Wonderful, this argument again. To quote (or possibly paraphrase) VV, this would make an excellent completely different thread.

actually you could see it as more of adjusting for the gamers. It's not saying you have to, but if you think it would make a better game, then go ahead. I mean there are "serious gamers" that the rules are the rules, but this is meant more for the "casual gamer" who likes a long story and if getting rid of rules at times will help people join the game, then they can. It's not gonna force the dm's to do this, but a suggestion.

Yeah. The sidebar is question is sitting right next to the suggested DCs.

This is the first time, to my knowledge, that Wizards has explicitly included this for 5e.

I have nothing further to say on this topic at this time.

I have to strongly disagree with this. There is no perfect game. Every game is going to have something that someone dislikes. If I like everything about DnD except gnomes, and my players agree that gnomes are stupid, why should we play another game instead of houseruling away gnomes? That isn't even taking into consideration that learning a new system or buying new rules instead of tweaking the ones you have might not generation a better experience or be worth the work or expense.

I can read that two ways:

1: "Let the player roll the check, and if it's in doubt, then do the math." This speeds up play, because if the player rolled a 19 and had decent bonuses, it's probably in the bag, and if they're working on a long-shot and rolled a 3, it's "Goodnight, Gracie". You don't usually need to know exactly how much they succeeded/failed by, so don't sweat the details.

2: "Decide the DC after the roll, so you can control the outcome." As you note, this would be bullshit. If the DC is set by semi-arbitrary standards, and the DM then adds post-hoc rationalizations to make sure that the outcome is what they wanted in the first place, then the whole exercise of rolling the dice is meaningless, and the only fair response is for the players to tell the DM to write up his little story, and maybe they'll read it after they go do something fun.

The quote in question, now that I found my PDFs:



For context, the DC spread that's in the DMG is:
Trivial = 7, easy = 10, moderate = 13, hard = 16, very hard = 19, and formidible = 22.

Okay, so it's option 1. That's far less of a problem. Though I note that their list doesn't quite match the scale in the DMG--"Trivial" results are below 10, after all.

Sounds like #1 works. It really isn't much more than a take 10 or take 20. Just a way of streamlining the game. Not only do I not have a problem with it, I've been doing the same sorts of things for decades.

I agree....no game is perfect. And there's nothing wrong with mixing some light house rules into an otherwise good game system.

The majority of my gaming sessions involved AD&D (1st edition)....we added some minor tweaks to the game, and it ran great for our gaming group for years.