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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9363184" data-attributes="member: 8461">I think that a lot of this discussion gets unnecessarily bogged down with comparative terms like "better," when a more appropriate term would be "tailored."I remember the term "toolbox" being thrown around a lot back when 3E came out; it was the idea that the game system was modular, and that you could tweak or swap the parts you needed so that the game played the way you wanted. I recall wondering at the time how a unified game engine (i.e. the d20 System), where most everything was interrelated (i.e. ability score modifiers tended to apply to a lot of the system's "moving parts," and always in the same way; namely, adding their modifier) was supposed to be better for this than the "isolated subsystems" of AD&D. Wouldn't an isolated system be easier to change/delete/replace, since that was less likely to have unintended consequences the way a "unified" game engine might?Nowadays, I suspect that a lot of people had the same misgivings, because very few people treated the d20 System like a toolbox. Instead, they treated the game engine as if it were an actual engine: a very precise piece of machinery that was also very delicate, prone to failing if you started tinkering with it too much (unless you were extremely careful and precise in how you modified it).Personally, I think that viewpoint is exaggerated at best; the real issue is less one of the system being delicate than it is one of people not understanding what the tools in the toolbox are used for. If you've never had to use a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halligan_bar" target="_blank">halligan bar</a> before, you likely won't know what it is and what it's used for if it doesn't come with an instruction manual, and attempting to learn to use it "on the job" means putting it into practice in the course of play, which is likely to involve several misuses before its purpose becomes clear, in which case you (or, more likely, the player(s) involved in utilizing it) will become disdainful of the thing which keeps being a poor fit (not realizing that it's not being used for its intended purpose, since said purpose was never communicated to them to begin with). This lack of an instruction manual for the tools in the box is, it should be noted, what Monte Cook actually meant when he referred to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200224072541/https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2498/roleplaying-games/thought-of-the-day-ivory-tower-design" target="_blank">ivory tower design</a>, not that the designers wanted to reward system mastery by building "trap options" into the game. "System mastery" just means "knowing what each tool in the box was designed to do."To that end, I'm of the opinion that the problem with the d20 System isn't that "the math is too heavy (especially at higher levels)" (I enjoy math, and I like playing at higher levels, so neither of those things are a problem to me). Rather, I think it's that everyone keeps thinking that the system should be used unaltered, out of the metaphorical box, and worse, that the entire game engine will fall apart if they don't. The "discovery" of E6 (or rather, E-anything, since you can set any arbitrary level limit under that paradigm) was insightful because it brought back this idea, albeit mostly in terms of what it disallowed (i.e. higher levels), though it did have some instances of tweaking existing things (mostly in terms of options for people who'd hit the level cap but still wanted to advance; it was here that we saw a precursor to 5E's "epic boons").I own several thousand d20 System products (mostly digital offerings for PF1), and I get a lot of enjoyment out of using them to tweak the baseline assumptions of what my next homebrew setting will allow for, ranging from the races available to how magic works, and quite a bit more. This is something abetted by how many moving parts (or "fiddly bits," as they're so often pejoratively called) the system has, since the more there are the more I can interact with in order to make a game world that itself has more alternative options which the PCs can in turn substantively (i.e. via the game engine in addition to via role-playing) interact with.At the same time, the system isn't so tightly wound that it mandates that "balance" (which is a concept worthy of another long rant, to which all I'll say here is that is something I think has been both misunderstood and fetishized by a large segment of the community in a way that has very little to do with the course of play) be placed above options. Quite the contrary, the usual definition of "balance" that I see tends to be predicated on options being restricted in the name of parity (though a lot of people insist that they don't want options restricted, but for all character classes to have as many options available as the one which has the most, traditionally identified as the wizard; this is a laudable goal, but attempts to actualize it have their own trade-offs, largely with regards to what aspects of the play experience are prioritized over others).All of which is really a plaudit to the OGL, and what it allowed for, which was to let the community poke and prod the system longer and to a far greater degree than any set of designers (or open playtest) ever could. I've noticed that the d20 System engine (and any game system of "complex" design) tends to be a lot like writing a computer operating system in how even the people writing it won't notice issues until years down the road, after a lot of user feedback. For an instance of a "patch" being issued, look at things like <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090602164632/http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20060216a" target="_blank">how they changed polymorphing</a> late in 3.X's life, or the Battle Blessing feat (which, while put out as a feat, modified paladin spellcasting in a way that was clearly meant to at least somewhat ameliorate how useless it was) in Complete Champion.To be clear, I think these are benefits, not evidence that the system was somehow never worth investing in. I like complex game engines, the same way I like being able to use a computer, and continued interaction in order to find the "rough patches" and figure out how to fix them are part-and-parcel of that. Moreover, because these patches are different for everyone (which is a key point: you can point at "the math" all you want, but 99.99% of the time, you're going to be talking about personal preference rather than objective analysis), the third-party community essentially acted to create ever more tools for the toolbox, encouraging you to customize what tools you made use of. The only problem was figuring out where those tools were (i.e. what third-party products had what you were looking for) and making sure that they worked as intended.Unfortunately, the mindset outlined above never really seemed to catch on, which I think is a shame, since there was a lot of potential for customization that was missed in people citing things like "RAW" (i.e. rules as written), the fetishization of "balance" that I mentioned before, and third-party offerings seeming (as I saw it) to be treated with a great deal of suspicion (more so than I think the (overstated) "glut" of low-quality products in the early days of 3.0 warranted).Fortunately, that makes little difference to me personally, as I can still put everything I have to use as I like, and there are still third-party d20 System creators making things today (mostly, but not completely, for PF1). But it does make it a tad bit frustrating that, when it comes to discussions about the game, we seem to be exactly where we were more than twenty years ago.</blockquote>

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