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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5359836" data-attributes="member: 2067">They spoke to the idea that the rules did not confine you, but rather gave you a baseline to launch from. What the proliferation of these companies -- which were often just formalized and (sometimes) better-tested house rules -- showed was that a DM could easily take the baseline 3e mechanics and feel free to tweak away on the fly without too much concern, thus opening up vistas of improvisation.It's sort of like: improv actors have "stocks." Stock situations, stock characters, stock lines. The improvisation occurs as these are remixed, mutated, and recombined with new audience input. The rules of the D&D game, for those of us who like to improvise, serve as those "stocks." 3rd party publishers showed how easy it was to combine the "stocks" in different ways for whatever effect you were going for (from Telekinetic Jellyfish to Litorian Armigers). See, that gets the whole game design desire/fulfillment thing backwards, if that is what they did.They have to see the things they WANT the players to do, and then design incentives (carrots and sticks) to get players to do it.Of course D&D players have always taken the game in their own directions (which is a great selling point of D&D), but then you build game rules for what they want to do.Game design is, IMO, a big process of desire-making and reward-distributing (and it's not unlike much creative art in that regard, but I digress).Right. AKA: The Powers System.I diverge with a lot of the "true grognards" when I put my flag in the sand with this:You need rules for things you want players to do with your game.The amount of rules you have for a thing effectively speaks to what you want people playing the game to spend their time doing. Rules are there to resolve conflict, after all. If it's not important, and it doesn't affect your game, you're not going to need a rule to adjudicate it.Which is why 4e's support of intricate combat rules and it's lack of support for solid noncombat rules is such an axe for me to grind. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I was speaking pretty broadly, there, but there are some incentive differences between Essentials and '08. For instance, the lack of martial dailies in Essentials decreases the incentive to justify a PC's abilities by circumstance, chance, luck, or metagame need. There's others, too.I'm not saying you can't. I'm saying there's not much incentive for it. The game doesn't reward it. The game discourages it. The game doesn't really want you do to it, but it'll oblige you if you happen to demand that. It's not a binary can/can't thing, it's a "will they want to or not?" thing.And "as any other system?" Have you played Feng Shui?If you can look at Tony Vargas's post and tell me with a straight face that saying "people are unhappy because 4e is such a good game that they don't have those shared suffering experiences" is not actually a condescending position, there's not much I can do to help you see it.</blockquote>

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