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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6250592" data-attributes="member: 42582">Because I've spent so much of my GMing life GMing Rolemaster, which is basically a set of ideas on how to build a system rather than a system ready to go out of the box - particularly once you layer on all the RM Companions - and before that I used to read White Dwarf and Dragon Magazine articles which were full of ideas about how I might tweak the game this way or that way, I've never really thought of RPG rulebooks as "telling me what I have to do".On the other hand, I'm wary of rulebooks simply telling me I can change this or that and it will all be good. For instance, if you're playing 4e, and you change the game so that rogues can't do sneak attack damage against undead, and then you run a group with a rogue PC through an undead-heavy adventure, there's a good chance the game won't be as satisfying for the player of that rogue as it might otherwise be. Or, to generalise slightly, it's not as if the PC build rules and the action resolution rules that interface with them make no difference to the experience of the players at the table.In the case of D&Dnext, from my point of view it's not enough that it tell me I can change the rules this way or that way. I want it to take steps to ensure that changing the rules this way or that way will predictably deliver the desired experience. Or to tell me what the predicted experience resulting from a given tweak will be, so that I can work out whether or not I want to make that tweak.Just to give one practical example: if the game talks about options for slowing down hit point recovery, then on the same page I want it to talk about slowing down the recovery of other resources linked to the daily cycle too, like spells. And to talk about the duration of spells like Rope Trick and Mordenkainen's Magnificant Mansion, and the extent to which I might also want to tweak them to preserve their default role within the overall system architecture. And to talk, too, about how I might change relevant aspects of the exploration and random encounter rules, to make sure that these still interface neatly with the (now slower) recovery rules.This is the sort of thing which historically (including 4e) D&D has been very bad at. But there are plenty of good examples of how advice can be framed in this sort of practically useful way that prioritises the perspective of the table over the perspective of the fiction. Burning Wheel is the best I know; but 13th Age is a pretty good example within the d20 family of games.</blockquote>

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