NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4869910" data-attributes="member: 80487">Conflating "support" and "more rules" seems often to be a phase through which gamers go. (It can also be a firm and enduring conviction, of course!)The "classic" Traveller line in its fullness provided an awful lot of rules -- on some subjects, effectively two or three or more different games! Some systems made for engrossing solitaire games, and might produce materials of great utility in certain contexts (such as a war-game). One might come to find, though, that they really made no significant contribution (even had they required much less effort) to one's role-playing sessions. More precisely, it might depend on circumstances; I am not sympathetic to blanket claims that fewer tools in the toolbox is categorically A Good Thing.I personally find pleasure in "simulation" in (probably) whatever sense you may interpret the term ... but not necessarily in all forms at once.A lacuna in RPG rules is rarely a big deal to me, whereas a heap of rules that actively confounds either common sense or speed of play -- or, worst of all, both at once -- can easily lose my interest. (My own mileage on that score may vary depending on personal hierarchies of values or even the moment's mood.)Not at all intending to paint everyone's experience with the same brush, I will observe that some phenomena seem pretty common.The RPG field, like the wargame field before it, can -- especially when it is still fairly novel in one's experience -- present an incredibly alluring range of intellectual toys. Yes, this works just fine ... but that is interesting, too! It's a combination of a big buffet for the eating and a big pantry for the cooking.Another factor, perhaps more associated with youth, is the reassurance one can find in Official Rules®. When I was 11 years old, I knew very little about mortgages, machine-guns or a host of other things about which I now know a little more. Rule-books gave me something on which to lean when my life experience seemed insufficient support.Certainly not always, but I think rather often, those early enthusiasms run their course and fall away from the fore. One tends to get comfortable with methods that "just work" and fit one like an old pair of bluejeans, and to find it easier to make ad hoc rulings rather than looking up rules.As well, one's previous explorations of various rules sets have given one a wide variety of models on which to draw. The precise data may escape memory, but the essential concepts are still at hand.One may find that "game mechanics" have become pretty trivial, not much worth buying more of at all. Calculations for armor value based on slope of glacis? Bah! How does a tank smell when it brews up? Evocative detail! It is not models for which one is in demand, but more prototypes that are interesting to model.</blockquote>

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