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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 7839290" data-attributes="member: 6677017">I sometimes like to compare RPGs to other, somewhat similar forms of recreation to tease out psychology of play.One thing that occurred to me is that often players of RPGs don't consider things problematic that they quite likely would if it were in a video game, even an RPG video game.Why not? My gut says that it's probably a fundamental difference in how people interpret the freedom to change and adapt the rules in an RPG.From my perspective, the freedom to change and adapt is something that should be added on top of a system that is already as close to perfect as possible. A good RPG should as close to perfectly presented an intended play experience (or variety of play experiences) as possible with no house rules at all. You should only need to adjust it if you want a slightly different experience that requires a slightly different rule set. And if the experience you want is more than slightly different, you ideally should have a better RPG option to present it (often times you don't, unfortunately).I get the impression that there are other people who see the imperfection within an RPG that often necessitates customization to smooth out rough spots to be a feature.I'm not sure if there is a different purchasing intent--ie, desiring purchasing an RPG to provide a similar experience to purchasing some sort of do-it-yourself kit. And maybe as an extension of that, would be differences in the level of do-it-yourself-ing that people are comfortable with.For instance, I am (and have before) working on my own system to give me particular experiences I can't get with another system. When I pay for an RPG, I hate having to houserule it. I hate it. And yet I've basically never met an RPG I can play for more than a little while without houseruling because of what I perceive as actual problems in the system. The vast majority I come up with at least a tentative houserule or two before I finish reading the book, because there is usually something that stands out as glaringly not fitting right with the rest of the system.(1)I don't get the impression most people buy a computer game and are happy with the fact that you need to download an unofficial patch (or make one yourself) to fix bugs in it. And we straight up wouldn't tolerate it if we bought DVDs and they wouldn't play right on our regulation players without going through hoops to make it work.Now, I know some of it relates to people that got started a few years before me when you almost couldn't buy an RPG product that wasn't overtly and unavoidably riddled with inconsistencies that made it literally unplayable "by the book". If one's foundational experiences were with being required to "fix" a system in order to play, it might be understandable that us kids today wanting a system that works "out of the box" is just entitled nonsense (j/k). Now, maybe that's the only demographic that feels that, in which case it makes sense. I just wonder, if that's not the case, in the case of more recent players, why there is so much more of a tolerance for RPGs that don't work or are inconsistent without customization, than for other forms of entertainment.(1) Example: In recently reading through Savage Rifts (which looks completely awesome) there was a description of the length of a dragon from nose to tip of tail that immediately stood out to me as not making sense in connection with its weight, it's description, and the mechanical size category it was assigned to. Simply changing it to base of tail fixed it. I went and posted about it, with some helpful diagrams I put together that dramatically illustrated the issue, and it appears that no one else had even noticed the discrepancy (nor, more disturbingly, seemed to care), which had been there since the previous edition a few years ago! Gift? Curse? Obsession? (Well, it was a dragon, and I'm pretty dragon obsessed.)</blockquote>

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