You're, in general, absolutely right that small differences in the answer don't matter.
What really matters is whether the rules address the issue of attacking through cover at all. If the rules don't address attacking through cover at all, that matters. You are know in a situation where the GM must either ignore this scenario as irrelevant to play (most usually by making sure consciously or unconsciously that it doesn't come up), or else must rulesmith out an answer with no clues on the fly when it does come up.
The mental cost of that rulesmithing in uncommon situations isn't that different from the mental overhead of knowing the answer from the rules. But the mental cost of rulesmithing answers to common situations is much heavier than the mental overhead of knowing the answer from the rules, and this is generally addressed by the GM by simply defacto making the ruling a rule. In other words, every time the situation comes up, the GM uses the rule he used before.
Agreed, generally speaking. I'm only talking about the upper end of GM ability. I was specifically speaking to the assertion that light rules are worse for the most experienced/best GMs. I'm also really only knocking very complex systems. I have no problem with having the rules for cover called out in the PHB; in fact, I appreciate them being there. As I indicated elsewhere, one of the reasons I still play D&D is because there are specific rules for a lot of things. Mostly, I appreciate the lists of spells, monsters, and magic items, but there are other perks. In this case, I'm not sure whether I'd really miss having the rules for cover spelled out if I moved to Fate, rather than just having someone invoke an aspect if there cared.
But this has a problem, in that now rules are play tested in play, and often the player (or the GM) begins to have cause to contest and/or regret the original ruling. Sure, whether the GM introduced the idea of -2 penalty to hit or disadvantage on the attack might not matter much, but we're assuming here the GM made choices like that instead of say a -10 penalty to hit or the target gets to make a Dexterity save to dodge the attack. Suddenly, the game has become all about obtaining cover, and the GM and the players are going to discover that and deal with the consequences whatever they are.
That may seem like a silly case, but anecdotal history is filled with examples of GM's rule smithing out far less logical and intuitive and balanced answers to unanswered questions than that. Back when we had an explicit house rules forum, much of my posts involved trying to explain to would be rule's smiths that their brilliant ideas perhaps weren't as brilliant as they thought they were.
Oh, definitely. And I agree that there's a good potential for missteps. If a rule exists, I generally prefer to use it. There's a point of diminishing returns, though. I'm pretty good at remembering rules -- probably the best in any group I've been in since college, which is one of the reasons I usually GM. I can still only hold so many rules in my head. Having a GM screen helps, but it's generally just confirmation for the most common rules, anyway. Sometimes, a player will remember a rule differently than me. Since either one of us could be correct, either I make a decision or we pause the game to look it up. Sometimes, I know there's a rule, but I also know that I don't actually remember it. I can either make a decision or pause the game. I have a pretty good track record, but not perfect. I don't mind when a player remembers a rule better than me. I mind it when the game grinds to a halt while we look up a rule that may or may not exist but is almost guaranteed to not affect the outcome of the scene.
You make it sound like the basic appearance of whether the GM knows what he's doing is a small matter. What you are talking about is the crux of GM/player trust, and that's the foundation upon which tables are functional rather than dysfunctional.
Not at all. There's a reason I called it out. I think a GM who appears to lack competence probably isn't competent and it does exactly what you're saying. I just didn't belabor the point.
On the other hand, I've had a player who actually remembered some ruling I'd made a couple years before with a different group of characters for something not covered in the rules (this was 3.5, so there weren't a ton of things not covered) that I didn't figure it would ever come up again. When my ruling differed from his recollection, he was seriously aggrieved. I'm honestly not sure whether he remembered correctly or not. Either way, it didn't change the outcome of the action. It just got him slightly closer, but also served to stop the game for several minutes while I tried to figure out what he was on about and we confirmed that there wasn't an official rule or usable guidance.
Players benefit from a middle ground as well. Whatever actions or moves you provide the players tend to become implicitly the set of moves that the player feels entitled to offer, and often as not any other moves are never even imagined. If the rules don't explicitly tell the player, "You can try to trip your opponent!" or "You can try to take your opponent's weapon from them!" or even "You can try to do things that aren't covered anywhere by these rules!", the players propositions will tend to be very rote, "I attack the X." The real issue is whether the rules explicitly state that anything not forbidden by the rules is permitted, or whether they imply or even state that anything not permitted by the rules is forbidden.
Agreed on this, as well. I was pretty explicit about that, as well. The only question is whether experienced/expert players still benefit from an abundance of rules. If a player needs rules to let them know they can sneak, try to climb a wall, break down a door, or any number of other things that D&D provides guidance for, I'd say it's pretty clear that they aren't expert players.
I'd more expect expert players to decide what they want to do, then go looking to see whether the rules cover it. If the rules don't then they either offer up a rule of their own or they ask the GM to come up with something (again, deciding it's not possible is a sign they aren't expert players -- barring things like trying to build a spaceship in D&D, but that's genre convention, not rules). As a GM, I'm fine with either, and make it clear to my 5E players that they're welcome to suggest alternate skills to use for various tasks and the like.
One of the problem with seemingly elegant systems is that they tend to implicitly or explicitly state that they only cover a very particular sort of game as the only game that should be played. Whereas a game like AD&D with all its baroque and obscure rules meant that you weren't not playing D&D when you were playing a game of mass combat and dynastic, multigenerational play, where your latest PC was the child of a former adventurer and was concerned with getting a good marriage to strengthen diplomatic ties at court and increase the scope of his feudal holdings. It meant you were still playing D&D when you're former adventurer bought warehouses, factories, and sailing ships and ran a mercantile cartel, or when you went traipsing around the cosmos dealing with gods and the fate of the universe. Or, on a smaller scale, they never encourage a player to say something like, "I lock blades with the foe and try to leverage him around so that we have switched places." (Which, AD&D, with it's explicitly abstract and supposedly 'simple' combat system never provoked as a thought in 99.9% of player's imaginations, and so never occurred in AD&D stories.)
Rule 'light' systems might be extended to cover things that they don't explicitly cover, assuming the participants ever realize that they can, and are willing to work out how. It's just generally, they don't, and aren't, and can't.
It's something of a trade-off. I haven't used a D&D mass combat system since the 2E Battlesystem. I don't know that I'd consider those rules to feel much like the rest of D&D, mechanically. Even so, the core resolution mechanics of D&D (roll d20, add a bonus, check DC, optionally role damage) don't really lend themselves to large-scale conflicts. Sure, they can be used that way, but so can the 3d6 of Hero, Fate dice, dice pools for Shadowrun, etc. Just like D&D, you need to add on some additional stats for things. Any of those systems could do so, too.
But... that gets right back to what I said the weakness of so-called universal systems is: It's not that they
can't do something/everything, it's that they often don't have any guidance published to do so. The complexity of D&D is far different than the complexity of, say, Hero System -- which also represent the two major themes in dealing with game complexity.
D&D manages complexity through a series of exceptions. Every feat, spell, class ability, racial feature, etc. is an exception to the rules. Yes, they still tend to follow the basic resolution mechanics (unless you go back to 1E AD&D, but that's a different matter), but they do what they do because the specific rule trumps the general. They're organized into fairly large-grain chunks that have to be taken as they are. Want only part of a feat, say the cool trick from the skill feats? Tough. You have to take the whole thing... or create a brand new feat that is balanced to handle the fact that you already have expertise in the skill and have maxed out the stat (12th level Rogue at the time of the article being published?). That feat is either a one-off and subject to all the disadvantages around consistency or it needs to get recorded and made part of the "table canon". Look, more bloat. Easy to consume, to a point, but the learning curve for creation is somewhat higher. Ultimately, the bloat will kill the system, IMO, and did so for 3.5.
Hero System, on the other hand, is a toolkit. If someone creates a package of which you only want part, you can see exactly how it was made and what you'd need to swap around to make it work. Sure, you could record it, as an option, but there's not much need to because it's so easy to disassemble and reassemble. The downside is that these sorts of systems tend to be somewhat dogmatic about encouraging everyone to explore their freedom, to the point where you might have a better chance getting a simple, straight, meaningful answer from a politician. GURPS was probably the best at actually detailing stuff out, but the system curdled my blood. Fantasy Hero did fine, and I played a fair amount of it. Again, these systems are
absolutely capable of doing this sort of thing. They just don't follow through. So, pretty much the opposite of D&D: Difficult to consume, at least at first, but a much easier learning curve to rolling your own.
The third category is the "rules light" systems, which are almost always also "universal" systems. They take the problems of, say, Hero, and raise them an order of magnitude. As a GM, I'm super excited about the core mechanics of Fate and Savage Worlds. I just don't like that either my players are truly, completely unbounded in terms of ability selection or that I have to do all the frameworking, myself. This isn't because I'm afraid of power levels getting out of hand, but because I'd like to see some sort of consistency in how things like magic work. There are some things that I would actually like to see "menu driven", so to speak. Magic is one of the big ones. Options are good, but being able to select, in addition to create is nice.
Without the toolkit portion of Hero, you also get the "balance by eyeball" problem that crops up in D&D. I don't think that it's any worse, by any means, than creating new spells, classes, feats, etc. in D&D, but I could see the argument about light systems being more work, if you talk about complexity in terms of too many "menued" options. In that case, Hero System's complexity is definitely a boon, by comparison. If you're talking about baseline complexity and the number of core rules, then I still don't see something like Fate as being particularly more challenging than D&D. It's probably less so, for an experienced, narrativist group. Again, D&D 5E is probably a happy middle ground for the average gamer/group. Pathfinder is probably better for a gamist group.
