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As I noted, I was never scared off by the tables, but trying to work my way through Spacemaster character gen ended up dissuading me, and that's something given my general taste in RPGs always leaned into the crunchy.

I think all of the above is correct.

The ones with the rubber and metal stoppers? I don't think we did the cream soda, but I remember the root beer.

I remember when there were still A&W drive-ins when I was young. Wasn't the best food ever, but there was always a little something to it (and the root beer in the frosted mugs was special).

I understand your position, but at a certain point it comes down to "I expressed my opinion on the matter, and if people want to take it well beyond what I said, I'm not going to make sure they don't." I'm not sure I even consider D&D the best choice for compromise cases; it simply has the...

No. At the very worst it can be read as it being mediocre at everything. Those are not identical statements in any way. "Not good" /= "bad". This is not a binary context.

I think, at the least, "direct" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. They may have had influence, but the only ones I'd call descendents are Rifts and Rolemaster (I don't know enough about Warhammer to judge).

Yeah, how someone can read "D&D tries to do too many things to be good at any one of them" as "piss poor" escapes me. I do think its never even been halfway good at simulationist concerns, but that may be my perception of what doing that looks like. I think its been somewhat better at being a...

I'm saying its not really good at any one thing, because it tries to do too many, and is carrying decades old baggage in doing most of them when it was designed in a quick and dirty fashion. That's worlds away from "piss poor". I've seen games I'd characterize that way, and they have immensely...

It might not be objective--because its, at best, hard to demonstrate objective truth regarding this sort of thing--but when I'm saying something like that its because I believe it true. After all, if someone likes another game better, most of the time there are reasons for doing so, and feeling...

Often they're somewhat muddy, though. Trying to serve multiple purposes isn't something just games try to do (and is often something that trying to do in general isn't trivial).

I'd suggest that's because very few of those people particularly care or cared about simulation except in the broadest sense.

Arguably, it was trying to serve multiple masters on the game/story/world axes, and it shouldn't surprise people that the net effect of that was that it doesn't really do any of them well, either.

No, in some cases people literally think there are different rules than there are, because the places the rules work differently are very much more specific fictional tropes. The reason they work as they do has nothing to do with the physics or other science of the world at all. As an example...

Sometimes it has to be, because part of the genre is not acknowledging within the world some genre conventions. One can, of course, argue how common that is within fantasy, but its absolutely true within most horror and superhero genre usage, and sometimes the former overlaps with fantasy.

I tend to agree that they're not a simulation (in the sense I'm using it, which is, again, to make it clear, excluding genre emulation which I think belongs elsewhere) tool; they're representing certain story tropes and expressing them in a way that makes it easy to handle in game play. But...

Maybe, but it does mean that in a world of adventuring parties, defending against them is mostly an idiot's game. Certainly anything resembling fortifications has to have an asterisk next to it, because its not going to stop them and conventional defense strategies have failed before they even...

Except its even worth with D&D/F20 parties because they A) Are more analogous to commando groups that conventional forces, and B) Above a certain level are very hard to keep out because of the tools they have for bypassing fortifications or even defensive lines. The most extreme case of this...

Well, it doesn't help that plastic surgery is one of the areas most ripe to corruption in the medial field, either. I used to have a dermatologist who was also a plastic surgeon, and it was abundantly obvious if you weren't interested in the latter you were distinctly a second class patient. I...

The problem is that unless you've already got a second defensive perimeter around the "dungeon", that still favors the attackers; they drop back and set up ambushes to pick off the trackers and skirmishers. That's just a consequence of the fact the attackers only have to be prepared when...