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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8999904" data-attributes="member: 42582">The flipside of what I've quoted seems to be saying that Cthulhu Dark can handle small unit skirmish combat, because the GM can graft on (say) the Warhammer rules, or just make up their own variant.I mean, I guess it's true in some abstract sense, but is noting that possibility a meaningful part of evaluating what Cthulhu Dark can and can't do?I've read many posts that talk about how a paladin's mount is useless or a mere ribbon (no horses in a dungeon, horses are vulnerable to fireball, etc). In my Prince Valiant game, incorporating horses into play (including better-than-typical steeds) is straightforward and an intelligent warhorse would be prized by its owner. Is this experience really irrelevant to judging whether one or the other system better accommodates knightly tropes?What do you think is added to the analysis of a game to say that "it hands the reins to the DM"? Clearly that doesn't magically give the GM game design skills (which is a version of [USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER]'s point). Are you emphasising the normative expectations it might generate? Do you think the player of the PC thief is expected to just suck up Luke Crane's decision to give the fighter a better chance of hiding via an ad hoc roll because the GM is applying "rule zero"?My questions in the previous two paragraphs are sitting somewhere between the literal and the rhetorical: I don't understand what work you think "rule zero" is doing in increasing flexibility, and it is opaque to me what meaningful work you think it can be doing.What does this mean? In case it's not clear, I'm not having trouble reading the sentence and attributing content to its words and syntax. But - to reiterate the earlier parts of this post - I am having a lot of trouble understanding what you think is actually contributed to the account of what the game can do by pointing to the GM. An instruction to players that says Ask your GM doesn't in itself give the GM any powers to generate an answer.This is why I keep returning to the following puzzlement: the only practical sense I can make of what you're saying is that a game with "rule zero" is telling the players to go along with whatever the GM tells them happens next, perhaps with the GM being guided by some ad hoc die roll in making that decision. But the idea that this makes a game flexible is bizarre to me, because any RPG can trivially graft that rule onto the rest of its system and thereby obtain exactly the same degree of flexibility. In other words, on this account being "flexible" is an utterly trivial property of a RPG, arrived at by appending a sentence or two to the rulebook. But those who assert that D&D is flexible clearly intend the assertion to be a non-trivial one.Now, if the claim was that D&D had certain features - say, structural features - that made GM-authored extensions and additions and extrapolations particularly straightforward in some fashion, so that (eg) the Luke Crane thief vs fighter problem wouldn't come up, that would be a different kettle of fish altogether. In that case, rule zero wouldn't just be a trivial addition of two sentence, but an actually considered and operationalised component of the design.The only version of D&D I know of that fits the description in the previous paragraph is 4e D&D.</blockquote>

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