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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Solomoriah" data-source="post: 4872080" data-attributes="member: 10663">Um... in S&W, and BFRPG, and LL:Fighters fight,Magic-users cast spells,Clerics fight some, and cast spells some, and generally provide support to the party, andThieves sneak around and steal things, and sometimes apply a cowardly poke in the back.In terms of the number of different things the standard classes do, the thieves are actually ahead of the fighters and magic-users.  So are clerics, a class I find not many people prefer to play (at least, hereabouts).But anyone can have a good idea.Lots of hard-and-fast rules, with details for every possible situation, leaves the players needing to consult the rulebooks to decide what they want to try, and the GM doing the same to see if they can do it.  Relatively few, very simple rules allow the GM and players to look beyond the rules and think in terms of the characters.  My ideal game would provide excellent simulation of fantastic reality with the rules largely invisible to the players.  Of course, that's not possible, so I settle for the best I can get.If you are offended by "DM Fiat" then you won't like these games.  If you are in love with lots of detailed, named and numbered options (feats, etc.) then you won't like them either. But if you like a game that plays FAST and needs little preparation time for the GM, then these might be the games for you.See, here it is again.  It seems that you think that classic games treat some characters better than others.  I disagree.  What it comes down to is this:  In some situations, some classes or races have advantages over others; but they pay for those advantages with disadvantages in other situations.  The "balance" is not mechanically precise, because outside of combat, it appears impossible to make the balance mechanically precise.  There is no good metric for determining if game balance is "correct" in all non-combat situations.  For this reason, modern games tend to focus on balancing combat while ignoring the other situations.  But this leads to a combat focus in the mechanics that I don't really like all that much, and further, it leads to homogenizing the classes so that the choice of class really doesn't matter, balance-wise.For a choice to matter, there have to be both good and bad consequences regardless of the decision, and the player must choose which set of good and bad he or she will accept.  How you deal with limitation is as important as how you deal with capability....One of the things that really amazes me in modern games is how players will sit down and spend a mess of time generating a first level character... and know in advance what that character will look like at level 20.  Egad.  Where's the fun in that?The first campaign I ever ran had two thieves as the core PCs.  Yes, thieves, that much-maligned class.  They stole and fought and slunk through a number of adventures, collecting comrades and discarding them again (or losing them outright to the scythe of the reaper) until they somehow became heros.  In the process, they died a few times, but never both at once (so there was always one to pay to raise the other).  Then came the day when one was slain by a sea dragon, and too little remained to raise.  So he was reincarnated... as a halfling.  (In BX, which we played back then, a halfling was effectively just a kind of fighter.)  He paid a magic-user (the same one who reincarnated him, if I recall rightly) to Polymorph him back to a human.  Of course, he had to worry about Dispel Magic from then on.  But that lowly thief became a renowned warrior and eventually a king.  His thiefly associate remained with him until the very end of the campaign.They had no idea when they started where they would end up.  No "career planning" there.  And we really did prefer it that way... still do.</blockquote>

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