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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6663760" data-attributes="member: 996">Player empowerment vs DM empowerment  ('entitlement' has gotten an unpleasant connotation from politics) does seem to have become an issue and 3.x/PF and 5e do stake out extreme positions.  Either way, though, 'empowerment' is not a bad thing.  Empowered players have move control over the definition and development of their characters and have more chances to knowingly influence how the game progresses (and the campaign or 'story' develops) by the decisions they make.  Empowered DMs have more control over their campaigns - the sub-genre they're trying to evoke, the tone and pacing they're going for, and so forth.   Neither are the two necessarily incompatible. Interesting way of looking at it.  I usually focus on how D&D is about the only game that a group can readily agree upon playing, because so many of us started with it and thus everyone's likely familiar with it. That they may also have very different expectations about it is a complication I hadn't thought so much about. When D&D first got the RPG hobby rollling, it was briefly alone, and it's always remained the most widely-familiar RPG.  So, naturally, it gets adapted to all sorts of things it's not so well-suited for.  d20 was, perhaps, the ultimate expression of that victory of familiarity over facility - basically still D&D, but adapted with questionable success to all sorts of other genres, where hps/healing, class & level, AC, and the whole host of other D&Disms didn't work so smoothly. Balance was pretty roundly rejected by enough of the community, to make that seem likely, yes.  Balance, though, can be imposed by the Empowered DM.  And, it's a less fragile, less complex way of achieving balance, one that's not system-dependent.  Obviously, it puts a lot of responsibility on the DM... I get it.  I've felt that way since the late 80s, I'd say.  D&D is the game that started it all, and I'll always love it, but, it does sometimes seem like it's holding back the broader TTRPG hobby (if there really is one, not just D&D and some "games like D&D, but..").</blockquote>

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