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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5630767" data-attributes="member: 22424">True. It's just a shame that it's often easier to heavily adapt a system in ways that don't really suit than it is to find players who'll try an alternate system. Sadly, lots of people will play 4e or nothing.For the first several years of play, my tendency was always to very crunch-heavy games, with very complex rules systems. I had no interest in 'story', or anything that went with it.Then things gradually changed. Endlessly hacking through dungeons lost some of its charm; it was important to consider why. At about the same time, I discovered "Vampire: the Masquerade", and moved to a very storyteller style.The thing is, although I did come back to D&D, my style had changed irreversibly by then. We didn't just go back to the crunch-heavy dungeon hack; there were always heavy story elements, and role-playing was really important, in a way it just hadn't been in the older days.Even so, my tendency towards greater complexity had never changed. Even when playing Vampire, I'd been constantly tinkering with the system, trying to 'fix' it. (Some might say I was completely missing the point...)So 3e really sang to me. It was immediately obvious that this was the game we should have had since forever. The maths were so clear, so obvious. And the system was so extensible...But again, over the last few years, my style has shifted. The weaknesses of 3e became glarigly apparent, especially at high levels. The heavy crunch started detracting from the story elements that remain of crucial importance to me. (Going "core rules only" helps, but only a bit. Many of the problems are fundamental to the system, and cannot be fixed within the 3e framework.)That's a large part of why I disdain 4e - the game as released in the PHB/DMG/MM is far too limited for me, but if you go much beyond that the bloat of options is such that I just have no interest in digging in to it. It's also why I don't run Pathfinder - the game is just too heavy for what I want now. And it's why I really like Star Wars Saga Edition.That's what I mean by drifting styles. It's nothing to do with blinkered attitudes; it's just a preference for running the game in a particular way, and a way that genuinely has shifted over time, from "rules-heavy, no RP" to "heavy RP, tending towards complexity", to "heavy RP, solid mechanics, tending to complexity", to "heavy RP, tending back towards simplicity".I disagree with literally everything in this paragraph.I see. It probably is a definitional issue, then. When I say I was an "Advanced DMG" to talk about handling different styles, it is the differences between, say Spelljammer and Dark Sun that I mean, not the differences between D&D and Universalis. But also the differences between "tending towards complexity" and "tending towards simplicity", or "no RP" and "heavy RP".</blockquote>

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