Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7362317" data-attributes="member: 996">There's a kernel of truth to that, but it's also something of a design-philosophy blind alley.  Take it to the ultimate conclusion and the only good RPG is freestyle rpg.   No rules at all means maximum freedom and creativity, adding any rule makes the game worse!Obviously, that's not true:  when a game is sorely lacking in rules adding some opens up more creative avenues than it blocks.  Even nominal freestylers use some rules - guidelines, conventions, consensus, but they're basically still rules - to smooth the play process so you don't just get constant cosmic-one-upmanship and bang-you're-dead-am-not-are-too cycles. The qualities of those rules also matter.  Bad rules don't constrain player choice and stifle creativity just because they're rules, they do so because they wreck other rules, as well.   Imbalanced options, particularly, clearly do that.  You add an imbalanced (OP) option, it can crowd out multiple existing options, including the de-facto option of freestyling.Many of the 'rules heavy' games like 3.x D&D or RIFTS or whatever that get held up as examples to support this kind of philosophy are good examples of dysfunctional games that drown in supplementation and stifle everything but overweening system mastery.  But it's because they're broken systems, not because they're heavy systems.  Rules-Heavy, of course, exacerbates that.  But, those cautions aside, there is a danger in codifying things with rules that there's no point in codifying.  Particularly in dicing abilities too fine without expanding build resources in proportion.  Skills are the clear example, IMHO.  It's fine to have skills in an RPG, they let a player define something his PC is good at, they give a convenient mechanism to resolve tasks.  But if you take the broad universe of every task a PC might need to do, and break it up into myriad skills, then let a PC choose only a few to be good at, you create a tremendous amount of incompetence in PCs.  That can spotlight-balance them, if you have the right number of PCs with the right mix to cover all the bases, it can also leave them stymied if they leave blindspots.  The more you add skills to such a dysfunctional system, the worse it gets.The only alternative isn't to have no skills and just let everyone be equally good (indifferent) at everything, nor have little difference between the skilled and unskilled.  The alternative is to have a well-thought-out, fixed, finite list of skills, and allow PCs the skill resources to be broadly competent, impressive in the occasional specialty, and generally emulate characters in whatever genre the game's going for.  That's (here it is again) a question of designing balance into the system.  Not merely of stripping the system down.  Now, feats, specifically, in 5e specifically?Meh.  It's not a mistake to decline to opt into them, IMHO.</blockquote>

Verification