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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9385063" data-attributes="member: 6799660">And that I can absolutely get behind. I simple, well-reasoned and stated analysis that accurately describes the topic of discussion, its consequences, and a simple statement of preference against it (all with no straw rebuttals, conflating other issues onto the topic, nor denigration of the opposite position). 10/10, no remarks.This is the same complaint I've heard about games where the players want to just say what their characters would say instead of diplomacy checks (the most charismatic player has an advantage, even if their character doesn't have high social attributes or skills). I think this might be a broader category -- 'open interpretation rules' or the like ('Mother may I?' probably being the most common term, but clearly showing a bias in one direction) -- under which 'rule of cool' is just one of many playstyles that have to deal with it.It's another one of those perennial debate subjects that never seems to go anywhere. We all know the two sides -- strictly adhered to mechanical rules create a level playing field, but can feel robotic to some and miss edge cases/produce verisimilitude-straining results; open-ended rules can feel less stilted/more engaging/more realistic, but are subject to GM whim, player (not character) skill, and in the most extreme of cases not give a clear picture of the boundaries of the possible.   We can put any kind of name on it we want. The game has (by design) aspects of a game to it, and by that I mean the type of game where each person participating has access to the same rules and attempts to excel within them along some pre-defined metric of accomplishment. The game has certainly shifted away from predominantly focusing on that. Honestly, though, I think there were a lot of people not overly focused on that almost from the get go (even if the rules didn't keep pace), and I don't think it's really gotten that much worse in recent times. I certainly feel that the exploration/high-score game started to take a back seat to 'you can play as a ______ in a fantasy scenario' gaming by the time of AD&D 2E and Gazetteer-era BECMI.Failure to achieve one's goals is still possible.I feel like there's at least a few excluded middles there. Not least of which not being able to perfect-position your blast radius, but not having said radius expand in a confined space in a massive-math-overload outcome (which, to be honest, often ended up with the DM doing some kind of just-eyeballing-it or rule-of-cool/uncool-ing it).</blockquote>

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