Quote Originally Posted by navar100 View Post
Agreed. This was something that bothered me about 2E that I'm glad 3E corrected. Obviously the DM runs the game, but there is such a thing as too much control. It's annoying to have to ask the DM for permission for "everything". Skills and feats provided defined parameters. Players know what their characters can and cannot do
I understand these concerns. And I would be wary, too, of trying this with an unknown DM. Letting him decide almost everything is a recipe with the potential for disaster, or greatness, or anything in between. But I don't do unknown DMs anyway, I play with people I trust. And I trust them to handle this wisely.

Even in 3.5, I've had the most fun with DMs who'd bend the rules all the time: introducing parameters that weren't written and disallowing things that were, sometimes to our mechanical advantage and sometimes to our mechanical disadvantage, but always, ALWAYS serving immersion and a more rewarding game. They weren't out to get us. I bend the rules beyond recognition, too. And the least fun I've had was hearing the phrase "there's no rule for that".

Fortunately, I haven't heard that in a long time. So I'm fairly confident that the people I play with (and I) can pull it off - possibly after fumbling a bit with the new rationale.

But it isn't new, is it? It's old.

Quite unexpectedly, this whole thing has filled me with nostalgia for 2E. I just now realized how much I'd missed trying something in game and not knowing what will come of it. Oh dear, I missed it so much!

Suppose you're playing 3.5 and say "I bull rush the orc, trying to push it off the cliff". You know exactly what will happen if you win the opposed roll, and exactly what will happen if you lose. And now, just for a moment, imagine that you really ARE on that cliff. Forget the game rules. Imagine that within reason (the laws of physics and magic in this world), ANYTHING can happen.

The DM may roll and say: "Surprise, as you push the orc, he manages to grab your wrist. He won't let go! He takes you down with him as he falls! You try to hold back? OK, roll... you succeed partially: you don't fall off, but you can't stay on your feet either. You're now face down on the cliff, one hand grabbing the rock and one hand dangling helplessly off the edge, with an orc holding on to it for dear life! What do you do?"

Is that fair? Frankly, I don't give a damn. It's unpredictable, it's exciting, it feels real and at the same time extraordinary, it's not freeform (there were rolls involved, and stats affected the results)... what more do I want?

(I know, I know, other people don't want that at all. Again, I'm not trying to convert anyone. And frankly I don't know if I'll dig the new edition in the end, there are a lot of things to consider. I'm just explaining how I see it.)