NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6327113" data-attributes="member: 177">Actually, it kind of does.Customer:  "I wold like a slice of your best pie, please."Waitress: brings slice of apple pieCustomer: "No, I meant *pizza* pie."Folks read his work, and get a particular interpretation out of it pretty simply.  It isn't like they are stretching.  You then tell them, "But if you ignore all that stuff that you interpret as being mean, he's right!"We have the words he actually put on the page to go on.  Selectively removing some of them as inconvenient is just as invalid as selectively focusing too much on a passage - both are just cherry picking.  The issue here is not "broken".  The issue is, "does not do what I, personally, want it to do".  Saying that the rules are broken because they reward what they were designed to reward is kind of like saying a Werewolf game is broken because it doesn't focus on Hello Kitty.  A fry pan is not broken for not acting well as a hammer.I am not an optimizer by nature.  I have never planned a build for a PC I ever actually used.  My creativity has not been significantly hampered by 3e or 4e rules.  3e, especially, gives me great breadth of options for organic character growth and development.  That also happens to serve the optimizers, but it serves my most common style of play well in that regard.So please, speak *for yourself*. Do not speak as if you speak for unnamed masses, please, unless you have some survey data or the like to back you up.You are talking about a leisure enjoyment hobby game.  There is no "objectively" to speak of.  Whether it is good or bad is measured only by how much people enjoy it.  There is no objective truth to be had here, only empirical truth.I disagree, as above.  If, broadly speaking, people like it, it is good.  Given that tens to hundreds of thousands of people play these games happily, I think "good" applies.  The proof is in the pudding.  Moreover, if it has taken Mr Schwalb a decade and a half to come to this realization, maybe he's overstating how bad it is.This is kind of like saying that vanilla ice cream is good.  Not everyone likes it.  Some people prefer chocolate.  But you preferring chocolate does not make vanilla objectively bad.You say that it is keeping people from playing.  Others say it is part of play - it is, to them, the character creation minigame.There is no one, finite, usable ruleset that will please everyone perfectly.  Accept that there are folks who like all sorts of different things.  If you stop saying that those things they like are bad, and this will go better.  Spitting on what others love is at the heart of edition warring.  It is a good sign that you are no longer listening to others, and no longer care about what they think.  When you stop caring what your fellow gamers think around here, we have a problem.This, in essence, is where Schwalb went wrong, and where you are going wrong.  Despite all his disclaimers, his basic point is that something that many people love was badwrongfun.If I hope to be playing a character for *years*?  A few hours seems like a good investment.  Some games (say, FATE) make a whole little story-telling game out of character creation, that is intended to take the first session.  And FATE is *light* on rules, overall.  Yes to both.  Here's the thing - if a game is mechanically complex, I can do a few things to make things better for those who aren't into complexity.  So those who like rules complexity, and those who don't, get to play at the same table, and enrich each other.If a game is not mechanically complex, there's nothing much that can be done to bring those who really like such complexity to the table.  You will generally only get those players who don't like complexity at the table, and that's limiting.  Not a death-knell, but limiting.</blockquote>

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