Was the move towards less GM fiat in general a wrong one?

Was the move towards less GM fiat in general a wrong one?
Is 5th edition of DnD kind of course correction back to the feel of AD&D after the era of 3th edition?

AD&D has more fiat than anything since, and I really don't see how 5th comes back toward that.

It probably depends largely on your group. Most of my better games have been with DMs who make liberal use of DM fiat. They won't save us if we're acting like dolts but rule 0 does take precedence over crunch; e.g. a random mook in a heroic campaign won't just randomly decapitate your character in a random encounter. That wouldn't be satisfying for anyone even if the dice say that it should happen. That said, me and my play group largely consist of hobbyist writers. We play for the character interactions, story, and scenarios less than we play for the crunch or strategy and while there are always failure and success states, they aren't what we focus our gaming around.

Players more interested in crunch, building characters, and doing the combat thing probably won't get much out of a game with a lot of fiat since the DM may basically hand them the win (or unjustly withhold it from them, which would be a bit shitty). It would defeat the point of the exercise.

Uh, the hell are you talking about?

5e is way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaay loosey goosey DM fiat powered.

That's what he's saying. He's asking if moving away from fiat in the first place was a mistake.

I think the mistake was that the 3.x teams were never comfortable committing to *any* style of play so it was all "meh."

Less GM fiat is only to prevent or lessen GM burnout.

I think it was a mistake. 3.x and 4e were just too tight, too restrictive, too organized and systematic. There were rules and tables for damn near everything, which led to looking up everything when you wanted to do anything.

5e is kind of refreshing because all the DM has to do is decide in their head if something is possible or not, then decide what ability score to use, then pick a reasonable DC -- and because of bounded accuracy, it's pretty easy to keep track of what a reasonable DC would be for any given tier of play.

It's quick and smooth and easy and it keeps the game moving and interesting.

But you cannot commit to one style only
That makes your market share really tiny

Why would you want a social element in an RPG? It would just block off customers.

HELLLOOOO!

YES and YES to both questions; why are you even asking them?

>Was the move towards less GM fiat in general a wrong one?
I'd say yes. Players should have at least a general idea of their characters' capabilities, and they can't have that when the rules for everything except combat are "just have the DM make something up" and your chances of success and failure depends on what mood he's in and how much he likes you.

>3th edition
>3th

I fucking hate DMs that liberally use the DM fiat.
And it's not hard to call out the DM bullshit
>but DM>The rules
Go fuck yourself

Thirth is a perfectly cromulent word.

You'd probably feel differently if you ever tried playing an RPG.

You misspelled 'thirdth'.

The pattern that a I been seeing is that bad DMs like to use DM fiat.
Nothing like doing something that you not suppose to do and watch the DM try to fix.
Even better when DM fail to fix it and now we're wondering around doing nothing.
And then DM summons a big monster and called it a night.

No, absolutely not. People like to think that RPGs should be perfect games that have slight DM imput to cover what the game can't, and wonder why their games are bad.

The best games have as much DM fiat as possible, with the rules being as simple and small as possible, to cover only what the DM fiat cannot fairly arbitrate. Rolling a d6 with high numbers being better without any characters, modifiers, classes, or stats is the best way to play RPGs. Everything builds from that.

Any move away from GM as cheerleader computer is a good thing.

It's a cycle of learning. Fiat is shitty if you are untested and don't have a good handle on social power.. but it's not the game's responsibility to try and legislate social norms by strict rules. If anything all that does is tell the shitty people it's ok to be shit because it's legal by RAW.

Ever notice how people who use RAW as arguments tend to be shit tier, almost everytime? Well that's how RAWfags feel about Fiat. The difference is, you can do Fiat well with experience. RAW? Not so much. Remember charop boards?

I just wish my character got stronger. I'm a 5eggot who couldn't get into 4e back when it was the new thing (Chris Perkins's game with the writers of Robot Chicken got me interested in D&D), but one thing I'm growing kinda' tired of in 5e is that characters don't feel that strong to me, even at higher levels. It feels like everyone's just a peasant with an increasing number of tools that they can use once an encounter, but they don't really grow into super men or anything like that, they just suddenly get Wish. Watching people play, I've noticed that the most interesting things come straight from the players trying to spice the game up themselves, rather than anything written on their character sheet.

I know I'll be called a weeb, but to pass the time at work I often think about homebrewing a Monk subclass that's the Rokushiki martial art from One Piece, but every time I do I inevitably run into the problem that even having half of those abilities, which is not particularly high level in One Piece terms, would still be too much for 5e Monks. I actually think it could work by gerrymandering the Monk's base skills, but it would still never really feel like the thing it's trying to be.

Yes, because these issues result more from interpersonal dynamics than anything else.

Have you tried Mutants & Masterminds?

Pugmire is the best D&D edition that never was.
>Goes to level 10, not 20
>Class features more flexible in general
>Money less caught up in bullshit minutae
Fucking fight me if you want, you know I'm right. All it needs is some actual backing- hell, it probably has more actual developers than 5e given the 'made by 5 people' meme.

Its ok, sperg user, nobody will ever ruin your fantasy world because never actually play.

That puts everything on the DM though and why even bother having a system at that point.

> act like a fucking tosser at the table, try to derail the campaign and generally being a thatguy player
> ugh. What a fucking shitty dm for trying to get the game back on track instead of fulfilling my every whims and tangent and rewarding my bad behavior.
Is what I'm hearing here, user. But don't worry; bizarrely, no one else is having this issue, because we play to have fun instead of trying to 'beat' the DM. Try it. Assuming you do actually get to play and this experience you talk about isn't all just your personal fantasy world. Man, that would be fucking tragic.

>Was the move towards less GM fiat in general a wrong one?
This depends entirely on what your goal is.

3.X wanted to be GURPS. Hence the whole d20 license nonsense, where things went so far as to have a pro wrestling splatbook. The goal was modularity, and modularity requires consistency. Consistency requires the removal of fiat.

However, 3.X was also trying to be a specific kind of fantasy that had emerged from the previous editions. The requirements that it placed on itself in that regard shackled it and prevented the kind of decisions that would have actually supported the modular goal.

I would, however, argue that 3.X and 4E weren't "wrong" choices. Even if a move back to fiat can be argued to be a course correction, we did learn things over the course of those editions.

your post embiggens my vocabulary.