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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4158088" data-attributes="member: 4937">The problem with a stand like this is that reasonable people are very likely to disagree.  In fact, 'people with perfectly functioning brains' are probably more likely to disagree than not, because that perfectly functioning brain gives them the power to imagine various perspectives and the rhetorical skill to rationalize to themselves the superiority of thier opinion.  Besides, they are used to being right, so why not now?So what you find is that leaving things up to 'common sense' doesn't really solve anything.  'Common sense' is nothing more than peoples unreflected upon opinions, and not only will people hold different things to be 'intuitive' - but smart people are far less likely to hold alot of unreflected upon opinions and generally can be trusted to not have alot of 'common sense'.  Leaving things to 'common sense' with a bunch of nerds is just a recipe for spending your evening arguing.  Moreover, even if you can avoid arguing what you find is that every case that you leave up to the GM's (or the players) common sense becomes a defacto 'house rule'.  Pretty soon, in addition to your slender rule book, your table is dragging along literally scores or hundreds of pages of informal rules to deal with all those cases that you didn't want to deal with because it would have made your formal rulebook more complicated.  You haven't decreased the complexity; you've just deferred it.  And not only that, you deferred it to a place where you can't as easily look it up to satisfy everyone what it was or remember how you handled the problem last time.  There are a number of board games (Roborally, for example) where our group finally had to write down our house rules that we used every time to play simply because we'd forget exactly what we'd decided on, and someone would do something based off one assumption and have to have everyone else tell them that no, remember, last time we decided on something else.  Or else we'd all forget and then remember halfway into the game what we forgot and how much better the game would have been had we not forgotten.  After we wrote them down, the games were smoother and more consistant.  And we only needed a 3x5 notecard for what had been all sorts of confusion and disappointment.'Common sense' is a bloody complicated and preeminently confusing rule.</blockquote>

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