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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5028813" data-attributes="member: 4937">Which is probably why I loved 3E so much.  I don't want 'simplicity'.  I want breadth, and if I have to chuck some simplicity out to have it, then I'm ok with that.  I want in a rules set something like what the the AEG Toolbox is to fluff.  Need rules for something?  There it is in Appendix B26.My focus as a DM is always on proposition resolution.  The DM asks to do something.  I'm supposed to provide the consequences.  I don't expect (or necessarily even desire) the PC's to know all the rules.  What I want is for the PC to say:"I want to do X." when no real understanding of what is or isn't provided by the rules, only assuming that its something he could 'really' try.And be able to say:"Yes, this is what you do...", where, "Yes" is understood by me to mean, "The system supports that and has an equitable resolution mechanic with the proper mixture of elegance (simple, quick, abstract) and mapping between the task and the mechanical resolution (intuitive, cinematic, versimilitude).  Simple doesn't cover it.  If the rules system is too simple, it generally either produces wacky results all the time, is forced to go to fortune at the end (or beginning), or else I'm forced to make too many ad hoc rules creations on the fly - essentially building the missing peices of the system.  None of those solutions are for me acceptable generally, either as a player or DM.  I might accept wacky results in a silly one off sort of game.  Ditto fortune at the end.  Or I might accept fortune at beginning for a one off emo game that owes more to games where one person starts telling a story and another finishes, than to 'Cops and Robbers' or 'Cowboys and Indians'.  But neither seems suited to what I want out of a D&D style game.When I read Knights of the Dinner Table, I'm often envious at least to some degree of the tools BA has in his arsenal for resolving player proposition.  Regardless of the situation, Hackmaster has a rule to cover it.  Granted, the rules set is buggy and he's got a rules lawyer at the table that makes the most of that, but the rules are generally proven by play robust enough to survive even the hidebound confrontational approach he gets forced into.Rules light approaches tend to get 'simple, quick, and abstract' down just fine, but they lean so far in that direction that they are wholly reliant on DM narration (and often DM fiat) to provide everything else I'm looking for in a rules system.  Finding a good balance is the heart and soul of game design as far as I'm concerned.Unnecessary complication is for me, when I turn to some subsystem (or worse, if it comes up all the time) and there are more than one or at most two 'moving parts'.  I see this alot in the house rules forum.  Some players designs a system and he thinks of all the variables that might realistically feed into it and he comes up with this long equation that produces a result that feeds into some other equation.  The versimilitude is strong, but easy and quick it is not.  You see this alot in 'Parry' mechanics, for example.  Players of D&D have wanted to add a parry mechanic to D&D since the early days of 1e, and invariably they try to do this in the intuitive way - by adding an active defence roll to D&D.  That's the obvious, intuitive approach, and it makes for strong correspondence between the mechanic and the action..."If I roll better than your attack, I block the blow." But adding an active defense roll to the already complex 3e D&D attack cycle is just too much.For me, there is really only one aspect of 3E that unecessarily complex to the point it is also a burden and unfortunately its also pervasive, and that's the enormous number of named changable modifiers (meaning they can come and go from round to round) and the complex interaction between them.  Static modifers don't bother me (so for example, skill synergies are fine so long as you never change ranks except when you change levels), but all the buffs and debuffs get hard to track at times.  This is the reason that 4e doesn't appear simplier to me.  It appears to have in spades the only part of 3e I cringe at - quickly changing buffs and debuffs.</blockquote>

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