Dwight said:
But that aside, I understand what he getting at. Except what Doug said. That's how stuff like that tended to come out in my experience. You tried to find something that worked with the DM and then ran with that. You played the DM. With less holes in the rules, more options in the rules, you don't have to play the DM so much. Eventually you can go outside the rules the need just isn't as strong to do so because there is a lot more room inside.
See, I think there's a difference between going outside the rules, and going outside the
framework of the rules. As Mouseferatu mentioned in his comments on JD's blog (and elsewhere around here, I think), his character actions of sliding under a table and kicking it out from under a foe probably won't be explicitly covered even in the full blown 4E rules, but will still be easily within the framework. The simple formula of roll X vs Y (where X and Y are a small list of BAB, Defense or Attribute scores) makes it easy for a DM to quickly and - more importantly, IMHO - consistently make a call on the fly and move on.
In 1E, these actions weren't covered by the rules, nor were they within the framework of the rules. The natural instinct was still to make a roll of X vs Y, but with little guidance from the DMG on how to do this. In ANY roleplaying game, 1E or 4E D&D included, you can
say you throw dirt in someone's eye. How the system actually lets you resolve that action is a completely different matter. In 1E, it typically ended up being something like:
DM: "Dirt in the eyes? Um. Okay. Make an attack roll."
Player: "Against AC 10? His armor doesn't count, right?"
DM: "Uh, I guess not. But since you're targeting his face, you've got a -4. So it's like you're attacking AC 6." [Yes, younger players: in 1E, a penalty for the attacker made the target's Armor Class go down, which was really up]
(Player rolls and cross-references result on chart)
Player:"I hit!"
DM:"You did? Oh. Uh. I guess I'll have him make a save vs. Petrification."
Player:"Petrification? Wouldn't it be more like Poison? Foreign substance in the body?" (The player knows the save vs. Poison is bad for this foe's class. Next time he pulls this stunt on a foe with a bad Petrification save, he'll argue for that.)
DM:"Okay, fine." (rolls) "He failed. He's blind for a round."
Player:"Only one? I'd think it'd be at least 1d4."
Don't get me started on players who's only tactic against large monsters was "I shoot an arrow in his eye!"
So Dwight, you might have seen this more as "playing with the DM", and sometimes it was, but more often it like the players trying to find ways to throw metaphorical rules dirt in the DM's eyes, interrupting the game to argue for a better advantage than what the rules normally allowed. Players also often argued about how much they could actually do in a round (a minute), even when it obviously went beyond the rules of 1 move, 1 action per round. Add in magic, and games often ground to a halt as players gave physics dissertations on why it was perfectly logical for them to use a spell in a way which was obviously way beyond the intended scope and power of the spell.
JD's claim of 1E allowing players to do whatever they could imagine was missing the caveat:
If the DM doesn't disallow it because:
- he feels too pressured to come up with house rules on the spot
- the tactic is better than most other combat options in the core rules, and likely to be repeated and abused by the players
- the rules effect for handling the action make it more tactically sound than it would be in "real life"
- he thinks the player's idea is ridiculous
- no one can agree on how it was handled last time
- any of a hundred other reasons because there's little framework for handling these ad hoc situations
To me, 4E sounds like it's actually going to let players do the crazy things like they tried to do in 1E, but this time around, the DM has a quicker, more logical structure to help him adjudicate things and keep the action going.
