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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2292675" data-attributes="member: 4937">The Shaman: Excellent post.  I concur on all points and with all your observations.Basically, the rules for D&D have gotten too good.  They've gotten so good that a player - especially a new player - is tempted to think that the game is about the rules, and not merely that the rules serve the game.  It's a subtle distinction, but its an important one.  I think 3rd edition players tend to select a list of rules, and then fit there character to that list.  Older players knew that the rules sucked, and they tended to select a character and then fit the rules to it as much as possible, and bend or break them where it wasn't.Exactly.  I think that such a situation is literally outside of the imagination of many current players.  Today, your concept is a list of rules; back then it was a character.The problem with players bringing completely unsuitable characters to existing campaigns is probably as old as the publishing of D&D.  But third edition has strongly encouraged player ownership of the rules.  That's always been a problem from the first day a powergamer bought a DMG and then started rules lawyering the DM by flipping through the DMG and pulling out quotes, but the problem has been getting worse and worse lately.  I've been tossing this term around loosely lately, but to me 3rd edition has brought forth a scourge of 'rule playing'.  Back in the day when the rules didn't even come close to having the appearance of covering every situation, and in fact many new players didn't even have the rules because they were only in the DMG, what a player tried to do with their character was whatever they could imagine thier player doing.  Players had to interact with the shared imaginary environment in an extensive and precise manner (both in terms of thier imagintion of the environment and in terms of verbalizing what they did) because there wasn't any good mechanics for handle character action outside of combat in a general way.  This is what I associate with 'role playing'.  Now, we also knew that we ourselves, back as junior high players had pretty much avoided actual 'role playing' in favor of orcs and pies in 10'x10' rooms and rolling initiative.  This is what we refer to as 'roll playing', and at the time it was basically a distillation of the game down to bare bones of the mechanical action.  But lately I've been noticing an intermediate ground.  Because the 3rd edition rules are good, and because they have the illusion of covering every possible situation, I see more and more players playing the whole game as if it was - at every level - no more than a complex game of chess or something akin to Bloodbowl or ASL.  The game situations that occur are far more complex than in the old 'roll playing' games, but the mindset isn't that much different.  Instead of interacting with the whole of the shared imaginary space, the players imagine that the various rules tell them what they can do in a given situation and that if a rule does not exist to cover it - it simply doesn't exist.  For them, what isn't in the rules isn't in the shared imaginary space.  There is no need to imagine themselves in the shared imaginary space, much less imagine themselves as the character, because the character is an inch high figurine standing on a peice of oversided graph paper whose abilities are as precisely defined as a chess peice.   This approach to the game is radically different than the one I learned.Let me give you an example.  In a dungeon I designed I had a room in which I had described the floor as thickly covered with straw.  In the room was a flagstone which covered a trapdoor in the floor of the room.  Now, I had allowed the trapdoor to be discovered with a DC 30 search check, but I wrote in my notes that if the players moved aside the straw in order to uncover the floor they would recieve a +5 circumstance bonus.  Not one of the players conducting a search of the room thought to interact with the straw in anyway even though I'd specifically placed a broom in the room as a clue, even though they were convinced something was hidden in the room.  Each player simply looked bewildered as they asked for more and more search checks and recieved the same answer that they'd found nothing, without ever really attempting to interact with any of the furnishings in the room.  Essentially, beyond taking 20, they couldn't think of anything more they could do to 'find something' and so gave up and quit, and I'm absolutely positive that as I relate this story there are readers out there who think I'm a bad DM because I put a puzzle in the room (a very simple one indeed I might add) that could only be solved by player knowledge and didn't label the puzzle a puzzle so that the players might know this, and I'm sure that there are those out there that think that player action should never alter the result of a search check because I'm 'nerfing the skill' or something.And this is just one example of what appears to be a general trend.  What I discovered as I played with more and more people was that alot of players out there had very good skills when they could completely understand the situation, when in effect they could see the whole board.  The minute however they faced something that they didn't completely understand, when essentially they were suffering from the fog of war, they paniced.  They didn't know what to try.  They didn't pay attention to descriptions because as far as they were concerned descriptions were only fluff.  They didn't interact with the environment.  They tried to solve problems purely by rolling dice, and if throwing a dice didn't work they didn't know what to do.What I've discovered is that the ability to role play isn't necessarily the biggest victim of this mindset.  When they are in a situation that they can label 'social interaction', at least some of these players are pretty decent role players.  What I have found to be the biggest victim of this mindset is oddly enough the tactical ability of the players.  They just aren't as good of dungeon crawlers as I'm used to playing with because they never imagine the environment.   I mean serioiusly, if you imagined the straw covered room in your head and said, "Now where could something be hiding in this room?", how could you not think to yourself, "Under the straw!  Wait a minute, isn't there a broom in the room?".  No, you aren't.I understand it to, precisely because the new mechanics give me as a DM so much better ability to describe and adjudicate situations.  I'd never ever go back to 1st edition.  But all that is just a part of the game and just a part of a player's skillset IMO.The character's concept should be served by the mechanics.  The mechanics should not be served by the character's concept.  If the later is the case, the mechanics aren't transparent enough.</blockquote>

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