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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5956885" data-attributes="member: 54877">Riffing off recent discussion in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?p=5956625#post5956528" target="_blank">My HP Fix - Page 8 - EN World: Your Daily RPG Magazine</a>, I'm going to assert a few things and see if they spark any interest: D&D has always been a mix of process-sim, result-sim, gamist, and narrative mechanics.  By that, I mean something vaguely analogous to Forge versions of simultation, gamism, and narrativism in pursuit of creative agendas, but not exactly.  For example, in my usage, a gamist decision is simply one that produces a decision point in manipulating the odds using the game's mechanics, while a narrative one is the corresponding decision point in manipulating the fiction.  Both simulation type mechanics run the other way, where you are finding out what happened rather than deciding. This mix is a great strength of D&D, and accounts for a certain amount of its widespread appeal.  It's also one of the things that drives people crazy.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />   D&D has also always been a mix of incompatible and incoherent abstractions.  Unlike the various mechanics, I think this has largely been a negative--or at best, a "necessary evil."  People have wanted incompatible things in the game, and the designers have tried to satisfy them. You could get away with a lot, because of the abstractions. For a long time, the designers tried to satisfy them with patter and fancy footwork.  As the designers got more serious about really handling the issues, instead of hiding them, the incompatible desires have become more and more apparent.  The Next modular approach is the only answer that solve this problem, except for people who think the patter and fancy footwork was sufficient.  (Or more fairly, the modular approach is the only suggestion I've seen thus far capable of solving the problem.) There's at least three strains of thought in the above.  I'll wait to see if I get any bites before I bore you with elaboration. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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