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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dungeoneer" data-source="post: 6221714" data-attributes="member: 91777">Innovation is not automatically better, obviously. I don't think that anyone would seriously claim that it is. Innovation in and of itself is a neutral thing. But there are specific reasons we might want to innovate the rules for an old game; reasons that are more meaningful than making the game 'new and shiny'. A question we can reasonably ask about the rules for any game is whether those rules help the game achieve what it was designed to do. If they do, great! But for many games, we will see ways in which they could be improved. Take Tic-Tac-Toe: it's 'designed' to be a simple competitive game that two people can play with just a pen and paper. But the problem is that too many games end in draws. So Tic-Tac-Toe could be improved. There's room for innovation.Chess, on the other hand, arguably does what it was intended to do perfectly: it's a two-player strategy game with no element of luck. It has simple rules but an almost unlimited number of strategies to win. While we can imagine variations on the rules of chess (and people HAVE created chess variants) none of them are likely to make chess better at what it's supposed to do. Chess doesn't have much room for innovation.Tabletop roleplaying games are vastly more complicated than chess. For starters, there are different types of participants in the same game: the GM and the players. Even among the players there are differences: there's the player that wants to slay monsters and the player that wants to bring to life a fantasy character. We need the rules to accommodate all these different types of participants. You don't really 'win' at a TRPG, like in chess. Instead the goal of the game is to have fun. But people have fun in different ways. The perfect game would accommodate all these different ways. Unlike chess, which is limited to pieces on a board, TRPGs allow just about anything to happen. We need rules for at least some of these things, or the game will devolve into players and GMs endlessly debating about how to adjudicate events in the game. These rules are obviously going to be a lot further-reaching than the rules of chess, and there will probably be more of them.So we have a TRPG like D&D, which is a very complicated game which is trying to achieve many different goals and please many different types of people. The chances that the first version of D&D would ever have accomplished all of that approach zero. In fact it's very likely that there is no perfect ruleset for D&D. Don't get me wrong, there are better and worse versions, but there is probably no version which is simply the best D&D possible for everyone. This means that the game can always get better. There is always space to innovate.Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were great game designers, no doubt about it. They created an entirely new category of game. But we should hardly expect them to have gotten such a new and massively complicated game completely right the first time (even if we accepted that that was really possible). In the intervening forty years lots of people have had great ideas about the game. Ideas which can help improve the game, at least for some people.Here are some categories of rules that might improve the game:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rules that make the game easier to run for the DM.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rules that make the rules simpler or more understandable for the players.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rules that allow players to further customize their characters.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rules that facilitate roleplaying.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rules that adjudicate more kinds of game events.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rules that support a game narrative.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rules that make combat with monsters more interesting.</li> </ul>Since D&D is a game mostly about players exploring fantasy dungeons, there is a whole category of rules that can be basically summed up as,<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rules that help the players do cool stuff.</li> </ul>Over four decades it turns out that a LOT of people have had ideas for rules that help players do cool stuff. People have also come up with innovations that can make DM prep easier or the rules of the game simpler. And these are just a few categories off the top of my head. Depending on what the specific players and DM are interested in, we could go on and on. The point is that there are lots of ways the game could be 'improved', at least for some people.Now in your specific case, GreyLord, you apparently have already found a version of the rules that fulfills all your personal requirements. That's great! But everyone else isn't just like you. For those people, there's a version of the rules of D&D that would help them enjoy it more. Since this is a game with complicated rules and somewhat amorphous goals, there will always be room for innovation. Again, I don't think we will ever get to a 'best' version of D&D. And some people will find that an existing version already satisfies all their requirements. But there will always be room for new ideas, new 'tech', new variations on the rules, new versions and editions. If you have found your perfect D&D in an existing version of the game, go play it! But expect innovations to keep coming as other people look for theirs.</blockquote>

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