Celebrim
Legend
Hussar said:
Why would I mind? If I didn't want to talk about it, I wouldn't have posted.
No, it isn't exactly true. The alternative to rules is things which tell you how to use the rules. That isn't always bad. However, there is only a certain amount of that you can put in before bad things happen. First, you end up confusing new players (and certain types of older players) over the difference between rules and design guidelines. You end up with a segment of the readership that takes the example of play as the only 'right' way to play, treats the flavor text as rules (usually with reverential words like 'canon'), and so forth. You risk mucking up the games ability to provide a creative outlet, and that can be really bad for a system. D&D has survived in large part because it spawned so many diverse groups. Secondly, the marginal utility of all that stuff decreases more rapidly than the marginal utility of additional rules. The more experienced the player, the more that is true. Simply, once you have abit of experience fluff is less valueable than crunch. Likewise, once you have a bit of experience, being told how to play is significantly less useful than being provided alternatives in play.
I think the nature of source books and what sells tends to back that claim up.
No, of course not. There are two good reasons why expanded rules should typically not be part of the core rules. First, it tends to overwhelm new players. And secondly, it tends to increase the minimum investment required to get into the game system.
However, the core book should cover the core experience of play thoroughly and provide clear rules that are in and of themselves sufficiently generic and universal for the situation they proportedly cover.
A clear example of not doing this in 3rd edition is the rules for perception (spot, listen, and search). According to the rules, for each 10' of distance the DC of the perception check increases by 1. For the core experience of play the problems with this rule aren't necessarily evident. That is to say, what the perception rules tell the observent reader is that stealth is not really part of the core experience of play nor is an outdoor encounter part of the core experience of play. Yet, there would be alot of players (myself included) who would claim that stealth and outdoor encounters should be part of the core experience of play, and as best as I can tell there are alot of designers that didn't realize that thier spot rules excluded outdoor encounters from the core experience of play. You see, the problem with the linear penalty to perception from range (besides the fact that it is not realistic) is that it only works 'right' when that penalty is a small fraction of 20. Yet, the rules for ranged weapons and spells and so forth suggest that those sorts of attacks work just fine at 200' (-20 to spot) or 400' (-40 to spot). Hense, as soon as you try to use the rules to adjudicate what happens when someone shoots an arrow at you from 400' away (little more than a football field counting the end zones), you discover that what the rules say is that it is impossible for most people to see anything farther than a couple hundred feet away. The rules fail almost immediately, and we are forced to rely almost entirely on common sense - which will fail us almost immediately if a player has invested resources in being stealthy and doesn't agree with your 'common sense' assessment of what can be seen easily and what can't.
Now, the RAW have the advantage of being simple. But it's not as if better perception systems needed to be that much more complex to gain a large amount of versimilitude/realism. Other game systems with perception type skills have managed. And the thing is, a somewhat more complex perception system wouldn't have impacted most campaigns all that much, because - whether we would like to believe otherwise - for most campaigns stealth really isn't part of the core experience of play and neither are outdoors encounters which begin at long range. Hense, the more complex rules would only impinge strongly on those groups that needed them and needed to use them.
As an aside, fixing issues like this was what I expected of 4e back when I was moderately excited about the idea. But I have virtually no hope that this matter, what I would consider one of the worst flaws in the game, is even going to be addressed. In fact, my suspicion is that my whole complaint will be treated with the sort of dismissive derision by the design team that people who hold that 1-2-1-2 is superior to 1-1-1-1 have been treated. It didn't take me very long at all to realize that I wasn't part of the target market, because none of the big problems I have with 3rd edition are being addressed and I'm repeatedly being told that I'm having problems I'm not having.
