Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6009184" data-attributes="member: 2067">I've found that's not really true. The thing is, when folks play D&D, what is important to them is different. You need detail for the things which are important, and you need to be able to ignore the things that are not important. What is important to a given person is always fairly arbitrary, from a game-design perspective. Whether you have a game where encumbrance matters or not is largely arbitrary: some folks wouldn't love the game without it, others haven't bothered to track equipment weight ever. The folks that love it would have a big problem if the game all of a sudden said "NO ENCUMBRANCE!" The folks that don't like it would have a big problem if the game all of a sudden said "ENCUMBRANCE RULES ARE VERY IMPORTANT AND WILL BE USED AS THE CORE DESIGN METRIC."The big thing is that, at various points in history, D&D has largely decided to tell people what SHOULD be important, and what SHOULDN'T be important. It has tried to dictate that to them. It's been more effective in current e's (3e and 4e have highly networked rulesets, which is part of why disentangling them is so difficult), but it's been tried since Gygax's day. But you can't dictate that to people. It's not just inadvisable, it's often impossible. For me, for instance, no matter how much any D&D edition tries to tell me that MINIS ARE VERY IMPORTANT FOR A PLAY EXPERIENCE, I never want to use them. If you tightly weave their use into your ruleset, you don't make me use minis, you just cripple your ruleset. Similarly, if D&D turned around and forbade minis and didn't enable them and allowed their use only for simple visualizations, folks who really like them wouldn't adapt, they'd rebel. These are not logical positions, these are arbitrary likes and dislikes. You have to let people decide what they want out of the experience themselves, and try to provide them that. You have to let people take ownership of their own D&D games. If D&D falls down on what is important to you, you won't have fun playing it. Because what's important to a given person is mostly arbitrary, trying to dictate any one ruleset as THE CORRECT ONE is going to go horribly awry. Gygax's rules were great for Gygax, but the moment Dave Arneson got his paws on them, they were changed for Arneson's purposes. They're different people, and considered different things to be important for their games. And so it has been unto the Nth generation. See, there's two reasonable responses to such a thing.The first is to admit the thing isn't important and go with the flow.The second is to say, "Wait, no, if the game works that way, that's not fun for me. If the point of the game is my enjoyment, and the game works that way, it fails. Lets go play flashlight tag in the park instead."Life's full of awesome distractions. No one needs to play D&D. Playing D&D is actually kind of a commitment. If D&D doesn't deliver the enjoyment you want, there's plenty of other things to fill your free time with. Because what can ruin a D&D game can be so specific and arbitrary, if you're going to make a D&D that reaches the largest possible audience, you're going to want a D&D that isn't dogmatic about what you need to accept as a precondition of playing it.This presumes that you have more fun playing a game that annoys you than you would have doing anything else.For most people, that's not true. For me, that's kind of true, but I've got a design bug in me so even bad games are interesting to me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification