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Shhh...thinking that way leans towards heresy, and even worse, 4e. :)

If you build a game (say, 3E) oriented around the party overcoming preplanned challenges, and the games has hundreds of specifically coded player-facing exceptions (i.e. spells, and some other class/race features) that allow challenges to be bypassed or obviated, this does seem like the natural...

Some people really like the idea of rolling randomly and seeing what sort of character they get, some people really hate it. A standard array lowers the amount of randomness in character creation.

Our recollections differ, then. Even in the few cases where high skill checks could obviate challenges, those checks were generally augmented with copious amounts of magic.

That's fair, but I think it's important to note that a lot of participants aren't playing RPGs with the intent of generating drama and narrative as their primary focus. Many participants enjoy the engagement with the ruleset, specifically, and running games that are basically open-ended board...

To be pedantic, the change was from "are you, as a player, skilled at open-ended narrative negotiation with the DM" to "are you, as a player, skilled at leveraging the player-focused character building mechanics".

To be fair, that's because ~90% of the rules for environmental or other non-combat challenges in 3e boiled down to "Do you have a spell for that?"

And that's precisely why most games we play have at least some rules. Because most people, in the end, don't want to have one person arbitrating absolutely everything.

I don't want everything in a new PHB. I just want the publisher to periodically (every 2 or 3 years) put something together that I can hand to new players and say "these are the options". Something a little more fun to look through than a spreadsheet or dropdown-list of options. I mean, most...

Agreed, I've said this for other systems (like Shadow of the Demon Lord) as well. Just give me one physical product I can plunk down in front of new players and say "Pick from these."

To me, this is the most salient quote in the blog post: "Therefore, by not systematizing something, we give it the power to expand and dominate a part of the conversation, because without rules the fiction must be resolved through discussion. For example, by not giving characters a skill for...

Fair. This is the type of thread where statements of “this is what the game does”, “this is what the game could do (with small tweaks and house rules)”, and “this is what I wish the game did” get easily conflated.

Fair. But considering the thread topic, I was working on the assumption that people would be presenting ideas that were more hypothetical.

To be fair, I think @Lanefan has expressed criticism for those aspects of the hit point system before.

@Lanefan’s setting.

Well, it's somewhat tautological. Those mechanics help ground the character in the setting BECAUSE the intention is to have a setting where even high-level characters are still mortal who can be humbled by mundane bad luck.

They'd have to pry vortex warp out of my artificer's cold, dead hands! It's his number one go-to spell.

I mean, you can absolutely have a game where 12th level characters have to worry about things like diseases, food and water, and the weather, and a second game where being that powerful means those concerns are utterly trivial, even within the same game engine (with some minor house rules)...

But how much rule changing is actually required to turn a paladin from "using divine spells" to "just generically awesome?" I would argue not that much, outside of some targeted interactions like counterspell and dispel magic.

In the narrative, it's most likely that other characters beyond the PCs have access to identical effects, and often even stronger effects than the PCs might ever gain access to. (Unless the narrative is about the PC or PCs having access to something unique within the setting.) Whether that...