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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8247453" data-attributes="member: 87792">It's "more accessible" as long as you don't actually want to engage with the world in my experience. In the real world I may not be able to solve the equations for a thrown ball (at least not when you take air resistance and my rust into account) - but when someone throws a ball I can be reasonably confident where it will land and in other ways have an intuitive understanding of the mechanics of the world. And there are literally dozens of examples I could come up with like this.What this means is that without having a decent understanding of the mechanics in question I am significantly less able to engage with the fiction than I am if I do because I do not understand the underlying mechanics of the setting. Tone only takes you so far - and tones can vary drastically especially when such a gamist convention as hit points are a key part of the system.Having rules and structure provides advantages for roleplaying over freeform because it allows me to, as a player, act more confidently and with greater freedom while knowing that what I want to do meshes closely with the shared fiction despite the fact we have never discussed it. Having rules but knowing that as a player they are kept from me just makes me feel that I'm in an unmarked minefield and provides the worst of all worlds between freeform and mechanically structured.And having a DM who won't tell me what the rules are is having a DM who is purposely and deliberately inserting themselves between me and the fiction, making it harder to reach. If the DM's job is to act as the interface between the player and the rules then purposely hiding the rules when the player wants to reach them means that the DM is about as helpful as pop-up advertising and rather than being a helpful user interface they are getting in the way.Meanwhile as a DM I don't want to have to learn dozens of subsystems and I don't want to be the one preventing the players doing their thing.As for "gauging the impact of a plethora of hard coded abilities on my adventure", firstly it's not my adventure. I'm not the one going on it. If it's anyone's adventure it's the players'. And secondly if the players catch me off guard good for them. They've done something cool. I prefer to let them have their genuine victories rather than spoon feeding them to them by their only using pre-approved abilities in pre-approved ways.</blockquote>

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