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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5792963" data-attributes="member: 54877">Something to that, though I look at the effect from a slightly different angle. Not infrequently we hear the statement, "Look at what a game spends time on to see what the game is about." At its most literal (and thus most useless), this comes out as saying that a game is proportionally about whatever its page count is dedicated to. In contrast, I see what a game spends time on (including dedicating page count to) as a sign of what the authors think they have handled.  Is 3.* D&D about making your rogue3/fighter2/super-prestige6 guy? No. Do the 3.* authors think they have mostly handled letting you make the guy you want to make? Sure. Is 4E about tactical combat? No. Do the 4E authors think they have mostly handled tactical combat. No doubt. Of course, what a game handles well will become what the game is about, or at least a pleasant sideline, for some people. You had people in 1E days that would spend more time making characters than they did playing (though often due to lack of a group). And you also had people that made characters and used the game as a mini-wargame (even though it wasn't the best option for that). That was more about them than the game, though. Given them a game that satisfied their itch didn't say as much about the game as it did their preferences. Which is a long way around to get back to that quote, in that I think people feel obligated to use those specific rules because having the specific rules creates the impression that the game authors have handled what those rules are about. When the rules are extensive but lacking, there will be a natural resistance to change them, and to make the changes as small as possible. You have to get really fed up (often from prior experience with rules) to simply chunk the whole section altogether. After all, you paid for those rules, right? Might as well use them. This is why the oft-cited "1E was such a hodge-podge of screwed up rules that people had to house rule" effect is even stronger than usually stated. It wasn't so much that everything in 1E was screwed up (it wasn't), or that none of it had subtle effects that could be lost (there were). Rather, it was that some of it was so blatantly and obviously not handled, that you got that resistance out of your system fairly rapidly. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/angel.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":angel:" title="Angel    :angel:" data-shortname=":angel:" /></blockquote>

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