What exactly is stopping either the DM or the group in these games from using rule 0?
Well, by definition the group can't use Rule 0, because Rule 0 is a rule conferring power upon the GM.
And what stops the GM from using Rule 0 in the games that I mentioned is its absence.
Of course the GM, the same as any participant in any game (RPG or otherwise), can cheat, or can try and bully other participants. But breaking the rules of the game isn't an instance of using Rule 0.
If you're not familiar with RPGs - such as the ones I mentioned - that have GM-side rules that are as robust and binding as the player-side rules, then I commend them to you.
If changes to address issues are implemented in a fair and consistent manner where they players buy into them, there's no problem.
This is not rule zero - it is not a unilateral exercise of authority by the GM. This is the group, by consensus, changing the game rules.
I have news for you, in the unlikely even I were to DM for 4e, rule 0 exists in my game. Period. It doesn't matter if they system claims to ahve it or not - it is ALWAYS present, in ANY game.
I don't see how games without a referee can have a rule empowering the referee to change or suspend the rules. Nor do most sports that do involve a referee have such a rule.
All you seem to be asserting is that the referee can break the rules and, perhaps, get away with it. That's true, but its true of players also. A player can lie about his/her attack rolls, for instance, but that doesn't mean the game contains a "rule zero" permitting players to override the results of d20 rolls. It just means that sometimes people cheat and you can't always stop them.
This is an abstract concern with a particular use of rule 0, and completely ignores the player's own agency as people to say to the DM "look, we don't like it when you make arbitrary changes for no reason mid-campaign. Stop doing that" and either negotiate with him in some way (revert the changes and stop making them without good reason, someone else DMs for a while, or in the extreme playing without him).
The concern is not abstract; it is quite concrete, and is a reason that more than one poster (including me) has quit games or booted GMs.
Rather than empowering a GM to handle action resolution by way of fiat, and then having to escalate to social conflict when things go wrong, I prefer to establish a framework of rules that establishes permissible moves for the various participants in the game, including the GM. This is really just a particular instance of the general function of rules, to reduce or ameliorate social conflict by pre-establishing what is permitted and what is forbidden.
many people consider 3.X diplomacy to be flawed as it can seemingly magically (without using game magic) result in abrupt and massive attitude changes by NPCs. It's a simple matter for the DM to say "no, one step limit" or something like that with minimal effort if this effect is undesirable.
Wouldn't it be better to actually have decent social resolution rules, rather than some ad hoc GM ruling? It's not as if there are no such rules out there to be emulated!
We're talking about games here. Why should anyone refer to anything BUT what he or she likes?
Also, I don't refer to non-4E systems as not good; it's 4E that was not good - in fact it was a total train wreck. If people like that system, that's fine, it's good to them, but it should have been published as a new system not as a replacement to 3.X.
I think you've missed my point. You rebuked another poster for describing something as good and something else as bad, on the grounds that s/he was merely expressing preferences - but here you are again using all this normative language ("not good", "train wreck", "should have been . . ."). What are you doing here but expressing preferences? Which is the very thing you rebuked another poster for doing.
the premises of 4E - that equal balance and utility among all classes - turned out not to work very well in practice.
Do you mean that you didn't like it? How is that of any relevance to someone like me who did like it?
I would seriously question if the game was designed for that
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that was never an exclusive goal, just a single use.
Have you read the original rulebooks recently? Or the closing pages (prior to the appendices) of Gygax's PHB? The whole focus of the game is dungeon exploration; the goal of play is to be a "skilled player" whose PC(s) survive the dungeon and collect treasure, and thereby XP, and thereby gain levels.
That's why the game has action resolution rules for finding traps and listening at doors (both dungeon things), but not for (say) predicting the weather (other than a spell) or hunting and fishing. It's not as if traps and doors are somehow more fundamental to an RPG experience than weather and wilderness survival.
There was never anything broken about 1E, 2E, or 3E that couldn't be resolved by DM management.
Pick up your 1st ed AD&D DMG and PHB and read through them. They are full of action resolution mechanics. There are mechanics for combat - they are level dependent. There are mechanics for social interactions and loyalty - they are not level dependent (except when they interact with combat, via the morale rules - in that case, relative HD can matter). There are mechanics for listening at doors, for finding secret doors, for divine intervention.
Why do these mechanics make combat more mechanically intricate, and level dependant, than other forms of conflict? Because the game was invented and enjoyed by wargamers.
Why is the chance to find a trap or follow tracks level dependent (thief/assassin/monk or ranger level respectively), but the chance to find a secret door or a sloping corridor (the latter for dwarves et al) not? No good reason that I'm aware of, just idiosyncratic allocation of capabilities across elements of PC build that do and don't have a level component to them.
Why don't they include other sorts of stuff - say, chances to dance nicely, or chances to compose a beautiful poem, or chances to navigate by the stars? Because this stuff wasn't of the essence of the play the game was designed to support.
If all that was required was "DM management" then these mechanics would (i) all be redundant, and (ii) all be immune to critical analysis! But clearly the game designers didn't regard them as redundant: they are the engine of the game. Nor did the designers regard them as immune to critical analysis: the rules are revised between the original supplements and AD&D, and revised again in the move to AD&D 2nd edition, and over the years there are attempts to come up with more-or-less generic and flexible action resolution mechanics (eg roll under stat) although these suffer from not being integrated in any sort of way (let alone a systematic way) with the plethora of discrete abilities idiosyncratically granted to various races and classes.
using the term "obviously broken" is just imposing your personal limits on everyone else. The proper answer was to go play another system, but for some reason people think D&D needs to always be the go-to system that meets their needs instead of representing a stereotypical generic fantasy system where magic is almost always a dominant world force.
You seem to be confused about two things.
First, using a term is not imposing anything on anyone. I have never met you, let alone played a game with you, let alone imposed any approach to gaming upon you. I have simply described some rules. You are describing the very same rules, so presumably don't begrudge me the liberty of doing likewise.
Second, because the AD&D rules were broken for single-PC-per-player, character/story focused RPGing, I stopped GMing D&D in the late 80s, and GMed Rolemaster almost exclusively for nearly 20 years. I returned to D&D as my main game in 2009, when an edition was published which supported the sort of RPGing experience that I was looking for.
My fairly extensive
play of 2nd ed AD&D in the early and mid-90s confirmed my view that it's mechanics did not facilitate the sorts of play that most people (or, at least, most people I knew at the time) were trying to achieve with it. The result was widespread GM force to bend mechanical outcomes, and to plug mechanical gaps, so as to achieve consistency with stylistic/aesthetic desires. I don't regard this as a very satisfactory form of RPGing, and on two occasions it led me to abandon campaigns. I was also able to recruit "refugees" from such games to my RM game at the time.
Casters being dominant is wildly overestimated in most forum discussions. This is not to say they are not more powerful or versatile overall (they generally are) but almost never actually render anyone else irrelevant in practice.
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The problem is that you think "Caster dominance" is both far more prevalent than it really is, and that you think it's a problem. It isn't. Magic is supposed to be powerful and versatile in D&D.
For someone who accuses others of "imposing limits", you speak very dogmatically. What is your textual authority for the claim that "magic is supposed to be powerful and versatile in D&D" in a way that non-magical PCs are not? And why am I wrong to think it's a problem? How do you know whether or not I have found dominant casters to rend other PCs irrelevant in practice? And why is
irrelevance the threshold in any event? Why should a player who wants to play a Lancelot or Conan be able to impact the fiction of the game any less then one who wants to play a Ged or Circe?
