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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 2271730" data-attributes="member: 26473">"Y'know, ever since we stopped being good at this we haven't been successful. The problem must be that there's no market." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /> Absolutely.Many years ago I framed a cartoon for my wife, an elementary school teacher. The cartoon shows a teacher sitting at her desk at the front of the classroom, her M.Ed. prominently displayed on the wall behind her, and two books on her desk: the first a massive tome called How to Teach, the second a skinny little volume titled What to Teach.It seems to me that gamers are presented with volumes and volumes of settings, classes, feats, spells &c. with suggestions on how to incoporate them into a game, and a handful of often-sparse one-or-two page adventures that show how to bring those pieces together for actual game-play. As with the schoolteacher who is all technique and no substance, the proliferation of mechanics has come at the expense of game-play, creating a game where the proportion of time spent on character generation (and, more specifically, optimization) is much higher - arguably too high - to the time spent actually crawling through the dungeon, trekking through the lonely forest, or sneaking down the shadowy alley than it was in the past.</blockquote>

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