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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wycen" data-source="post: 6159916" data-attributes="member: 13732">Recent personal experience tells me the system matters.  Or at least expectations and/or system knowledge.But let me back up a bit.  A few years ago a friend and I were talking about not liking a particular version of the worlds most popular role playing game.  It was something we could agree on and bad mouth.  Then, later I discovered that in fact my friend didn't really like any of the more recent incarnations of this game, or perhaps any game with levels, classes, and expectations of accumulating "stuff".  He prefers indie games with heavy role play, but that's another story.  For a brief time, we managed to play Pathfinder together, but factors out of our control ended the game (well, we ended the game because we didn't like one of the players, but we didn't know we wouldn't like one of the players).While playing with that group I was also playing Pathfinder with other groups.  When I joined one of these groups, I knew they had played other d20 games and had enjoyed them, though also expected a couple things might annoy me, but figured I'd cross that bridge when I came to it.It started out with little rules being ignored or changed.  But as the game progressed and we fought larger and tougher monsters, it became obvious that either the DM did not know the rules or had house rules that I hadn't been informed of.  Finally, after the climactic battle after a year of playing, I had to talk to the DM about why the monsters did not fight well.  I'm talking about monsters larger than Medium size never using their reach and not taking attacks of opportunity among the glaring, "why doesn't anyone else at the table see this?" type of stuff.  That conversation convinced me the DM didn't know the rules and didn't know he didn't know the rules.  At that point I wasn't really having fun anymore because my knowledge of the rules pre-informed my decisions on valid tactics.  I should also acknowledge that other issues related to the DM-game dynamic were happening, so this issue of the rules isn't the sole factor, but in any event, I dropped the game.  I was the only one not having fun, so rather than fight an uphill battle with rules, and player expectations, I bowed out.</blockquote>

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