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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5910589" data-attributes="member: 21169">Good thread topic. I really like your analysis of 3e/d20 -A lot of 3e players seem to want to detach many of the rules from the game reality. Class doesn't mean anything, for example. I had the same experience running Mutants & Masterminds, a d20 game. The players often wanted to take the same feats, the most mechanically powerful ones, for their PCs, feeling that they could put any flavor on them, whereas I, as GM, wanted feat choice to say something about a character. After all, that was how I was building my NPCs.The Forge dislikes the approach of 2e AD&D and Vampire, which bill themselves as story-creation systems while using fairly traditional gamist/simulationist mechanics.The creators of 2e AD&D faced a very similar problem to the creators of 5e - both wanted to please sets of players that wanted different things. With 2e the tension was between old school Gygaxian gamist play, with challenging dungeons that make no sense at all from a verisimiltudinous perspective, and the newer school Dragonlance/Forgotten Realms style of play that wanted to tell epic Tolkien-esque stories. The 2e solution was mostly to keep the rules the same (so they could retain the Gygaxians) play up Rule Zero, and put all the responsibility for story creation on the DM's shoulders. The DM is supposed to fudge things to keep the epic heroes alive, for example.Admittedly, 2e does make a few very important rule changes to support its preferred play style, notably the removal of xp for gold.I think it's going to be easier to keep the fans of old school, 3e and 4e happy, because 2e is the major outlier in D&D's history, in terms of its aims for play. Apart from 2e, *every* edition of D&D has supported gamist play, though the player skills each edition promoted have changed somewhat.Old school - Knowledge of the rules, particularly monsters and spells. Ability to read the DM.3e - Knowledge of the rules, particularly character builds. Combat tactics.4e - Reverses the priority of 3e, combat tactics are #1, builds #2.</blockquote>

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