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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9000107" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I think tone, genre, and I guess I would call it maybe sub-genre, I think its actually more complicated than most people assume. For instance, D&D certainly can be played in a more or less serious tone, but how gritty can you actually make 5e? Not very! I mean, higher level PCs simply do not feel 'gritty', at level 4 you seem pretty much a character in high fantasy most of the time! Certainly a 9th level PC isn't going to convey much of a gritty feel. Likewise trying to pull off something like horror, OK you can do it with very low level PCs, but higher level ones have a LOT of ways to gain control of a situation, its not going to be easy to make them seem helpless or vulnerable. Not impossible, maybe, but D&D has never manged to be a very good vehicle for that. And, as you observe, outside of the fairly high fantasy sort of milieu of typical D&D it really isn't suited to another genre. WotC did its d20-based SAGA Star Wars, which is a pretty good game, and does a very 'high fantasy sci-fi' pretty well, but doing something like 'Foundation' or any other similar harder 'space opera' or 'galaxy fiction' would be pretty close to impossible to get the feel right. I love the leveling progression concept of D&D, its genius within its niche, but outside that niche it just basically does not work!OK, but why wouldn't any of those techniques work just as well if 'rule 0' said "everything rests on table consensus, whenever a rules decision, modification, or other similar decision must be made regarding how the game is played, everyone at the table must agree." Dungeon World comes pretty close to saying that, and I don't see how that is going to impede hacking the rules at all. Yes, someone may dig their feet in and say "no I won't go along with that solution/house rule/whatever" but so what? I mean, anything can still be proposed and likely accepted if its a good idea.Well, OK, someone who is a designer might design better than us random people off the street, but I still don't see how that relates to this rule 0 thing. I don't see games that lack a rule 0 'delegating to the rules', rules never DO anything, they're simply a set of instructions and whatnot that you can use to play a game. Either the GM role has a certain authority, or the player role does, or nobody does. Yes, its possible for the game to describe how that authority is exercised, but in terms of making rules changes, or simply playing in a way not envisaged by a loose set of rules, I again state, I don't think rule 0 is even REALLY very relevant, it isn't constitutive of anything, ignoring it, fully or partially, doesn't really have much impact on actual play.</blockquote>

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