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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arrowhawk" data-source="post: 5723734" data-attributes="member: 6679551">First off, the decision that may be inspired by some outside source is still arbitrary if it lacks self supporting reasons for being.  Naming your kid after your favorite baseball player is arbitrary unless you family/culture has a tradition for naming kids after baseball players.Second, you've taken two quotes out of context to combine them.  In the first quote, the decision by D&D to decide what part of an illusion is real or fake or figment or whatever, is arbitrary.  There is no underlying basis in reality for how illusions should work.  Whether the authors got the idea from other fantasy works or they just made it up, the decision to make it a part of D&D is "wholly" arbitrary.  Overtime, that decision gets revisited and it may get tweaked to achieve some desired end.   It most cases, these decisions are reviewed by other editors and the changes are tested by not only the authors, but other people who have no vested interest in the outcome and who aren't given a reason for the change.In the second quote, we are talking about someone who, for reasons unknown, has decided that illusions should be more powerful than they are.  Why?  There is no stated reason.  It's tantamount to why someone likes vanilla more than chocolate, except it doesn't even have a physiological underpinning.  I'm not sure what it is you're trying to convey here.  There is a such a thing as robust play testing and misinformative play testing.  You do it right, you make good decisions, you do it wrong, you make bad decisions.  "Trust" is the wrong word.  It's not a value/character assessment, it's  a competency assessment.  No, I don't have any faith that any random group of players is conducting unbiased evaluations of the rules they've decided to change.  More to the point, people may not even be able to accurately determine if the game is in fact better for them with the rules changes because it would require them playing the same scenario twice with no knowledge of having played it the other way.   So you think gamers are infinitely capable of figuring out what works and what doesn't?  If that were so, they wouldn't be on the boards asking for opinions now would they?  The fact is we don't know what the total consequences of any change might be, especially when it comes to something as monumental as deciding that DM no longer detects illusions.  We change it, we play it.  And then it's an open question as to whether the change was really an improvement on an objective level.Here's a biologically proven truth about human beings:  we impose our own logic on facts.   Someone convinces themselves A is better than B and they subsequently interpret all facts to the contrary in a way that does not disturb their preconceptions.  This behavior in human beings has been proven in numerous types of experiments and it most assuredly applies to someone's ability to assess rule changes that they've asked for. I think you and I have a very different definition of what "play testing" involves.    You and I are talking about two different definitions of "play test" and whether its arbitrary depends on the stated reason for introducing the rule, now doesn't it?</blockquote>

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