This is possibly the best gaming story, period. There's much to admire here but I love the observation "You can try *anything* in an RPG. The GM just works out what dice to roll." That's really so much of my preferred approach to rules & rolls, summed up so succinctly.
https://twitter.com/Owen_Stephens/status/1437122832752857090
People who played at the original-original D&D tables have told me the reason the old editions (to which 4E was in many ways a throwback) were so "rules lite" for basically everything but straightforward combat is the idea was the table could work out other situations naturally.
A lot of people who had come up playing 2E and 3E rebuked 4E for (supposedly) "not allowing" anything but combat, because it had detailed and intricate rules for tactical combat positioning and codified rad combat stunts and didn't go into that detail for any other endeavor.
But I loved the feeling that 4E got the rules out of the way of the story and positioned 3E's universal d20 mechanic more as a "when in doubt, roll and shout" type thing.
Yeah, I personally think 4E's big misstep was being underexplained. The out of combat stuff of checks and skill challenges was presented as though it were a similarly rigorous plug-and-play subsystem, not a framework for answering in-story questions.
https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/1437438375770959874
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