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<blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 4649544" data-attributes="member: 99">I'm always interested in how perceptions vary.&nbsp; Personally I picked to run 4e as my next campaign in large part because it requires less rules mastery from players who aren't into that (I'd say that 3 of my 4 players are not all that into rules mastery).&nbsp; My wife is playing a Cleric and she is a smart woman but a pretty casual gamer.&nbsp; She was able to fairly easily grasp the powers and feats available to her and select choices that she considered to capture the flavor she wanted while still being fairly good choices (in terms of optimizing) for her stats.I contrast this with 3.5 (a system that I very much like despite the fact that I'm not running it anymore) where she would have never considered playing a Cleric.&nbsp; It was simply too much work in terms of system mastery to have to become familiar with the large number of spells each level that were available to a Cleric and then have to choose which ones would be good choices for each adventuring day.&nbsp; This issue becomes compounded considerably if you allow spells from the various &quot;splatbooks&quot;.So my answer to the OP is that I feel it is in the player's interest to know the rules for their character and those who do so will tend to perform better from a power standpoint than those who don't.&nbsp; But I'm starting to favor systems that require much less rules mastery because that isn't something my group enjoys as a whole.&nbsp; I personally enjoy browsing through RPG rule books and finding little tidbits therein.&nbsp; But this is not a trait shared by most of the people I game with.That's probably why I tend to GM.&nbsp; It's also why when I'm a player that my characters ownzorz.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Rel, post: 4649544, member: 99"] I'm always interested in how perceptions vary. Personally I picked to run 4e as my next campaign in large part because it requires less rules mastery from players who aren't into that (I'd say that 3 of my 4 players are not all that into rules mastery). My wife is playing a Cleric and she is a smart woman but a pretty casual gamer. She was able to fairly easily grasp the powers and feats available to her and select choices that she considered to capture the flavor she wanted while still being fairly good choices (in terms of optimizing) for her stats. I contrast this with 3.5 (a system that I very much like despite the fact that I'm not running it anymore) where she would have never considered playing a Cleric. It was simply too much work in terms of system mastery to have to become familiar with the large number of spells each level that were available to a Cleric and then have to choose which ones would be good choices for each adventuring day. This issue becomes compounded considerably if you allow spells from the various "splatbooks". So my answer to the OP is that I feel it is in the player's interest to know the rules for their character and those who do so will tend to perform better from a power standpoint than those who don't. But I'm starting to favor systems that require much less rules mastery because that isn't something my group enjoys as a whole. I personally enjoy browsing through RPG rule books and finding little tidbits therein. But this is not a trait shared by most of the people I game with. That's probably why I tend to GM. It's also why when I'm a player that my characters ownzorz. [/QUOTE]

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