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Message: <blockquote data-quote="riprock" data-source="post: 2985945" data-attributes="member: 42506">All right, that proves that the average players are not going to be able to hack the rules to produce Pun-Pun because almost every DM will disallow it.  I call that category "Players breaking the design."However, I've known quite a few DMs who have killed their campaigns because they assumed supplements would work well together.  They stretched the rules beyond what players would tolerate and players left.  I call that category "DMs breaking the design."The worst category, however, is when there is no crisis point, neither the DM nor the players know why everything seems out of whack, and after the game collapses they realize that they were putting together rules that don't go together well.  I call that category "accidental breakage."The Pun-Pun case is useful and instructive because it shows how easily accidental breakage can pile up.  I've seen a lot of campaigns that petered out because they were accidentally broken.  No one was *trying* to break them, but they broke anyway.  The solution of more play-testing or more logical rule design is applicable.Also, I've noticed that quite a few rule designs are much, much harder to break, even accidentally.  Those designs usually turn out to have been much more carefully play-tested.  I'm not subjecting AD&D to enough criticism, then, due to my ignorance of AD&D's supplemental material.  It's my impression that AD&D was better-playtested and harder to break accidentally, but possibly if I knew about the right supplements I would know how to do it.In the context of "becoming a god in AD&D":I think you don't understand my intended meaning.  Perhaps I didn't express it well.  What I meant was, "In AD&D, there was one way to become a god, namely by going through the process in Deities and Demigods."  That process required DM input explicitly, which prevented casual loophole abuse.Psionics, Wish, artifacts, etc. could produce high-powered PCs, but my interpretation of the rules for gods in Deities and Demigods was such that PCs always had to fear gods.  I could be wrong about this, but that was how it seemed to me.All right.  I can rule out Pun-Pun and still say that D&D 3.x had more accidental breakage than AD&D in my limited experience.  Quite possibly my experience is not representative of most folks' experience.I could sit down and type out the gory horror stories of bad DM judgement calls and incompatible players.  All of that doesn't really establish anything about the game at all, because it basically says that a DM ran a bad game -- whether that was due to unplaytested rules, bad DM skills, bad players is pretty hard to prove from one man's story.  If it's a foolish mistake to judge D&D 3.5 core rules based on Pun-Pun, is it also a foolish mistake to judge the supplemental material's optional rules based on Pun-Pun?</blockquote>

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