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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8112845" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sure, one way to play a RPG is to have the GM decide what happens in any conflict.But D&D has never taken that approach to combat, or to trying to resist an evil magician's hypnotism, or trying to suck poison from a wound before you die. There's nothing intrinsic to those sorts of things, vs trying to burn down a shed despite the bucket brigade, that means the first need mechanics while the second just needs "GM rulings". It's simply a product of the fact that, in the wargaming milieu of the time, Gygax et al thought about swords and about hypnotists but not about firefighters.D&D can't do races, either, or cooking competitions, or even high jump competitions (every thief acrobat ties with every other thief acrobat of the same level, every time).My point is that you can have a system that copes with the firefighting as much as the sword fighting, with running races and cooking competitions as much as contests of will and contests of steel, and that such a system can be concise (much briefer than AD&D) and need not have either limits or bloating. I know because those systems exist, and I play some of them. (Prince Valiant is probably my favourite at the moment, but Burning Wheel is hot on its heels.)I also find it a bit odd that for someone decrying limits and corner cases, you're now saying, or at least strongly implying, that it's fine that D&D has no rules for firefighting (a limit) because that's a corner case where a GM can just make something up!</blockquote>

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