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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 5770402" data-attributes="member: 54707">I neither love it nor hate it. I think of it as a  system, like any other. It has some very enjoyable parts but some severe  weaknesses and I gave up using it a long time ago. Not for the way magic  operates in later or in other systems but with one I created on my  own.   However I thought it was perfectly suited to AD&D.  It just felt very right for that gaming system.   As to what led me to playing D&D, well, at that time  it was almost the only game in town. And to me it was the very first RPG magic  system I really encountered. And as I've already said it felt very right to me  in that system. It all worked together as a whole.   I liked the class system, even though I gave that up  too, and I liked the overall adventuring system. You gotta remember, when I  started, it was almost the only thing around. So, what wasn't to like? It was  novel.   And from the start to me it was just a game. To tell the  truth I've never understood the, "well, this is the way the game is written  so you must play it this way." I can understand that with chess. Even some  war.    I never understood it with D&D. To me inherent in  the very idea of the Role Play Game is the idea of personal and interactive  modification. The game attracted me to the game, the  thought that individual elements had to be this way or that way never occurred  to me just because some designer, no matter who he was, said so.    It was "my way." That  was what made D&D unique and interesting to me. The fantasy element  was nice. Magic was interesting. The wargaming elements were fun. The role  playing was exciting and novel. the social aspects were alluring. But the idea  that you could remake the game, rules, setting, characters, monsters, etc as you  wished, and restructure it to taste, that was a really great leap in game design  that I think a lot of younger people completely overlook cause they're used to  the idea now. It's ubiquitous now in video and computer gaming design, at least.  And with internet games. Personalization, modification, and interactive  individualization. Back then though that was a very novel and revolutionary  concept in game design. In everything, including game design.  Unfortunately I am afraid it has become a novel concept all over again, as  modern Gamers and Geeks are often far more interested in learning and mastering  rule and structure systems than redesigning and recreating them. Absorption has  replaced experimentation as the "rule du jour." A shame, but that's the way it  is. But it wasn't that way back then at all. Back then it was the end user and  games like D&D at the very Frontier of Imaginative Recreation. Gygax and his  cohorts deserve a lot of credit for the idea because it was a very prophetic  statements about modern society and technology even before the real current age  of modern technology.    That was the real revolutionary idea behind it to me. It  presaged the "end user personal modification" idea of product design to  me.   How it later became the game of rule lawyering I never  understood. To me that very idea was antithetical and anathema to the original  design concept. But it just goes to show ya, things often become what they are  not even when they shouldn't. Just give it enough time.On the other hand  give it enough time and things finish where they start, and sometimes even  improve some as a result of having taken the trip. So, here's to  progress. Same here, obviously.</blockquote>

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