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Rules, Rules, Rules: Thoughts on the Past, Present, and Future of D&D
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8850971" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>In my opinion, all tRPGs allow rulings, so achieving that is no great feat of design and hardly worth discussing.</p><p></p><p>As a GM, what I don't want is a game system where I'm always relying on my own discovery, invention, and design - because all of those things are hard. I want to only have to make rulings in one off edge cases. I don't want to find rules that fail almost immediately when I try to rely on them, and find myself working in the mode of a designer doing play testing and fixing the rules based on evidence gathered. I am quite frankly disgusted that almost every adventure, rulebook, and campaign I purchase requires 100s of hours of my time to fix the broken math, cover the edge cases, and remove and rewrite the badly thought-out rules that are too narrow, too brittle, too likely to produce absurd results, and so forth or (in the case of adventures) depend on unlikely assumptions about player behavior and have no plan b for the adventure continuing.</p><p></p><p>What I find is that 100% of the time, leaving it up to GM judgment was just laziness on the part of the writer that drains almost all the value of the product. If I have to do the work of play testing design and elaboration of even the most basic areas of the rules, why in the heck am I paying for the product? If winging it is what I'm doing any noticeable percentage of the time, I wasn't saved many hours of work compared to writing my own fantasy heartbreaker, adapting an existing engine, or writing out my own adventure. Declaring that you created a game for me that allows for rulings is telling me you suck as a designer and your product is shite.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8850971, member: 4937"] In my opinion, all tRPGs allow rulings, so achieving that is no great feat of design and hardly worth discussing. As a GM, what I don't want is a game system where I'm always relying on my own discovery, invention, and design - because all of those things are hard. I want to only have to make rulings in one off edge cases. I don't want to find rules that fail almost immediately when I try to rely on them, and find myself working in the mode of a designer doing play testing and fixing the rules based on evidence gathered. I am quite frankly disgusted that almost every adventure, rulebook, and campaign I purchase requires 100s of hours of my time to fix the broken math, cover the edge cases, and remove and rewrite the badly thought-out rules that are too narrow, too brittle, too likely to produce absurd results, and so forth or (in the case of adventures) depend on unlikely assumptions about player behavior and have no plan b for the adventure continuing. What I find is that 100% of the time, leaving it up to GM judgment was just laziness on the part of the writer that drains almost all the value of the product. If I have to do the work of play testing design and elaboration of even the most basic areas of the rules, why in the heck am I paying for the product? If winging it is what I'm doing any noticeable percentage of the time, I wasn't saved many hours of work compared to writing my own fantasy heartbreaker, adapting an existing engine, or writing out my own adventure. Declaring that you created a game for me that allows for rulings is telling me you suck as a designer and your product is shite. [/QUOTE]
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