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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8999756" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Can "rulings" be considered flexibility though? That's what a number of folks are pushing back on.If a system relies heavily on rulings to achieve this, it would seem to suffer a serious dilemma: either they aren't design, meaning they're not actually part of the system and don't seem to be part of the system being flexible, or they are design, at which point the system is asking you to be armchair designer to play it and that bespeaks of inflexibility.A design goal of pretty much every edition of D&D—except 4e and 5e, albeit for dramatically different reasons—has been to have some kind of rule for most situations. In early editions, this is what led to the profusion of idiosyncratic, bespoke subsystems that often did similar things in supremely different ways, and was infamously byzantine as a result. (Gygax's poor organization didn't help matters.) 2e continued this, being probably the smallest jump in mechanics between editions. 3e did too, but cleaned house, and this made it obvious what its design ethos required. It wasn't any more or less about having rules for a zillion situational details, it just tried to be consistent and systematic about it.4e diverged by aiming for a bottom-up rather than top-down rule hierarchy ("exception-based design") and including what I call "extensible framework rules" (which cover classes or categories of situations, rather than solely aiming to produce a critical mass of discrete rules.) 5e diverged by openly disclaiming design in several places.</blockquote>

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