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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8247554" data-attributes="member: 87792">Guess what? I don't tailor things round the ability of my players and I actively prefer new school rule sets. So it's not the rule set that's the issue. It's the attitude of the GM.Again. I play new school rule sets with exception based design - and I do not have to gauge this "constant impact". I embrace it.You are only emphasising the point that you as a DM do not trust the players with too many codified abilities they can use. If I can trust the game designer I can trust the players.  It's not about the codified abilities because some of us can trust them. It's about your attitude to the players having codified abilities.You further emphasised that by your claim that I should know what all the feats and abilities in the game do. Why on earth would I want to?And you said that my issue was trust because I don't want to clutter up my user interface by unnecessarily wedging a DM in there - and as a DM I want to get on with the game rather than being an admin assistant and general dogsbody.The old school perspective in my experience relies on projection (the Old School Primer in particular being fairly risible). And the DM being the almost unquestioned god rather than trusting the players to take things and run with it. All the trust flows in old school play are from the player to the DM and none the other way round.The new school perspective in some cases even calls the GM the MC - first among equals and trust flows both ways. (The in between rules heavy perspective has little trust either way and Monte Cook himself has called this out and asked "what have we done?").If your idea of "New School" is the dominant paradigm from about 1985 to 2005 then I can see where your views come from. But that's not remotely new school.As has been pointed out old school rule sets are not light.You've got one set of mechanics for attacking, another set for ability checks (with lifting bars and bending gates having their own percentile subystem), another set for saves (two if you count resurrection and system shock), another set for thief weapon proficiencies, and still another set for spellcasting. And that's before getting into e.g. surprise rules let alone start digging through the 1e DMG for ridiculous and fiddly rules like the helmet rules. Old school rule sets are (despite the claims of some of their adherents) pretty complex - and more complex than 4e or 5e to learn. The complexity of 4e is largely emergent based on what people do and how they interact and the choices they make.And that's why old school DMs frequently have to do all the admin work rather than having everyone pitch in and freeing them up to do the parts only they can do. The rules are complex and fiddly compared to modern rules so it's a lot more of an overhead for the player to learn. For that matter the core of 3.X is, thanks to being unified, a lot easier to learn than anything TSR put out as D&D (and I include the brown/white box here and probably the purple and red boxes). 3.X then decided that they'd take all the space freed up by not using a complex and arcane ruleset that did things backwards and make it equally heavy by throwing modifiers everywhere.4e and 5e meanwhile both kept their cores simple and put extra complexity on the abilities of the characters (PC and NPC alike). But this is still relatively light because each player only needs to know what their character can do and you can even tailor the complexity of the character. And the X, Y, Z I'm doing is called working out what's going on in the world and DMing a collection of NPCs.If I want a light game there is no D&D version even worth talking about. I reach for Fate, Fudge, Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Risus, or a large number of other games. Modern RPGs are generally a lot lighter than anything old school.They don't need to pitch in. I want them to pitch in and they almost always learn to pitch in after the first couple of sessions. This is because modern RPGs are a lot easier to learn than old school RPGs because they use unified systems so you're not stuck wondering which dice to roll and whether you want to roll high or low.And they want to pitch in themselves because they aren't lazy and like to be in control of their characters.Debunking the misinformation you are spreading from your description of modern systems as complex when compared to arcane older systems to your leap to it being about trust issues.</blockquote>

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