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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 7536901" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I definitely wouldn't say this is a case of me not giving "system matters" its due cause and effect.  If you want to dig deeper into this, we can find out precisely why the phenomenon of significant variance in GM adjudication in AD&D1e is precisely an issue of "system matters."1)  Secondary Skills don't entail any sort of skill the equivalent of "piloting" or "engaging with tech (alien or other)".  2)  Adjudication of rolling under GM-determined relevant ability score or coming up with a percentile dice is invoked, but a tightly focused and coherent procedure for specific case studies and exception-handling is not...so GMs are left to filling in the gaps.3)  We do have a section of aerial movement; speed, class, etc.4)  We do have a section on training griffins, hippogriffs, pegasi, but how do we extrapolate anything from that (if there is any work to do there) in relation to learning and piloting alien tech?  If a GM tries to extrapolate anything from that, they're going to come up with "no, you can't immediately handle this alien tech (because x number of weeks/months training and learning riding with an aerial mount).  But again, I'm not sure there is good extrapolation there either from an sort of internal causality perspective or from a "we need a functional game that works" perspective.5)  We've got an aerial combat section that talks about several things:a)  Grappling being an issue for flyers.b)  Stability of platform for missile fire and aggregate penalties for firing until an action is taken to gain stability.c)  The inability to have functional melee on platforms that don't provide a means of gaining leverage.d)  Things you must pilot with your hands disallowing spell-casting and missile combat, but allowing the use of wands.6)  There is nothing about piloting high-tech items like speeder bikes, hoverpods, et al.So GMs are left to fill in a ton of holes and make (or not make) assumptions and extrapolations which can significantly impact play.  The "system matters" problem with all of the above when it comes to AD&D 1e is the nature of Gygaxian prose (the incoherent marriage of two types of language; "this is underwritten by abstract gaming/genre logic" and "x, y, z causal logic based on earth physics") and a DMG that is a system of discrete parts that often don't interface well with each other (or leave whole things missing or incoherent) rather than an elegant, consistent, holistic approach to language and rules text (see Moldvay Basic D&D).So yes, AD&D 1e has a "system matters" aspect that is fundamental to what you're decrying, but not so much in the way that you're decrying it I think.  You'll see me oftentimes sincerely cite "user error" when confronted by 4e detractors or detractors of specific system aspects of 4e like Skill Challenges.  That is also a "system matters" issue, but very different from the "system matters" issues inherent to AD&D1e (where I won't cite "user error"...because good luck sorting all of that out).</blockquote>

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