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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8993669" data-attributes="member: 82106">What do you mean 'formally declaring combat?' This is how WEIRD the construction of the 5e rules really is! You say "the players need to prepare a [character sheet]", but where does it say that? The Introduction on Page 5 (top of the 2nd column) mentions that there are roles of GM and Player. I find it pretty weird that this is in an intro, which is presumably not even part of the main text of the game! That is, it is NOWHERE ELSE. I mean, its assumed everywhere, but there's really no structure to the whole thing. I mean, I grew up playing wargames, I know a rule when I see one. Even amongst RPGs 5e is very strange.I think your example here is so trivial that it loses all force. You surely are not attempting to maintain a position that GMing is as simple as snakes and ladders, right? Especially given how little structure and thus DIRECTION the 'rules' of 5e give the participants, they better get a LOT of advice to make up for it! Well, they do. I think it could be more effective if there was some actual discussion of the rationale behind things and a more firmly enunciated structure, but there's quite a lot of advice, and boy do we need it.I mean, I won't really argue you are wrong in that RPGs as a class seem to suffer a lot from an assumption that the participants already understand the basic premise and that the structure of RPGs is obvious. It is thus little shock to see that when people like Edwards and Baker started actually dissecting what was going on in a productive fashion that one of the things they immediately did in the resulting games was actually spell out how to play and what their RPGs are doing. I mean, look at it this way, when Gygax wrote up the rules for D&D in 1973, he was simply writing down a bunch of notes for how to run a particular type of wargame campaign, right? He didn't really spell out the structure very explicitly, and every other RPG of those early days simply followed suit, basically reproducing the same structure of presentation with whatever desired rules permutations.Yeah, I think art is in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. It seems odd to equate an activity like this with art, we don't generally consider sports performances or play of board games as art, for example.And no, I don't see how they would really be playing D&D in a meaningful sense.</blockquote>

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