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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5846400" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yeah, in a sense, but I'm trying to draw a subtle distinction here between two very different sort of problems.  The criticism that starting players in a new system at high level would be confusing would apply well to 3e with its relatively complicated system.  High 3e's problem is the fiddliness of the math and the complexity of the rules situations that can arise, the number of rules that cover those situations, and the vast number of powers and abilities that players acrue by that point.  But the problem of rules silence has, as I said, the opposite problem and appears more strongly at low levels of play.  While these are both in some sense 'problems with the rules', they are problems of a very different sort and I'm trying to compare and constrast them.This is kinda odd praise considering the wide variaty of games that were built from the D20 framework.  Besides which, there isn't a game I've ever played that I felt constrained against making my own and smithing out if necessary dozens of pages of house rules.Where I really think you are off base is that you are confusing DM style with the system.  You seem to be saying that you can't use a particular style with 3e but that you can with 1e, and that just isn't true.  Let's collect a few assertions here.Me too.Yeah, that's true to.    Why did you let them get away with that then?  That's not a requirement of the system.  Nothing in 3e demands that you resolve an in game situation wholly through a metaproposition.  Nothing in 3e demands that you the DM interpret abstract propositions into concrete propositions on the players behalf.Yeah, players do that.  No, you don't have to let them get away with it.  If someone says, "Search check.", you can and should always say, "Searching what and how?"  If someone says, "Diplomacy check.", you can and should always say, "Yeah but what do you say?"   And the really important thing to note is that this isn't system specific.  Because I can remember the point in my early RPG development when I learned how to play the way that we both demand at our tables.  I was an elementary school DM, and a player's high school age cousin agreed to run a game for me and my friends, and there was a social situation and I proposed something like, "My character goes over and introduces himself to the cleric", and the DM said, "Yeah, ok, but what does your character say?"  And I distinctly remember this strong moment of embarassment at having to actually do what you and I would call role-playing, because it wasn't something that we'd learned to do at that point.  We weren't used to acting in the first person.  We had directed our characters in the third person abstract and now it had to get concrete.  You don't let players say, "Climb check", without saying what they want to climb.  Why would you let them say "Diplomacy check", without saying what they want to say?  Conversely, why would you let them climb a wall or pick a lock unless the climb was trivial or the lock was trivial without making some sort of check for success?Me too.Me too.  Yes you do.  If you don't have to worry about it, it's not because of the system but of the culture.  You lost control of your 3e game.  It sounds like you have an easier time retaining control of your 1e game probably because of differences in how your players play the game, and how you run the game, and not because of differences in the system.  That's Celebrim's Second Law of Role Playing: "How you prepare for and think about playing a system is more important than the system itself."Yes, I find all of that is true.   Those people who came from other tables without 1e experience often aren't used to the game being run how I run it.  Often they take a while to develop good play skill.  But, I should note that I ran my 1e game for years and years too, and that is also nothing knew.  Players that entered our game and my game from other tables were also often deficient in these basic player skills and took a while to become accustomed to a different style of play.  At the time, we used different language to describe the problem; we said things like, "His table played pure hack and slash.", but it was the same problem.Why do you let the players get away with that?  I still do as I did in 1e.  When its your turn to declare an action you have six seconds to state your action or you lose it.  If you have to the rule up in a rule book, do it between your turns.  If you are a spell caster and you don't know what your spell does, you aren't allowed to cast it.  Most of my players have a small sheaf of relevant rules paper clipped to their character sheets for quick reference.  I'm not going to let the players get away with bogging down the game in rules lawyering (again, the old term), and being indecisive.  And once again, I note that this has nothing to do with edition.   I can remember sessions of 1e (ran by people other than myself) where the players and the DM spent half the session with their noses in the rule book trying to find things in the notoriously badly organized 1e DMG and arguing over what the vague rule therein meant and how it was to be applied.Me too... oh wait a minute, you are saying 1e is grittier... nevermind.   That is ALSO not an attribute of the rules, but rather something that depends on the culture of play at the table.   The least gritty games I ever played were in 1e.   Play balance in favor of the PC's broke really easily in 1e, to the extent that it was not unusual for me to meet people back then who had characters that had killed not only all the arch-devils but many of the gods.  Especially post Unearthed Arcana, it was really easy for the players to dominate over stock monster manual entries unless the DM was very creative.  But characters in either edition are as frail as the DM wants them to be.  There is no upper bound on the power of 3e monsters.  It is much easier to challenge players within the 3e rules than 1e, which often required you making things up that broke or altered the rules in order to challenge the players.I'm ok with that.  But you, like several others here, seem to be more willing to give viewpoints on my game - a game you are completely unfamiliar with - than viewpoints on the system itself.  And most of you are flat out wrong about my game, and would be laughed at by my players for your cluelessness.</blockquote>

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