NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6042266" data-attributes="member: 22424">You know, the evidence suggests that he's actually right about that. 3e was phenomenally successful, 3.5e was extremely successful, and it remained successful throughout its lifespan. Then, once it became Pathfinder, it was successful again.You're almost certainly right that rewarding system mastery makes for a theoretically worse game. It means that there are almost certainly a bunch of game-breaking exploits out there somewhere, just waiting for people to dig them up and use them. And every time a DM squashes Pun-Pun, some new exploit will just pop up instead.And yet, rewarding system mastery also makes for a game that is both commercially more successful, but also one that people will play more, and get more enjoyment from, than the supposedly 'better' game that doesn't allow for system mastery.Why?Because system mastery rewards players who spend time thinking about the game, and their characters, outside of the game. It rewards those who actively discuss the game, its systems, and its options, outside of the game. And, crucially, it rewards those who try various things in the game.If the game was simple enough that system mastery was impossible, then there's no particular call for those discussions, so we're down to alignment threads and "let me tell you about my character/campaign". If the game is complex, but perfectly balanced so that all roads lead to the same place, then there's no incentive to put in any work to master the game - I might as well just grab any half-dozen on-theme powers for my archer, and he'll be as good as if I invested $400 in books and hundreds of hours in reading. There's no incentive to keep coming back.(That said, I don't think it's actually "system mastery" that's the key here. I think it's actually emergent gameplay. That is, as you play the game more and more, you discover more and more features of it. That's why chess has remained so fascinating for so long, despite both sides starting with exactly the same pieces. It's just that, in terms of an RPG, system mastery is the most obvious and easiest way to build in emergent gameplay. If one could find another such mechanism, then we could have the best of both worlds.)</blockquote>

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