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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6175440" data-attributes="member: 17106">This is going to take a while.I don't get that. From my perspective, it's unrealistic to invest that much time and money in the hobby. Trying new systems is quite an endeavor.That said, when I do look at or try new ones, I pretty much end up houseruling the aspects I like of the other ones back in, and then starting anew.True. And people have to have the opportunity to earn it. Which to some extent means taking a leap of faith and spending some time in a DM's game when you don't know if he can DM  or not.I don't think that knowing what you're doing is really that important. People learn from practice, regardless of whether they understand the theory of what they're doing or not. And natural talent plays into it too. In general, I think that people will naturally figure out a way to make things work.True, but not really relevant. What's relevant is whether an "average" DM is good enough, regardless of how good he thinks he is.This whole line of discussion misses the idea of individuality. There isn't generally a good or a bad rule, merely good or bad for one particular situation with one particular group of people. As was already suggested above, I think that a DM's individual vision and knowledge of his group are what makes him better, not just actual talent/IQ/publishing experience.I don't know that acknowledging their silliness counts as "bias".Except that this isn't how anyone I've ever seen looks at bards and barbarians.Because there is some value in playing someone who isn't a savant at what he's doing?More to the point, D&D isn't a hockey game. It's open-ended. Some games involve more things that barbarians are good at, while some are more bard-friendly.No.Trying to take an apple and an orange and make them the same is not a worthwhile exercise. I think it's a lot more important that the bard class lets the player feel like he's playing a bard than that it compares favorably to some completely disparate class. If the well-rendered bard isn't useful enough to be in the game at all, cut it, don't try to change it into something it's not.Which, for example, is exactly what happened with the cleric. It used to play like you'd expect a divine caster to play, but they kept trying to power it up because they thought it was too weak. Now it's needlessly powerful. Not enough to ruin the game, but enough to piss some people off, that's for sure.Sure they do. Take the example (which basically every book on DMing suggests at some point) of a society that bans magic. What good is a wizard then? He's a decent sage I guess. But there are plenty of more banal examples. Sometimes you're fighting an enemy that's resistant to damage and one character just can't damage them. Sometimes you need a skill that someone just doesn't have. I hardly think that a well-designed game precludes the possibility of a character sometimes being rendered useless.True. That's what houserules and other forms of customization are for!Not really. When these comparisons are really done, it's not as a thought experiment but in the game. The game seems to be working fine; I'm not aware of any imbalances at the level you suggest.Let me go back and check my latest session where there 10th level martial characters with minimal casting abilities (barely) beat a tricked out 16th level full spellcaster (PF witch).Given that I tend to err on the players' side, that usually doesn't happen. But if it happens, it happens. I don't see them complaining, because they know that however we get there, the final outcome is likely to be good.Again, you've missed the point. It's not that I'm better than other people, it's that specific is better than general. That being said...My feeling has always been that if they were all that smart, they wouldn't be designing games for a living. To me, D&D is a hobby dominated by amateurism. I am not aware of any professionals, only paid amateurs. They might be pretty good, but I doubt they're better than the rest of us.Personally, most of the players I know aren't on forums like this, but it's more because they don't have time or because they don't feel welcome, not because they aren't interested in game theory.IIt seems like a strange hobby to choose then. There are plenty of simpler and easier ways to kill monsters and take their stuff. This was less true when D&D was started, but now there's a (much larger than D&D) industry of computer games and tabletop wargames for people who want that.You certainly don't have to use D&D as an artistic medium, but that aspect of it is there.Well, everyone steals. Shakespeare stole. They still create something new out of what they stole.I'm beginning to see a recurring theme here: a lack of self-confidence. If you're at ~2500 posts on a D&D message board, I think you'd come up with something better. For me, D&D is a great venue for personal growth, and a great way to try and build the confidence to do stuff like that.Given that D&D is open-ended and has no defined outcomes, I don't think that's really a fair comparison. D&D has more in common with children playing house or running around a playground making fake gun noises at each other than with a video game.That being said, even games with close-ended objective rules are subject to modification. Before D&D my big thing was the Civilization games. There's an entire modding community built around them, and the games have been coded in increasingly modifiable ways to allow that.I don't think that's true. In many organized games there is some sort of referee, who does have absolute power over the people playing the game. It's the referee's job to police himself, not the rules' job. There is nothing preventing a baseball umpire from deciding who wins and loses a game through a variety of direct or indirect mechanisms. Of course, one hopes that umpires who do that will be removed from their job.The same is even more true of a DM. The DM has absolute discretion, can dictate any outcome, and the players can't change that. The only things they can do are build a relationship with the DM, or leave.No kidding.I'd say that's analagous to 'DM cheating'.Well, they have agreed to play. They've sat down for a game of D&D. There's a DM. It's right there in the rules. If anything, I find that players are usually begging for the DM to take a more authoritative stance and dictate more things to them, because they don't want to have to think about anything other than managing their character and having fun.Personally, the experiences I looked on as inspirational to D&D were improv exercises in drama class, beginner filmmaking, and my own storytelling around the campfire. I could have a completely satisfying D&D-like experience with no rules. I use the rules because they give us a common language and an alternate reality matrix to play with. They're an add-on to the experience, in my book.</blockquote>

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