most flexible of players that ever did live and that they are more than happy to play at tables at which the DM runs things not as written and then defending those too inflexible to permit the DM's tinkering of a class so that it is not as written?
You are contradicting yourself.
You are also contradicting yourself when you claim to be a proponent of OSR principles but then sing the praises of 5E. Because 5E is the antithesis of the movement's principles. Finch and others have decried since 3rd. how the game now has characters with skills like Persuasion and Deception for example. Instead of demanding players actually role-play such things. The average player now doesn't even bother to do so unless he or she thinks it will grant Advantage. A player could put in the absolute most mediocre and unconvincing of a performance and roll a 20 and critically succeed at the task. It's bad game design. And bad game design that discourages actual role-playing.
Whenever someone decries the death of role playing because there’s skills for social encounters all I see is people trying to gatekeep certain classes based on who the player is. Why should only charismatic players get to play charismatic characters? Not everyone is silver tongued and able to come up with elaborate conversations on the fly so what, they should never get to play out their fantasy of being exactly that type of person? They should never get to play a Bard, a Warlock or a Sorcerer? Why stop at just social skills if you’re following that logic? Sorry, you can’t play a Barbarian unless you’ve got anger issues. Want to play a Fighter? Get down and give me 200 pushups or I won’t let you have a decent strength score. It’s an idiotic and exclusionary train of thought. Let people play how they enjoy playing
So now you want an IQ test to play a wizard? It’s all just gate keeping BS if you demand that players have the same skills as their characters. As I said, why draw the line at soft skills and not demand only physically strong people get to play martial characters?
No. And your similarly deeply flawed comparison of expecting any player who simply wants to play a martial class to prove his or her athletic prowess and expecting a player who then wants his or her character in game to persuade or deceive an NPC to at least put in some effort and role-play in what is a role-playing game is profoundly silly.
So why even roll for stats if you’re then going to turn around to a socially awkward player and say their 20 points in Charisma doesn’t count because they personally can’t persuade you of something?
So now you want an IQ test to play a wizard? It’s all just gate keeping BS if you demand that players have the same skills as their characters. As I said, why draw the line at soft skills and not demand only physically strong people get to play martial characters?
Why draw that line? Because there is no comparison. We don't get up out of chairs and fight things do we? We do however describe what our characters will do or say. That is what role-playing is. Making it all about a roll is roll playing. And not role-playing. This is been a clear distinction made in the hobby for decades.
But there is a comparison, a totally one for one comparison. You’re letting a physically weak individual play a hugely strong Barbarian because one of their numbers just happens to be high but not letting a socially awkward person take advantage of where their high stats are just because you’d rather pull them massively out of their comfort zone and make them miserable. As I said at that point why even let them roll for stats? Why let them play a Bard? You’re the one who keeps claiming that 5e limits players to specific classes and character concepts but then contradict yourself totally by saying that you should only be allowed to play a character that matches your real world abilities. That’s not much of a fantasy now is it?
So why even roll for stats if you’re then going to turn around to a socially awkward player and say their 20 points in Charisma doesn’t count because they personally can’t persuade you of something?
CHA in earlier editions of the game served mostly two functions: how many retainers a character might attract—such is the nature of charisma—and how the character might influence how an encounter was going to respond to its presence.
It was even made pretty clear it was NOT a measure of a character's personality. Or appearance. A character with an extremely low CHA could still be likeable.
Do you honestly doubt a socially awkward player's ability to be at all persuasive when describing what he or she wants a character to do or say? I think that says more about you than it does a rule you don't like.
I’m not doubting them at all, you’re the one saying they shouldn’t be able to succeed at a persuasion check unless they can personally persuade you, I’m saying that if they aren’t comfortable doing that they shouldn’t have entire classes closed off to them
i do think in terms of rules. It is a game, and other than Calvinball, games have rules. All games. Indeed, the nature of games is predicated on the basis of rules — so anyone who is talking about games is talking about rules, fundamentally, and thus even you think in terms of rules.
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you also forgot: the cleric did have a tool to disarm traps. And could have used it. So the question you asked is, again, still answers by the same response. Throwing sandbags to trigger spike throwers, lifting, hauling, positioning, and using a log — these all still had mechanical tests and challenges.
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as for a narrative choice, everything in the books is a narrative choice, including the use of the mechanics or not using them. The narrative choice bit of the clothing is no different from my player’s deciding “that looks like a trapped area, let’s solve that problem” and then doing it. All of that was narrative, improvisational, and creative. So, again, no distinction and an empty argument.
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The meta textual influence you reference requires specific evidence to use as an argument, though. I am aware such things exist, but I am also aware of how they operate, explicitly, and so I would need to have some concrete examples in order to accept that argument. How, specifically, do they teach looking at the game as a game of chess in terms of maximizing and optimizing?
1) This is not really true, which is part of my point. Do you solve problems in the real world by wondering which rules are the right ones to apply? Do you encounter spilled flour and wondering which mechanic will pick it up? Do authors have their characters act according to a set of rules?
In some sense the real world has rules, they are called the laws of physics, but people don't start picking out laws of physics to solve their problems.
Indeed, for me, I have always had an issue with calling RPGs "games" for this very precise reason, because the style of RPG I got into was not about rules. It was not built on rules. We used mechanics as aids, but you could've easily taken them away and our game would not have slowed down. We would probably get more frustrated at times and suffer more miscommunications, but fundamentally, we could play without rules.
Sure you might argue that a character having a particular personality is "a rule" but that is truly bending things away from the argument and I'm pretty sure you're smart enough to know that. There is a massive difference between a writer giving a character a consistent behavior vs a player of chess choosing their next move.
2) A tool is not a mechanic, and you use the right tool for the job. Thieves tools are like lockpicks and pliers and such. You mention having players make mechanical challenges to move a log into position, and I really got to wonder why. The only thing that comes to my mind is that you felt there needed to be some sort of test, otherwise, why have the trap?
For me, there are three reasons to have a trap, the first is because it makes for a trap to be there and you want to show the trap being there because of what it communicates to the players, whether it be showing detail of the world to build verisimilitude or because it might be a clue or it might provide insight into something up ahead. The second is to make a scene where the players need to make a meaningful choice, which could be taking a risk or spending resources or impacting the life and livelihood of other characters. Third is to make them think creatively.
Where is the risk in moving a log? Where is the expenditure of resources? Mechanical challenges here do not seem to do anything other dictate whether they need to come up with a different plan. Not much risk, not much cost, not much impact. Rolling dice challenges here do not add a significant amount in any of these terms. What it does do is reward the meta play of game mechanics, not character build nor character personality.
3) Narrative choice in the sense I'm discussing it, is exclusively the choices within the context of the narrative milieu. There is a difference between looking at the mechanics, picking the best option and then building up story around that choice, vs making a choice based on the character you are playing and their perceptions and knowledge, then representing it with mechanics. Do you not see how the outcomes of these two alternatives are different?
4) I'm not the one that brought up minmaxing. Such subtleties in influence are generally difficult to get right because they are something that happens on a holistic level. You generally can't pin them down to "they made this particular mechanic like this so that players would be like that." There are exceptions but outside of gaming is easier to find some.
When a store puts snacks right next to the register, it is making it easy to give in to an impulse purchase which easily leads to a habit of giving in to impulse buying. Similarly, companies pay stores to put their product at a particular height because it makes it stand out and most people will take the easy solution and given a choice between an easy reach and reaching to the lowest or highest shelf. Yes, that has a significant impact on sales that absolutely makes it worth buying particular shelves. The same is true for the anti-trap skill. In 3.5 and pf1, the anti-trap skill exists, and that makes it easier to just use the anti-trap skill than to figure out an alternative not involving mechanics. This builds a habit of looking at mechanics first, which then drives creativity and problem solving to look first and foremost at mechanics. Subtle psychological tricks that matter.
The witch class. There is a sort of witch class in the core rulebooks, but DMs wouldn't allow it, even if they had homebrew, because to them it was somehow not legitimate, and that was important to them. Why? Because they have a certain reliance on the mechanics for how they think and resolve issues, and allowing the witch class makes them uncomfortable because it breaks the underlying assumptions they don't even know they are making.
Another example is flipping a table over for cover. Players won't do this. It's a trope we see in movies many times, and while players rarely have an issue with the idea, they never think of it themselves. The simple case of having a bunch of mechanics puts them in a mindset of thinking in terms of the mechanics, which means options not explicitly available in the mechanics tend to not be thought of. Most of the players I know that are not this limited, play freeform or some very rules light system that has mechanics more for story control rather than "what the character can do," and even then they usually limit themselves when playing in a "crunchy" system.
Indeed, the very fact that DnD mechanics are about what a character can do, instead of players having narrative control of outcomes, shapes the way they think of solutions and make plans. In fact, have you noticed that dnd homebrew is basically never a homebrew mechanic about narrative story control? I've never seen a dnd homebrew mechanic like "roll X, and on these result, the player gets to succeed and they get to come up with an additional boon, but this other value means that even though they succeed the GM gets to add a problem or complicaion, and this other value means they fail but they still get to come up with some advantage..." It is something that doesn't really fit with DnD mechanics so it doesn't get homebrewed in even though it is a fundamental and well used mechanic elsewhere. It is a contradictory mechanic. I can see that, yet I'm not really sure how to put into words the reason it is a contradictory structure.
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SandeebaRezYouri - That is not the point the above user is making. That is the point you are trying to make, but you do not get to just decide to insert your own points into another user's post because it fits your narrative. I will also note that, once again, you are being inconsistent to the point of being hypocritical in your posting--after all, you ranted in another post about how 5e leaves too much up to the DM (which you said could result in inconsistent rulings or confusion)... and are now trying to justify your love of earlier editions by saying that DMs could just translate things into DM-contrived mechanical terms (resulting in the very same problems you said 5e had).
There's some other nonsense you write, like your trying to say "encounters did not need to be combat" as if that was a unique feature of earlier editions not existent in 5e... even though 5e explicitly makes the non-combat encounter a clear part of the game.
Your anecdotes, your inconsistency in articulating your own points, and your clear lack of understanding of 5e are, however, are helpful. In an earlier post, I said your problem seemed to be a lack of understanding of 5e--after all, the near totality of your posting on 5e has demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of 5e's rules and systems, as nearly every single person on this thread has pointed out to you. I realize now that I was wrong--your problem is not that you do not understand 5e; it is that you do not seem to fundamentally grasp any edition of D&D.
At its core, your anecdotes about prior editions of D&D share a common thread - a dedication to using the "Rule of Cool" instead of looking up the rules. It is pretty clear you played earlier editions fast and loose with the official rules, confusing your lackadaisical approach to the game for how the game was designed to be played. Perhaps that was because you were younger and the rules were less important in your youth; perhaps it was because you did not really understand the rules; perhaps it was because your group just wanted to do what they thought might be cool, rules be darned. No matter the reason, it is clear you gained an anarchistic view of earlier editions that is not really supported by the reality of those editions' rules, many of which were far more intensive than 5e's.
Naturally, if you go from a game system where you decided not to learn the rules and do whatever you want, assuming without verifying there were no rules to support your Rule of Cool philosophy and start looking at 5e in terms of the rules... well, of course you are going to think 5e is stifling. But, here's a little tip for you - if you and your friends who ignored most of the 3.5 rules want to ignore most of the 5e rules, you are welcome to do that in 5e as well.
Now, there is nothing wrong with playing by Rule of Cool as the superseding authority. I certainly would not want to play at your table--but that is the joy of D&D. As long as you find a table that is a good fit for you, there is no true wrong way to play.
First, people often limit themselves without knowing it, and without intending to.
Second, there are multiple ways a limitation can be implemented. It's true that 5e does not explicitly deny creativity, but 5e's very design has an influence on the very structure of thinking of the players. Some players can remain unaffected by that, but it is a very subtle thing that goes by unnoticed, and such influences are not some esoteric thing that people can't control. Right now, people in power around the world use these exact kinds of subtle influences to manipulate the masses. But these influences are not always done intentionally, but sometimes they are.
Take for example, early windows, as in the operating system for computers. There was once a literal cheat sheet for designing windows programs, which did things like establish that check boxes were square and intended for when multiple options could be selected, and radio buttons were circular and for when only a single option could be selected, because then as became familiar with windows programs, they would subconsciously learn these rules and it would improve clarity, as people, without knowing why, would see radio buttons and just know that it meant they had to choose only one option. Most people never even realized it happened, never saw the cheat sheet. They just absorbed the information the same way children learn their first language.
This effect always happens. Sometimes designers take control of this effect, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes designers use this effect for something intentional and there end up also being unintended learned things as well.
5e is no different. The very structure of it teaches things, and not all those things are simply how to play. The notion of the role mechanics have in the running of the game, is one of those things. And both 5e and pf2, both encourage looking at mechanics in the same way players consider the mechanics of Chess. Homebrew vs wotc written mechanics is utterly meaningless to this point.
One thing that did not escape my notice, is that you still just have pre-written classes and races. You are not telling us how you create a unique for each player's unique character concept. No, you tell us about the classes you create that your players choose from the same as they would from the core book. When my DM gave my character's clothes a bonus to hide, it was a unique thing that represented a narrative choice. I did not choose an option from the book, nor did I choose an option from houserules the DM made. I made a purely narrative choice, and the DM did something unique to represent it.
You on the other hand, still think in terms of creating a set of rules and following those rules, and you consider creative freedom to be your ability to make your own rules. You don't give examples of making rulings. Even earlier, with the "traps" that your players circumvented without rolling a check, did not describe an occasion of the players forgoing the use of a mechanical option they had, but instead the players did not have a mechanical option, which forced them to do something not based on mechanics, further, the traps in the examples were not traps that one would disable anyway. So what were the alternatives? Perhaps a better question for you to answer, is "have your players ever been in a situation in which there was an obvious solution that would involve rolling a simple check that they could reasonably have done, that they instead tried something else anyway?"
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To answer your question bout the 7 types of DM, I'm a mixture of the Worldbuilder and minimalist. You might question that since I like 3.5 over 5e. How can I be the minimalist? Because, like the description of the minimalist, I let players try stuff. They want to do something, I do not look up whether it is allowed or not in the rules, instead I consider how it could be done according to how my world works, and then I consider whether it has any impact on rolling dice or permanent results to the character, if yes to either, then I figure out how to represent that with the mechanics. If a roll will be required, I judge what roll works best, and what bonuses or penalties best represent the effects that would impact the character's performance. I use the mechanics as a tool to make the player's choice happen and also have meaning.
I could easily go ultra light and just have players roll a d20 for everything, but by having skills and such, things they do can have an impact on their success, and that makes choices matter, even when they are not simply looking at the mechanics as a menu of choices. I could do the same without mechanics, but then I'd just be making mechanics in my head. If I play freeform, and I give a player a cloak that aids hiding, then I have to remember that they have a cloak that makes hiding easier, and I have to remember how much that cloak helps (are they basically invisible, or is just hunter's camo that provides a minor boost to hiding but only in woods?), in which case I'm making mechanics, but just keeping them all in my head.
On the contrary, fighters distinguished themselves by being like different people, the same way people in the real world distinguish themselves. Having different personalities and different tastes. They didn't need mechanical options to distinguish themselves.
Anecdote, played a fiery sorceress once. There was nothing about her magic or abilities to distinguish her. She was your bog standard pyromancer. What distinguished her was her personality, how I played her, how she responded every time the idiot rogue pinched her butt and nearly got himself roasted alive. How she took on the challenge of needing to calm her fiery nature to get close to the unicorn, how she responded when the party figured out she needed to and looked at her. There was not a single thing about her mechanically to distinguish her. I didn't even build her as she was a pregen character for the module.
"And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. "
And this is false. They used to roll to see if encountered monsters were hostile or not, because guess what, sometimes you would encounter an orc who was not interested in fighting at fighting at all.
Freedom isn't just about what is explicit. It is also about the encouragements and subtle influences. 5e encourages players to look at mechanics as a menu. Sure, players can look outside of the mechanics, but normally they will do so only when there are no mechanics. That is why 4e was hailed as being more free, because it lacked rules, players felt like they had more freedom, because simply having mechanics made them feel like they had to do things a certain way, even though the books explicitly said otherwise. 5e and pf2 are the same way. They subtly push for following mechanics, printed or homebrew.
And just because a lack of mechanics makes you feel more free, doesn't mean you actually are more free. In fact, that mindset limits your freedom, because even when you are comfortable being free when the mechanics are out of the way, when the mechanics do show up, you still feel the need to follow the mechanics, even if it is just following your homebrew mechanics. Sure you don't actually have to, but making homebrew mechanics is not defying the mechanical play, it is keeping the mechanical mindset.
Lastly, I want to reiterate, that I am not claiming any edition to be better than any other in a general sense. Each has different traits, and each fits different playstyles, and there isn't a right answer or a better answer to which playstyle you prefer to play. But there are always consequences, always costs, always a give and take.
"Hasbro and WotC didn't try to "end" OGL. They tried to update it, and they stated their reasons for doing so. If you don't believe those statements that's fine, but I caution against making assumptions based on information you don't have. At any rate, that episode saw several companies that create third-party 5E content commit to making their own systems. Whatever you think Hasbro and WotC were trying to do, they ultimately encouraged more growth in the non-5E segment of the TTRPG space."
They tried to end it. I'm not saying they weren't replacing it with something else, but they tried to end it. That why the lawyers that literally wrote the ogl originally had to actually speak up about the issue and say that the intent was for the OGL to be perpetual and not allowed to be ended and they were committed to making sure that WotC would not do so even so far as defending it in court. WotC and Hasbro claiming that they were just updating it is just the double speak description of what they were trying to do.
"If it's hard to imagine a world where the TTRPG space doesn't have room for anything but D&D"
That is not what I was saying. there is this thing, which I have no good term for at the moment. It is the collective stuff that "everybody knows." It is usually wrong of course, but similarly there is the stuff that "everybody knows" and stuff the "everybody does" and similar "everybody" things that we might perhaps call the collective pool. Marvel and DC are in the collective pool. The others are not. It doesn't mean the other stuff doesn't exist, it just means they lack a certain ubiquitous recognition or reputation that exists almost subconsciously among the majority of members of a society. For example, in America "everyone knows" that animation is for kids or Simpsons kind of casual humor and not for serious mature storytelling. Doesn't matter that Japan proves that sentiment wrong every day and that there is a large and growing segment of Americans who watch the serious and mature Japanese animations, but anime and the serious mature storytelling in animated format is still not indoctrinated into the collective pool of what "everyone knows." And there are effects caused by that.
This post is well said. Puts a lot of things into words that I simply couldn't.
I don't agree with everything, but in large part I do agree.
"I do not, however, place the fault with the company or the game itself "
This part however, I think that the companies are partly, and only partly, at fault. Companies want to monetize, and that is totally fair, so they certain have the means and motive to subtly shape their products to encourage trends in the direction they desire. They may not have created the idea of playing the games in a programmatic way, but they absolutely and intentionally help it along, because that makes it easier for them to monetize. I think it hurts the industry as a whole, even though you can't really say there is anything wrong with people playing that way, but the fact that both the major companies running shape what they do to focus things into a style more readily monetized still has rippling effects throughout the industry.
Certain Paizo folks have even said they explicitly do this for their PFS thing because they want every PFS session to have a consistent feel and therefore they set everything up specifically so that disparate GMs will still have a consistency in how they run things, and that means being programmatic.
A second point here, is that aside from the acceptance or programmability of mechanics is the use of mechanics. The fact that simply having an anti-trap skill, tends to make people think first of using the anti-trap skill for every trap, and to feel like someone in every party must have the anti-trap skill, and that for most, the only escape from that is to not have an anti-trap skill.
But it interests me that people also limit their view of mechanics to how they are used. Someone in this thread, I lost where it is, mentioned Disable Device as being exclusive to traps. No thought to the possible use for sabotage of general machinery, or if it might work on constructs (they are devices after all, and if it works on magical traps, why not magical devices).
That also reminded me of a discussion long ago about the DCs for climb. Someone in that thread had mentioned how no one needed to raise climb skill very high because none of the DCs listed in the book were high, and they listed the highest modifier in the book. My response was to lay out a narrative situation in which multiple of the additive modifiers in the book could easily result in extremely high climb DCS, such as climbing a cliff in the middle of terrible storm with minuscule handholds and a few other modifiers. It apparently never occurred to them that additive modifiers could be added together, likely because they had never seen it done, regardless of what the mechanics actually said even when they were reading the mechanics to make their example.
No, I wouldn’t wonder why you would be a minimalist, the point was to have you give me an idea of how your view is structured — that helps.
freeform is what I expected.
as the point about classes: yes, I have 20 classes. Each class a set fixed list of capabilities, an axiom, and an affinity. They also have a list of some several hundred different abilities they can choose from to customize their PC.
but I do operate from an Archetype basis. To me and to my players, when you step away from archetypes, it stops feeling like D&D. 0e, B/X, 1e, 2e all operated from the basis of an archetype, and that is a fundamental structure that holds all versions of D&D together. In broad game theory, there are Archetype, Skill, and Freeform bases, and those determine much of the overall structure. FATE, for example, is more a Freeform style, less concerned with concept. D&D is an archetype based system. Traveller did the Skill style.
stepping away from Archetypes makes it not feel like D&D. Doesn’t matter what the archetypes are, mind you, but they need to be present or I am uninterested. There’s a reason that we play only four games systems regularly despite having tried and worked on hundreds: we know what we like, and from there we just move on. Of them, we play D&D the most. But none of them escaped our re-engineering.
however, the archetypes serve as starting points for the development of a person of that world. The world is the Structure, and as such it sets the space that provides the limits, not the game. Nor does that inherently mean I that I still think in terms of classes - assumption without evidence. You have too narrow a sample to determine that from.
i do think in terms of rules. It is a game, and other than Calvinball, games have rules. All games. Indeed, the nature of games is predicated on the basis of rules — so anyone who is talking about games is talking about rules, fundamentally, and thus even you think in terms of rules.
the traps I mentioned— the ones you jumped to the conclusion were pit traps, even though I never described them as pit traps — were solved using several different mechanics. Just not ones that had a damn thing to do with any trap related skill or ability. Your response, though, highlighted that there was an absence of knowledge about 5es rules, and so rather than I respond, I deleted what I had been going to say.
you also forgot: the cleric did have a tool to disarm traps. And could have used it. So the question you asked is, again, still answers by the same response. Throwing sandbags to trigger spike throwers, lifting, hauling, positioning, and using a log — these all still had mechanical tests and challenges.
as for a narrative choice, everything in the books is a narrative choice, including the use of the mechanics or not using them. The narrative choice bit of the clothing is no different from my player’s deciding “that looks like a trapped area, let’s solve that problem” and then doing it. All of that was narrative, improvisational, and creative. So, again, no distinction and an empty argument.
The meta textual influence you reference requires specific evidence to use as an argument, though. I am aware such things exist, but I am also aware of how they operate, explicitly, and so I would need to have some concrete examples in order to accept that argument. How, specifically, do they teach looking at the game as a game of chess in terms of maximizing and optimizing?
last I checked, chess doesn’t allow you to alter how the pieces move. The optimization in chess is not in the game, it is in the player, and not a part of the game but an outgrowth of playing it.
if you mean the mathematical optimization to cause the greatest amount of damage, the game doesn’t do that — that is the outcome of the way that people play it — a way that encourages more combat. Reduce the combat, and the value in optimization for that purpose fades. But also, optimization is not a bad thing — everyone optimizes time, ability, skill sets, minutes used, and even their appearance. In real life, not the game. The game is just an expression of that same principle.
so that argument, thus far, appears empty as well. If more DM ran wilderness survival games, PCs would be optimized for that, instead — there are numbers involved. Engineers love numbers.
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I didn't miss your point, what I was pointing out is that the evidence is contrary to it. People don't limit themselves to "officially published options and supplements", they didn't back then and they do so even less now. I'm not a professional writer, game designer or publisher, what I am is an experienced DM and even I manage to sell the books I create on DM Guild very steadily. The reason people buy my books, the same reason they buy books from the guild in general is because people very specifically do not limit themselves to official options. Not everyone is comfortable designing and writing their own material, but the desire to expand their game beyond any limits is a huge driving force behind D&D. There is a massive 3rd party market. I wrote for example The Book fo Backgrounds: Volume 1 - Family Legacies in response to the fact that I thought the background options in the book were not narrative enough, not explicit or interesting enough and people love that book. I sell a few copies almost every single day. I think if people were as you describe limiting themselves, there is no way anyone would be buying books from a complete no-body novice writer/designer like me. What you are saying is simply not true.
5e's fan base is not the only one that was flexible like this. This was true in the 3e days and even in the 4e days. There has always been a drive to expand the rules and the game as a whole. It's in the DNA of D&D culture and really the only notable difference between OSR players and Modern D&D players is what system they use as their starting point, which I will agree with you, creates very different playstyles and games from either side can and often are built on very different philosophies, but there is also a tremendous amount of cross-over. There are more things in common between these two worlds than there are differences.
I mean I create content on DM's Guild and even though its made for 5e, most of this stuff is pretty system agnostic, I know because I use a lot of the stuff I create in my Old School Essentials games.
I think people in the OSR and I'm guilty of this too, often seek out differences in old school and new school gaming out of frustration of trying to get games off the ground in modern D&D culture and struggling to because of the popularity of 5e. It's such a force of nature, such an overwhelming influence that even among the OSR the most popular games are based on 5e... case in point, Shadowdark for example.
I have and always will be an OSR die hard and I will never stop trying to get modern gamers to play old school games as I mostly agree with you that in a lot of ways, those experiences are far more vivid than anything 5e can produce, but the more I play and the more I write for 5e, the more I realize that these perceived differences get smaller and smaller.
Sure and what I'm saying to you is having more options available in the official Players Handbook has not ended that tradition. I run 5e games all the time it is exceedingly rare that someone creates a character straight out of the book without adjustment, its basically unheard of. No matter what is there, every player brings something to the table that requires something, that doesn't exist.
The difference today is that you have an entire community creating non-stop, so when you have an idea for some alteration to X class or you have an idea for Y feat or Z spell list.. you can go on DM Guild and probably find someone who also had this idea and if you don't find it, that right there becomes an opportunity for one of your players to create it and publish it, so the next guy that comes along with that same idea, does find it on the Guild.
You're saying that this creativity doesn't exist in modern gaming, I'm telling you it not only exists, it's even more common and bigger and happens more often now than it ever did back then. This very thing is actually what brought be back to 5e. If it wasn't for the insane artistry and creativity of players in the modern era, the sheer seemingly endless talent for imagining awesome stuff, I don't think the game itself would have been enough. It really is how awesome the player base is that drives me to play modern D&D.
It’s interesting to me that people always bring up Marvel, especially the films, as this huge juggernaut that’s destroying all competition when as you say within comics there’s probably more indie publishers producing more types of comics then ever before. You also list a great variety of titles that have all had a shot at a to show or a film in the last 15 years that they wouldn’t have had without the MCU, often becoming popular with audiences that have no idea they’re based on a comic. Rather than being a destructive force for most of its time the MCU has been another great example of a rising tide lifting all boats
I'm just curious here, but as you have a clear example at your own table of a highly modified 5e game and most of the posts here reveal the same about what other people, myself included are doing in their game, essentially highly modified 5e games. What makes you believe that this is not the norm? I mean you seem to believe that there are these "other" groups of modern gamers (5e players) that are all running RAW and refusing to allow player influence, adaptation and creativity, but what are you basing that on? I mean I have been playing 5e for a decade, I'm yet to run into anyone, online or offline that plays 5e RAW, the DM Guild is a literaral infinity engine of content creation, this entire forum is littered with people's creative ideas on how to adapt, change and add to the game. I see no evidence anywhere that anything like what you're describing, this sort of adherence to RAW or obedience to official content actually exists.
So what are you using as a basis for that assumption? I mean, what makes you believe that modern gamers are so narrow and uncreative given that you are literally surrounded by evidence to the contrary? I mean can you point to a forum post where someone says "No I just run RAW, no adaptions allowed"? Cause I have been around this and many D&D communities over the last 30+ years, a very long time and I have never seen what you describe exist anywhere....ever..
I hope you don't mind me engaging you, I'm not like picking you out of the crowd to bust your chops, I just find the conversation intriguing. There are a couple of questions in here and I think each of them has an interesting train of thought and perhaps answer to some degree.
So to this first part, you've changed the subject a bit now. In your first thesis, this was a conversation about players creating and adding to the game, using their creativity to produce something unique and dynamic but now you have switched it to DM's limiting options and removing things, blocking players from getting to the creative thing they are trying to do. These two concepts are at odds with each other, they are in fact, polar opposite principles. In one, the players are expected to engage and be creative, to expand on the game based on its limits, to drive the creation and the DM to be responsive and allow for that dynamic creativity. As you pointed out is what is happening in your modified game and I believe is happening most D&D games regardless of edition or version, but now you are talking about DM power to limit players and limit their creativity, preferences and desires and living with a DM saying "no you can't do that".
I think you are right about the second part, players don't want to play in games where the DM is stringent about what is allowed and says no to creative ideas and player desires, limiting what options are available in the game as defaults but that is not a 5e, modern game attitude, that has always been true about D&D. Stringent DM's that follow the rules to the letter, that run RAW and even limit options present in the player's handbook has always even going back all the way to AD&D 1st edition been seen by players as "Not Fun DMing" if not outright "Bad Dming". So you're right, modern players don't like that. Their expectations are the DM will help them to bring their vision to the table, not silence it.
Yeah I have seen that too, but generally speaking what is and isn't power gaming is a matter of option, not objective truth. I think most players want a balanced game, they are not trying to find a cheat code, but again, what is and isn't power gaming isn't some established thing. In this scenario what you are saying is that the DM knows best what is and isn't power gaming and they make the final call, which I agree is a very old-school "thinking" thing. Modern players expect such decisions to be discussions and debates as a group and the decision to remove something seen as OP to be a negotiated, group decision. The days of "DM ruling the game" are mostly over in modern gaming. All players, including DM's are seen as equals as the table in modern D&D culture.
None the less, this is very different than allowing things and allowing players to be creative, its about restrictions and taking away things and again, these are different principles.
So this is the crux of the thesis here, you are talking about two different things and your trying to lump them into one.
The first thing is running RAW and refusing to allow players to add things, to be creative and dynamic in expanding the game and bringing their personal character visions to the game. This, I don't agree exists in modern gaming culture at all, quite to the contrary, I think the 5e community, especially 5e DM's are responsible for the positive response and saying yes and allowing creativity in their games by the players, they made this an openness to creativity a D&D culture norm. Restricting this kind of creativity IS definitively an old-school D&D thing. This idea that the DM rules the game and commands what is and isn't allowed, stifling player creativity comes directly from Gygax. He instructed you in the 1st edition AD&D DMG to never trust players, assume they are all trying to power game and it is your responsibility to say no often and loudly. It's modern gaming that has rejected this concept.
The 2nd thing you are talking about is eliminating and restricting options already in the core rulebook, meaning, we are not just not going to play RAW, but we are going to cut things out of the game. On this I think you are right, modern gamers don't like that at all. They want more not less options and this is why the page count of the PHB consistently grows with each edition. This however is the hallmark of creativity and this constant desire to expand the creative space of D&D. In fact, the Players Handbook at this point is more of an instruction manual, via example on how to create species, classes, sub-classes, feats, spells, magic items etc... Its a book that says "look here is a sample and example of all the stuff you can create, you can use it as is, or you can create your own". You are right that players expect that everything available in the book will be available in the game and they don't like to have it tampered with.
That said, my personal experience is that players are open to limitations as long as there is a narrative reason for it. For example, the campaign I'm running right now called Dusk Haven Chronicles is a story of Dragonborn exploration and colonization from their perspective, one of the limitations of the game is that all players MUST be Dragonborn. I had no issue selling it to my players, they loved the idea and they are all playing Dragonborn and there is nothing weird about it, there was no hostility or challenge to it. I do think they have an expectation that such an implementation is not just arbitrary. If I for example said, you can only be Dragonborn because all the other species are OP... yeah, that would not have been ok, but as I did it for narrative reasons, no one had a problem.
That's not really what I said. I didn't say they "don't exist", I said I have never met any. I have no idea how many players won't even play another version of the game, I'm sure there is a number just as I'm sure there is a number of people in the OSR who would never play anything but 1e AD&D. What I do know that this stringent view is not a norm, if its anything.
Do you understand how hyperbolic that sounds? You are making a pretty baseless assumption about an entire player base something in the vicinity of 25 million strong with little to go on in the way of evidence other than your opinion and accusing them of being a bunch of uncreative, rules lawyers who weaponize game rules against their DM out of what? spite? Now you're attacking my OSR credentials in a subtle effort to insult me because I don't agree with you?
I understand the OSR just fine, I have read Finch and I don't have any issues understanding it, quite to the contrary, I could have written it because I lived it.
Modern gamers do not concede authority to rules any more than old-school gamers do and the creative and dynamic spirit of role-playing wasn't lost in the evolution of the game. Yes Mathews's primer was written in 08' during the 3e and early 4e era pointed out this leaning, but modern gamers also noted, complained about and ultimately demanded this to be changed. It wasn't just old-school gamers that rejected the "rules first" philosophy, it's actually the modern community that rejected it and it's why 4e is largely considered a failure. 5e is a drastic shift away from 3rd and 4th editions and it's a shift very specifically because players found the rules of the game intruding too much on their creative free-form role-playing. Its part of 5e culture to bunk the rules for story/narratives, this is part of the 5e D&D communities culture.
Its true that 5e players want a structured, organized and clear rule system, but then again, that's what we want in the OSR. I mean there is a reason why OSRIC exists, why old school essentials exists. Its not like the rules where changed, they were just made clearer, organized better, they are better edits of the same rules... why? Because all RPG players want a good D&D book with good D&D rules that are clear and easy to use. Being clear and easy to use, isn't a submission to the letter of law that you implying.
Sorry I just think your wrong, what your describing, doesn't really exist.
Do you know what a strawman argument is? Cause that's what you're making here. What point are you trying to make? Do you really believe 5e DM's are "stupid people" who don't know the difference between a player making a reasonable request for narrative reasons and someone who wants to shoot laser beams out of their eyes for d100 damage? Is that your thesis? Because, I don't think that was what your trying to sell me on.
I don't think that we do. You have made a strawman argument to try to show how different we are, but we are not different at all, not even a little bit. I bet our games are very similar just as your game is very similar to the game most DM's on this forum run their game. People heavily modifying their 5e games out of an interest in player creativity is the norm in modern D&D.
Do you believe that your personal definition of Power Gaming is so general that everyone would agree with it universally? For example, I don't agree that is what power gaming is. I know plenty of power gamers who love stories and will always prioritize storytelling and narrative, but they still want the biggest, baddest sword, they always pick the most powerful spells and they want to win fights.... but they are also my best role-players. So are they power gamers?
And for the record, I don't think we are seeing that at all. In fact, I would say, most people come to D&D 5e, very specifically, very poignantly because they are more interested in storytelling than they are in game rules and limitations. Many people came to this game from watching Critical Role, essentially a D&D group of actors, most of which barely know the rules to the game save Matt Mercer.
This is why Bauldersgate 3 for example was far more influenced by modern gaming's need for detailed storytelling. The exact opposite is actually happening. PC games are becoming less about rules and more about story BECAUSE of this very modern story first culture that has been reborn since the launch of 5th edition.
I want to say too that there are differences between modern gaming and old-school gaming. There is no doubt about that, but they are driven mostly by playstyle differences which are governed by rules. If you're trying to make the case that there is a philosophical difference... yeah, maybe in the 3e and 4e days that was true to a degree and on that point I agree with Finch, I definitely think the game lost its way on that front to a certain degree, but in modern gaming I'm finding the philosophical differences between old school and modern gaming to be blending to a point of being indistinguishable.
All that is left are the rules differences. Any philosophy you claim, I promise you most 5e players will not disagree with you or challenge you, they are probably embracing it in their game. What your arguing is that 5e players are not embracing these gaming philosophies and I see people disagreeing with you on that point, not the philosophy, on the fact that your claiming that they don't believe in them.
The rules differences however do affect playstyle and I think this is really the only actual difference left between old school and new school.
Old-school games are deadlier, they are usually more focused on equipment vs. character powers, and they are usually more focused on open-world exploration, dungeon crawling, and dungeon survival which are all kind of unique playstyles usually not pursued by modern gamers. They are also more traditional where you have clear medieval tropes, more Tolkien-focused fantasy depictions.
I promise you that if you played in my game, unless you looked down on your character sheet, you would have no idea whether we are playing OSE or 5e. I run these games, exactly the same. The only thing that really separates my 5e and 1e games are the rules that we are actually using/applying as written. That's the difference. Not much else. Both games do have rules though and you do use them and that makes the biggest difference.
Whenever someone decries the death of role playing because there’s skills for social encounters all I see is people trying to gatekeep certain classes based on who the player is. Why should only charismatic players get to play charismatic characters? Not everyone is silver tongued and able to come up with elaborate conversations on the fly so what, they should never get to play out their fantasy of being exactly that type of person? They should never get to play a Bard, a Warlock or a Sorcerer? Why stop at just social skills if you’re following that logic? Sorry, you can’t play a Barbarian unless you’ve got anger issues. Want to play a Fighter? Get down and give me 200 pushups or I won’t let you have a decent strength score. It’s an idiotic and exclusionary train of thought. Let people play how they enjoy playing
So now you want an IQ test to play a wizard? It’s all just gate keeping BS if you demand that players have the same skills as their characters. As I said, why draw the line at soft skills and not demand only physically strong people get to play martial characters?
So why even roll for stats if you’re then going to turn around to a socially awkward player and say their 20 points in Charisma doesn’t count because they personally can’t persuade you of something?
But there is a comparison, a totally one for one comparison. You’re letting a physically weak individual play a hugely strong Barbarian because one of their numbers just happens to be high but not letting a socially awkward person take advantage of where their high stats are just because you’d rather pull them massively out of their comfort zone and make them miserable. As I said at that point why even let them roll for stats? Why let them play a Bard? You’re the one who keeps claiming that 5e limits players to specific classes and character concepts but then contradict yourself totally by saying that you should only be allowed to play a character that matches your real world abilities. That’s not much of a fantasy now is it?
I’m not doubting them at all, you’re the one saying they shouldn’t be able to succeed at a persuasion check unless they can personally persuade you, I’m saying that if they aren’t comfortable doing that they shouldn’t have entire classes closed off to them
1) This is not really true, which is part of my point. Do you solve problems in the real world by wondering which rules are the right ones to apply? Do you encounter spilled flour and wondering which mechanic will pick it up? Do authors have their characters act according to a set of rules?
In some sense the real world has rules, they are called the laws of physics, but people don't start picking out laws of physics to solve their problems.
Indeed, for me, I have always had an issue with calling RPGs "games" for this very precise reason, because the style of RPG I got into was not about rules. It was not built on rules. We used mechanics as aids, but you could've easily taken them away and our game would not have slowed down. We would probably get more frustrated at times and suffer more miscommunications, but fundamentally, we could play without rules.
Sure you might argue that a character having a particular personality is "a rule" but that is truly bending things away from the argument and I'm pretty sure you're smart enough to know that. There is a massive difference between a writer giving a character a consistent behavior vs a player of chess choosing their next move.
2) A tool is not a mechanic, and you use the right tool for the job. Thieves tools are like lockpicks and pliers and such. You mention having players make mechanical challenges to move a log into position, and I really got to wonder why. The only thing that comes to my mind is that you felt there needed to be some sort of test, otherwise, why have the trap?
For me, there are three reasons to have a trap, the first is because it makes for a trap to be there and you want to show the trap being there because of what it communicates to the players, whether it be showing detail of the world to build verisimilitude or because it might be a clue or it might provide insight into something up ahead. The second is to make a scene where the players need to make a meaningful choice, which could be taking a risk or spending resources or impacting the life and livelihood of other characters. Third is to make them think creatively.
Where is the risk in moving a log? Where is the expenditure of resources? Mechanical challenges here do not seem to do anything other dictate whether they need to come up with a different plan. Not much risk, not much cost, not much impact. Rolling dice challenges here do not add a significant amount in any of these terms. What it does do is reward the meta play of game mechanics, not character build nor character personality.
3) Narrative choice in the sense I'm discussing it, is exclusively the choices within the context of the narrative milieu. There is a difference between looking at the mechanics, picking the best option and then building up story around that choice, vs making a choice based on the character you are playing and their perceptions and knowledge, then representing it with mechanics. Do you not see how the outcomes of these two alternatives are different?
4) I'm not the one that brought up minmaxing. Such subtleties in influence are generally difficult to get right because they are something that happens on a holistic level. You generally can't pin them down to "they made this particular mechanic like this so that players would be like that." There are exceptions but outside of gaming is easier to find some.
When a store puts snacks right next to the register, it is making it easy to give in to an impulse purchase which easily leads to a habit of giving in to impulse buying. Similarly, companies pay stores to put their product at a particular height because it makes it stand out and most people will take the easy solution and given a choice between an easy reach and reaching to the lowest or highest shelf. Yes, that has a significant impact on sales that absolutely makes it worth buying particular shelves. The same is true for the anti-trap skill. In 3.5 and pf1, the anti-trap skill exists, and that makes it easier to just use the anti-trap skill than to figure out an alternative not involving mechanics. This builds a habit of looking at mechanics first, which then drives creativity and problem solving to look first and foremost at mechanics. Subtle psychological tricks that matter.
The witch class. There is a sort of witch class in the core rulebooks, but DMs wouldn't allow it, even if they had homebrew, because to them it was somehow not legitimate, and that was important to them. Why? Because they have a certain reliance on the mechanics for how they think and resolve issues, and allowing the witch class makes them uncomfortable because it breaks the underlying assumptions they don't even know they are making.
Another example is flipping a table over for cover. Players won't do this. It's a trope we see in movies many times, and while players rarely have an issue with the idea, they never think of it themselves. The simple case of having a bunch of mechanics puts them in a mindset of thinking in terms of the mechanics, which means options not explicitly available in the mechanics tend to not be thought of. Most of the players I know that are not this limited, play freeform or some very rules light system that has mechanics more for story control rather than "what the character can do," and even then they usually limit themselves when playing in a "crunchy" system.
Indeed, the very fact that DnD mechanics are about what a character can do, instead of players having narrative control of outcomes, shapes the way they think of solutions and make plans. In fact, have you noticed that dnd homebrew is basically never a homebrew mechanic about narrative story control? I've never seen a dnd homebrew mechanic like "roll X, and on these result, the player gets to succeed and they get to come up with an additional boon, but this other value means that even though they succeed the GM gets to add a problem or complicaion, and this other value means they fail but they still get to come up with some advantage..." It is something that doesn't really fit with DnD mechanics so it doesn't get homebrewed in even though it is a fundamental and well used mechanic elsewhere. It is a contradictory mechanic. I can see that, yet I'm not really sure how to put into words the reason it is a contradictory structure.