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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4158160" data-attributes="member: 4937">My point was to answer this question by saying, "More is more."OkDo we?  We only have a problem if the result - 'high level characters can swim in a river of lava and come out the other side' - isn't the desired result.  In fact, we actually have the rule this way because for a great many 1e designers this was in fact the desired result.  They wanted to feature lava in the environment for fluff reasons, but they also didn't want the lava to be simply instant death.  So, they took lava fluff and non-lava crunch and married them to get what they wanted.The real problem I see is that we never actually had a rule for what lava did.  It was up to the individual designer.  This meant that as a player, you never really knew how hot lava was.  It might just do 2d6 damage per round.  It might do 1d20 per segment.  It might be instant death.  That's not all bad because it meant that as a player you had to treat all lava as if it was absolutely lethal, but on the other hand it is confusing and the player doesn't know when lava is fluff or a cue to run away as fast as he can.  Alot.Everytime that they think they will be penalized for not doing so.I'm so glad you put it that way.  This is exactly the heart of the matter.  The two bookend cases are:a) Lava doesn't come up in your campaign.  In this case it doesn't matter if the rules are complicated.  You don't have lava in your campaign, so you don't actually need or use or even need to know the rules for lava.  In this case, you lose little to nothing for having detailed rules for how lava works.  Is lava hard so that you can walk on it, or soft so that you swim in it?  How much fire resistance do you need to survive contact with lava?  How fast does it flow?  You don't have to know any of these things.  b) Lava comes up in your campaign all the time.  Several of the main dungeons have been in volcanos various states of dormancy.  You go adventuring in the underdark, in the fane of the fire god, in White Plume Mountain, in a dormant volcano on a savage tropical island, and in a hideously trapped liches tomb.  There is lava everywhere.  You could use all the rules support you can get.  Is lava hard so that you can walk on it, or soft so that you swim in it?  How much fire resistance do you need to survive contact with lava?  How fast does it flow?  You have to know any of these things.  In this case, not having a designer do the heavy lifting for you is a pain in the butt.  You could use all the rules help you can get.Hense, more rules doesn't hurt you when you don't need them and helps you when you do.That's not to say that you can't have poorly written or designed rules, but you can have poor badly designed rules whether the rules are as terse as Hong or as discursive as I am. Of course, most peoples campaigns will tend to be somewhere in the middle.  For them, the best bet is to take only as much detail as they need at the moment.  However, its always nice to have that extra detail available for when the need comes up.Yes, well, what does 'well enough' mean?  I don't want something that works 'well enough'.  I want something that works well.No rule can disempower the DM from making rulings to cover the corner cases.  It's part of the job.  A rule can't keep you from the authority to break the rules, because you can just break that one too.  It's far better to give the DM help if he wants it.  If you aren't, then why try to sell books?That well and good, and I'd put that into any RPG regardless of what sort of rules we had.  It doesn't obviate the need for good rules.</blockquote>

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