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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ourph" data-source="post: 3383855" data-attributes="member: 20239">I wouldn't say I "long for the days when D&D had no skill rules", I just disagree with the notion that having the DM adjudicate the success of disguising yourself as a young giant is inherently more susceptible to the depredations of a poor DM than having a specific, rules-defined, DM-adjudicated probability of success for it (and no matter what all the extra numbers, descriptions and rules concerning the Disguise skill say in the books, it's ultimately still up to the DM to determine how easy or hard it is for your PC to succeed, so "DM-adjudicated" is completely appropriate and warranted in that description).  In my experience, a DM who is incapable of handling the former to create a fun game isn't going to suddenly improve because he's got a few more pages of rules to memorize.No, the rule is already present, it's "listen to what the players tell you their characters are doing and then use common sense or your best guess to make a reasonable judgement call as to the result".  It's just as much a rule as "roll d20 and add modifiers, compare to the opponent's AC".  Yes, theoretically, you could design a game system where the only rule was "DM makes the call".  There are, in fact, game systems that do almost exactly that (Amber and Prince Valiant come close).  They work just fine.  I don't use those systems because I prefer having specific rules for certain things (combat, poison, saving throws) but not others (searching for treasure, bluffing an NPC).  But the skills that make someone a good 3e DM are, IME, the exact same skills necessary to be a good DM for those other systems, so I would expect anyone decent at running one game would be equally good at running the others.  Conversely, if you can't run Amber (one of the simplest games ever created) effectively, I don't see how adding a boatload of rules complexity is going to improve your skills as a DM.  I've seen several examples of the opposite, however, where the added complexity made an already poor DM worse.  I didn't mention anything about personal preferences above.  I'm talking about the ability to be a decent DM.  You may prefer a more comprehensive rulesystem and that's fine, that's great, go with what works for you.  But I'm sure, if asked to run an AD&D game, you'd do just fine (assuming you're a decent 3e DM and you weren't purposely tanking to prove a point  <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=";)" /> ) at making an enjoyable game for the players.  Whether you would enjoy doing so is completely beyond the scope of my point.I think you're making the mistake of shoehorning this discussion into a "rollplaying vs. roleplaying" debate in your own analysis of it.  It seems to me that it's more of a challenge the player vs. challenge the character issue, which has very little to do with the segment of the RPG community that's super-concerned with character development, verisimilitude and immersion (i.e. what I would generally consider the "pro-roleplaying/anti-rollplaying" group).  IMO, those people probably consider BOTH positions being discussed in this thread undesirable.  One (the challenge the player position) breaks both verisimilitude and immersion.  The other (the challenge the character position) puts too much emphasis on the mechanical aspects of the character.They probably think of this discussion as "the thread where the powergamers are fighting over the best way to be a powergamer again".   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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