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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7954694" data-attributes="member: 4937">It can, but then it will tend to be less reified in its transcript.  Unless combat is very rare, then combat modeled with a very simple system will tend to not produce descriptive play.  No one tries to shove, trip, grapple, and so forth if there isn't some sort of system that supports that.   In the long run, unless a descriptive choice is meaningful, then players will bore of investing description when it doesn't change the outcome.  So you'll end up with, "I roll to attack and do 6 damage" as your process of play, which even D&D can devolve to if you aren't careful.  (Even say 4e, once you've fired off your limited choices.)But as I point out, that's like saying that combat systems are unfair to players who are less tactically adept, or who struggle to visualize things spatially.  I think I'd need examples.  And I can give counter examples.  For example, Champions has a very complicated combat system.   However, Gary Fine in Shared Fantasy documented how the Champions group he observed actually avoided combat precisely because of the complicated combat system, and instead spent almost all of their time in interpersonal RP of the low melodrama sort.   Combat was rare and not a large part of the process of play simply because going to combat meant such a large investment in time and energy.I have a somewhat different view of this. In my opinion, the rules don't dictate the process of play, or at least, not very much. What dictates the process of play more than anything else is how the participants think about playing the game, and in particular how the GM prepares to play that game. So how a game presents its process of play, or how the game encourages the players to think about the game matters a whole lot more than the page count of the rules. Likewise, how the game encourages the GM to prepare for the game - which in D&D is done through having "modules" - dictates what the game is going to be like far more than the rules. This is the reason that D&D is much more about kicking doors down, killing monsters and taking their stuff than it is about magic despite the massive page count devoted to magic. D&D does an incredibly good job of telling the participants what the game is, much better than most of its competitors. But, and this is the key point, if you think about the game differently and prepare for it differently, you get an entirely different experience of play using the exact same rules.And I have a lot of examples for how that works, but this late at night (and after this long of a post) I'll need to wait on them if anyone is interested.</blockquote>

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