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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 9629731" data-attributes="member: 2205">Arguably, that's exactly what the real problem actually is, isn't it? Starting somewhere around 1977 and the AD&D rules, the game got too complex to actually describe without a style guide that read more like a textbook than anything else. And an overly long, tedious textbook at that. Gygax tried to make AD&D as evocatively written as possible, but arguably, his writing wasn't helpful in terms of making things clear. I do too, but that just means that I've decided that the paradigm that has dominated in D&D rules since AD&D is not for me. I don't want exhaustive rules compendiums that take three gigantic textbooks worth of small font text to describe the rules of the game to me. Arguably, I think the way 5.5 did it is probably superior to the attempts to do it in natural (or even purple, as in AD&D) prose, but that's only true if extremely complex rules-heavy games is what you want. Since I don't, and it runs against the grain of my playstyle, it's a moot point. Suggesting that I don't like something even though it's clearly better at something that is important, but not what I want the game to do in the first place, puts me in a weird position. Well, it would, I guess. I played 3e/3.5 for many, many years, in spite of its running against the grain for me, because my group was such that we could just ignore most of the rules that we didn't like and do it handwavey anyway. I play 5e now because I've relocated and my group now has only played 4e and 5e (which I find odd; as they're my age, and I didn't think a lot of gen-xers would have completely missed the D&D pulse of the early 80s and yet be interested in becoming D&D players decades later. But I guess that's what I get for assuming.) But if I hadn't joined groups that already had ongoing campaigns going on, I wouldn't have any interest in any version of D&D anymore. I'm just over that overly complex, overly rulesy paradigm. And I think that's the tension that's really being described here. If you want all those rules for all of those situations, but don't want them described mechanicistically, I'm not quite sure what to tell you—in my experience, it's better than the situation like in the 80s with AD&D where the rules were so poorly organized and poorly described that nobody really knew exactly what they all were, even, and they just filled in the gaps of what they didn't know, didn't remember or didn't understand with rules from B/X or something instead that they did remember and did understand.</blockquote>

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