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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ydars" data-source="post: 4335040" data-attributes="member: 62992">Speaking personally as a player; there is a kind of unholy satisfaction in a rule-set that is highly defined. You know how the system works and more importantly, how to exploit it. There are many interesting choices and synergies. Because, I would argue, that D&D IS about "winning" encounters, it is obvious that players will want to know what the ground rules are and this is actually less defined in 4E than in 3.5E; a game that was fun to play but hell to DM because players expected EVERYTHING to follow the "rules".This is all a far cry from the days when the rules were just a frame-work for the DM to judge the outcomes of player choices; not a strait-jacket to limit either DM or player choice, like they sometimes feel now.The problem with more intensive, more codified rules is that they lead to less of a ROLEplaying game and more of a rolePLAYING game. The DM and players are so busy enjoying/navigating the rules set that they forget to engage the senses and the visceral and imaginative feast that can be unleashed wherever people sit down to create a shared story. This leads to less evocative but more intellectual games, that are also consistently more exciting but for me, less satisfying. I therefore dislike highly codified rules when DMing, although they do appeal on one level because the frame-work does alot of the work.The other problem from a DMing point of view is that the essence of story-telling is mystery and the unknown. Magic should be mystical and fey; it should not be predictable and tame; just another word for a kind of science. Monsters should be horrifying and unknowable; not a set of stats from the MM; the world should be exciting and different; not a mish-mash of lame earth cultures. Yet all of the above shortcomings of D&D are more and more likely the more codified the rules become and thus are likely to get worse and not better.What you want out of a game depends upon how you are feeling; the rules per se do not rule out any style of play, though I would argue that D&D has never been the best system for hard-core ROLEplaying and has always been tactical and therefore rules codification is inevitable.I would like to see a game that made some attempt to defocus the player obssession with rules and give tangible rewards for background hooks and creating a character. I would like to see mystery and magic and fearsome monsters that will scare the players. I would like to see an original background world that is actually compelling rather than vanilla.  Yet if someone did produce such a game, I doubt it would be most people's vision of D&D.</blockquote>

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