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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9502596" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This is always the case for all possible games, period.People who hate roleplaying and mathematics will hate D&D. It is not possible to make something that looks and smells and quacks like D&D but which contains absolutely zero RP and absolutely zero math. You can maybe eliminate one side or the other without issue, but if you eliminate both, there isn't anything left.So your whole argument rests on a point that is perfectly true, but also perfectly irrelevant. Designing ANY game forces you to limit your potential audience.Hence, the best choice is to build a baseline that would be hard for an ordinary rando to make, but which a designer can make easily, and then implement as much as possible robust, front-and-center opt-in stuff to enable various adjacent approaches. You will never--never--enable all possible approaches. A game that enables all possible approaches has no rules.A system that is inherently unbalanced cannot be turned into one that is balanced by mere effort of will on the part of its users. That's my point here. This is a one-way thing. Adding balance where it doesn't exist is a Herculean effort. Eliminating balance where it is present is trivial. Achieving good asymmetrical balance is a difficult task for a designer, and a near-impossible one for the end user.A cup of wine added to a barrel of sewage produces a barrel of sewage. A cup of sewage added to a barrel of wine produces a barrel of sewage. You can't have a barrel of wine unless you start with one. That's my point here. (Edit: Please, forgive the implication of the "sewage" term. That's simply the standard form of this phrase. I am absolutely not trying to say or imply anything about anyone's preferred style, period. If you prefer, "a quart of alcohol in bowl of juice produces a spiked punch. A quart of juice in a gallon of alcohol produces spiked punch." Or perhaps the idea that you can easily add salt to a soup that hasn't been salted enough, but you cannot take away salt from a soup that has been salted too much. Insert any spice there, really--you can add, but you can't subtract.)Some things, you really do have to start on one end of the scale, and give people tools, advice, and examples for how to move to the other end. That's not special pleading, nor a judgment against any style or preference. It is simply how reality is: creating symmetry is difficult, while creating asymmetry is easy; disorder is easily achieved (indeed, it is the most common state of affairs), while order must be imposed with effort; there are always many more ways for a structure to be unreliable than there are ways for it to be reliable.</blockquote>

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