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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6333556" data-attributes="member: 37579">I dunno if Merwin said it better. The intent seems to be the same, that D&D had more story and imagination elements in the early days than hard rules. Rules do have their place. In the Schwab thread I described rules as a crutch, because they let you play and let the game be fun when your imagination is hobbled. I think everyone who has DMed for more than a long weekend has had a session where they just were not "into" the situation and all cylinders were not firing. The imagination was lacking, the story wasn't coming together, and your lack of interest was inevitably going to kill your player's buzz. The rules help you say "Eff it. I'll just give them a dungeon crawl." And it works. The catch being, as the rules really took over this made the story harder. Because, as a DM, you needed to know the rules to work around them. If you didn't know the rules you could be blindsided by the players. And then there were the cases of RAW coming into play to smack down the DM's ideas, even if the Rule as Written created a weird and illogical situation that was the rule. It's been a looong time since I DMed without knowing the rules. But I've run for people who know the rules and don't know the rules. And I've played with people who don't know the rules. I have the most fun when I have more command of the rules than the players. Because I have more control. This is not one-sided though, as I can employ their ignorance to allow them to have more fun. "Sure, you can try that." I'll say and ignore the fact he moved five feet too many or the fact he'd provoke an Attack of Opportunity. It's more about playing the story at that point then playing the game. When I ran and there were other people who knew the rules it often felt like the main battle was taking place on a meta level. The rule lawyering started, and there was the back-and-forth over if you could do something. There was a lot more presumption that the PC could do something. Less "can I do this" and more "I do this then this then this." Most of the time this is fine if tonally different, but there's always the awkward moments where something fails because of an unknown variable and the player looks at me like I'm cheating. When I played and the DM didn't know the rules it was even more awkward. Because I didn't want to be that player that said "no, that doesn't work like that" or "well, actually, the rules say...". I tried to be there when he needed a ruling or asked for one and shut my trap the rest of the time. But I know some players who wouldn't be able to do that.This little rant-ette is really influenced by my view that D&D is equal parts story and rules, that the story and the narrative has equal impact over whether or not you're "playing D&D". When the story gets pushed aside and the narrative takes a back seat you lose an essential part of the experience.</blockquote>

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