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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5479602" data-attributes="member: 27160">Then can I suggest that D&D is not the game you thought it was?  My view is quite simple:D&D has, since day 1, included hit points, limited spell/power uses, "experience" points and character levels.  As such, it was pretty much focussed on players stepping up to the challenge of managing resources to kill (OK, maybe just "defeat") creatures and take their stuff.  This is built into the fabric of the game - it's the game's "DNA".Some folk found other things to focus roleplaying games on.  Initially, they did this using D&D, but invariably they had to "tweak" it quite a bit to get it to work to their satisfaction.  This is, I believe, because it was fundamentally not built for what they wanted to use it for.The more perceptive and adventurous of these folk either made their own systems from whole cloth or found systems that others had made that suited their purposes better.  A long period of experimentation and discovery followed.  Many good - and many frankly awful - systems were developed.With 3.x and especially with 4th Edition D&D, I think the designers have actually returned D&D to its 'roots'.  They have recognised the "DNA" I mentioned earlier and aimed to create a game system that is optimised for that purpose.  I love the result.  I can understand that those who wanted to use D&D for other aims prefer earlier editions - essentially because their lack of optimisation for "gamist" or "challenge based" play means they are better for other styles of play, in a similar way to which a hacksaw with no blade is better for use as a hammer, because there is no blade to break or cut yourself on!The "answer" I advocate for those who are not interested in "challenge based" play (or, more accurately, are not interested only in such play) is to find an alternative system or systems that suit your tastes better.  Maybe that would even be a derivative of D&D - but if you take out the xp, the levels and the hps and modify the spell systems I am confident you'll end up with a game better suited to your preferences.The one thing I sincerely hope does not happen is that Mike Mearls - or anyone else - tries to take D&D back towards those other play modes piecemeal.  All that this will get us is a game that still has basic gamism in its blood, due to the deep-engrained xp, levels and hps, but which is horribly compromised in other respects in a (doomed) attempt to provide "the perfect game" to those for whom the D&D system's core strengths are really not what they are looking for.In this respect, it's a shame that the D&D brand is indivisible.  I get the impression that what some (many?) folk really like is the setting colour and "genre" that has developed around D&D.  If someone was able to write a brand new system around that, without the D&D system tropes that run counter to exploratory ("simulationist") play, I think it might be a huge hit.It's not a question of "one true game" evolving over time.  There is no single, irrefutable goal to support such a supposition - that is the problem.  Why should we fight to pull a vehicle down two (or more) divergent roads, when if we had two vehicles we could simply take one for each road? Both roads are good - why fight over which one we should all take, when everyone could take the one that suits them (and some, like me, will wander awhile down both, at different times). Given that the "vehicles" in question exist in the realm of ideas, we are hardly likely to run out of wood - or draft horses!Nice image <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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