D&D 5th Edition: Thread #7

[Stubbazubba]

I would say that is adventure design and entirely in the hand of the DM.

I would agree if skills worked in any edition, ever. Stealth, Diplomacy, all of these approaches are plagued with horrible rules. Most everything boils down to a single pass/fail die roll, or worse, multiple rolls where success means you keep rolling, and a single failure means you lose the encounter. One character can push himself more than a d20 away from failure and have the ability to convince a king that his queen is actually a man, while the rest of the party stands little chance of successfully asking for a loan. Furthermore, by mid-levels, spells are more effective than any skill and become more and more affordable.

Don't even start me on Skill Challenges. Skill Challenges don't actually improve the situation; they make everyone participate, then punish you for doing so if you do poorly. That's a bad idea no matter which version of errata you're playing with.

They need either a real skill system or none and do everything on Ability Checks. In which case non-combat is still a problem. I would prefer that, in addition to leveling up in your class, once every level or X levels you pick a power off of a general non-combat list; teleport, a henchman, a fiefdom, a disguise, or whatever else.

What if, along with a "Monster Manual", there was also a "Adventure Manual", which had hundreds of different ready-to-go obstacles to put in the player's path, each balanced to give a good challenge to many different skills, so that the DM could browse through, find something that would challenge the players, and plop it into his campaign as needed?

This would relieve the pressure on the DM to come up with all his skill challenges himself, just like he doesn't come up with all of his monsters himself, and would allow the players to more readily expect what they would face. And of course, the DM would be encouraged to tweak, fluff, and re-fluff the encounters, or use them as inspiration and a reference for making his own challenges,

This is brilliance, assuming non-combat stuff works in any reasonable fashion.