5e is my third favorite dnd system.
As for rules. Rules should not be changed willy nilly. Rules matter. Why? Dnd is a game. While story, writing, characters and all that matter; ultimately dnd is a gane and all games need Rules. And, the story should not trump the rules except in very specific very unique situations. Without the rules mattering why play a game. Just read a book or watch a film. The best rules lend themselves to story, choices, and characters. A great story leans into and takes advantage if the rules it doesnt ignore them.
Ok, I totally see your position, but what if the game is precisely created with the intention of being modified?
Take Skyrim, it thrives into MODifications, doesn't? But these mods are not there by chance, a decision has been taken when the game were in development, when the rules were being written. It's not something that you can do randomly, you need your rules to be indipdent from one another, to be modular and self-sustaining. If you take a system where the rules are all interconnected you can easily see how hard it would be to add, modify or remove one rule would be without damaging the others. So we can create systems where the rules themselves are designed and created in a way to be modified or ignored. Obviously this doesn't make the system better or worse, just with different goals.
About 5e, I personally believe that it has been designed with the precise intentions of being a different game on each and every table. One of the most discussed topics about 5e is "what houserule do you use?", and other than that we can see how many subsystem the OpenGL generated, each one of them modifying here and there 5e base system bringing it in a new setting, adding rules and removing them. My favourite part of the PHB is where it explains the melee attacks and just throws there, in half a page, pushing and grappling, then in a little note it adds "Yeah, these are just templates, when your characters wants to interacts with someone do pretty much the same thing, opposed rolls and go for it.", and to me this is the whole 5e design goals. I love it.
If I compare this to Pathfinder 1e I have 5 full pages explaining me every kind of option you have with your manouvers you don't really have space do add or remove, the system is meticolously designed around those manouvers. It's not bad, it's cool, but you can see how they are going in different directions. In some thread I've read someone suggesting that from BG3 the ability to throw enemies should be removed, but I see this option absolutely in line with 5e design. It's a different application of the template we saw above. In the same way we saw how the system and the rules can lead the dm and the players into doing things, in the same way a system can lead players and dm to improvise and modify its own rules.
Well put, Sansang. I can get behind the idea of DnD becoming more of a story-driven PnP game through those changes. But what will be the next step? Do we even need the world elements to be that detailed with this approach? Do we really need Fae'run, Mechanus, Limbo and other planes to be pre-defined entities in the world? If its all about storytelling, then rules of physics and some general principles will suffice and story should not be restricted by the premade world elements. Will it even be a DnD game at that point? Definitely something to think about.
Ok, this is interesting, but I'm gonna provoke you. Has the setting ever mattered in the DnD system? I honestly know only 3.x and 5e, so I can't talk about the others editions, but I feel like the answer is not. D&D is already a setting agnostic system, a system that can pretty much work wherever you place it. Some settings have their own rules that goes on top of D&D itself, but the base system remains there. As always, this is not bad, quite the opposite, it's something needed if you want a system that works both in eberron and raveloft as much as faerun, but I think it can answer your question.
If I take, for example, Symbaroum, I have a system where every time a spellcaster use spells they gets tainted and corrupted because of the implication of its own setting, and everything is tied to this corruption, and tainted monsters corrupt you when they hit you, and traveling in the tainted reign gives you currution and so on and on. I can't take Symbaroum system into faerun because suddendly the system would stop working, but I can take the D&D system into Symbaroum and, well, I would have some characters with strong antibodies but it would work nonetheless.
Other than that, focusing more on your initial post, the only flaw I can immediately mark is that there is a differences between a PnP and digital games. The story-driven approach can work wonders for a PnP DnD but can find much less success as a PC game, which are mostly dominated by violence and action.
Yeah, I totally agree with the idea that pnp and videogames, can accomplish and implement different rules. I go as far as saying that implementing a pnp into a videogame is as bad as translating a book to a movie. Sometimes you get masterpieces, but 80% of the time it's subpar at best (actually I think that translating movies have way more sense than translating pnp rules). But I wanted to take the whole discussion on a more abstract level, because I feel like not everyone have a wider knowledge about this kind of world and they are too fast diminishing anything that goes in a different direction.
