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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shadow" data-source="post: 6006060" data-attributes="member: 16760">Yes.  You're definitely on to something here.  The whole 'Mother may I' thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth every time I hear it, but I couldn't articulate why until now:DM and players seem to trust each other less.  The rules delineate what can be done to protect the players from the DM, it seems at times.I can see how this came about.  There is nothing so magical as a great DM... but the flip-side is that there is nothing quite so horrible as a really bad one.  Codification of rules MAY help insulate groups from some of the horror, but it may also insulate them from some of the magic.I'm one of the lucky ones.  I found a truly great GM and have stuck with him. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  It comes naturally to trust him to do his thing.  If I put something on my sheet, I know he'll take it into account, in his own byzantine fashion.  (No doubt in ways I wouldn't have expected!)  That's not 'Mother May I'.  It's 'We're building this game together, and I trust you to hold up your end.'Don't get me started.  I've never played on a grid, and never want to.I'm really opening myself up to trouble now, but I find representations like that impair my imagination.  It's the same reason why movies based on books virtually always fail badly in my eyes...  By depicting a great scene, they shrink it down and freeze it.  If the film's vision of it is different from mine, there is a dissonance;  but it might even be worse when our visions are more consonant.  The scene existed in my mind as a... majestic overlapping of possibilities.  The visual medium, by its nature, must select one of them.So with the grid, at least for me.  It also doesn't help that I'm really not interested in tons of tactical options;  that's not the game I want to play.As you say, this started very early in the hobby.  Personally, rolling up characters has always been a trial for me, in part because I suffer from a Dice Curse.  (You laugh, but we all know somebody like me, yes?)  I can't roll above 8 on 3d6 when it counts to save my life.I get the idea of 'meeting your character' instead of creating him... but this really is a Great Divide in gaming mentalities, I think.  I've always preferred 'creating', and the dice got in the way.  I do think the 'default' position has changed a lot over the years, though.  It used to be almost all 'meet', now it's almost all 'create'.  Probably we could all stand to broaden our horizons a bit.Your last sentence there hits the nail squarely on the head.Some people seem to need to see it in black and white before they feel able to do it.  There's a spectrum in these matters...  3e skills are a little too granular for my taste, while 5e seems about right.There's also the fact that bigger books full of more rules probably make WotC more money.  There are some great, rules-lite indie games out there, but they're not making millions of dollars.No powers?  Surely that doesn't include spells, or Turn Undead, or similar things, right?  And there's the rub.Me, I'd just as soon not have XP tables at all, and let the GM dictate when the party levels.  There are some things just not worth simulating 'realistically', and character growth is one of them.Heh.  My group always mocked those overbearing Gygaxian phrases.  "Uh oh, guys, looks like we're not playing An Official Advanced Dungeon & Dragons Game!"  "Yeah, so?"</blockquote>

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