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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wil" data-source="post: 2791991" data-attributes="member: 3502">Right, I understand that - I was simply countering what Dave Turner had stated - the D&D does not have any mechanics in place to allow for player-set goals for the character.  The thing is, it does - just not in the way that some people might want to see it implemented.Another thing I think I'm seeing with a lot of this debate is a muddying of mechanics and rules.  They are not one and the same to me.  Most people will play by the mechanics in the game, but may modify the rules as they see fit.  Levelling up is a mechanic; the requirements for levelling up are a rule.  Levelling up for a particular class will work out of the book in nearly every game group - but in some groups, they may modify the rule for how to level up (or bypass it entirely and say, "All of you start out as 10th level characters").  Rolling d20+BAB+whatever else is a mechanic; how to apply additional modifiers is a rule.  This is part of the reason I'm not impressed with the "But there's not a rule for that in x game, but there is in mine" - even if one of the rules of the game is that the players must abide by all of the rules of the game, that rule is usually going to be more easily ignored than the mechanics.  And if someone wants to get pedantic about "there's no rule for that", most games include Rule 1 which is, "If you don't like it, change the rules" - which covers everything that the rules don't cover anyway.This is kind of a digression, but in a lot of ways it reminds me of another thread with the ad-hoc argument - where the assumption was that ad-hoc is bad or means a game is incomplete.  I think part of the outcome was the realization that ad-hoc means different things depending on the person's background - from where I come from, ad-hoc is oftentimes necessary.  There isn't always a stored procedure that can get me the data I want.  Usually, if the data that's being returned from a website isn't correct, performing some ad-hoc queries is the only way to find out why.  My company may have rules for how and when and who can perform ad-hoc queries, but the mechanics (how I write those queries to get the effect) never change.As such, just because a game doesn't have rules to handle something like character goals doesn't mean that it can't handle character goals, and just because a game codifies rules for character goals doesn't mean that it's necessarily innovative.  From what I've seen, BW has some neat tricks but nothing to make me jump out of my seat and shout about.</blockquote>

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