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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8276996" data-attributes="member: 87792">Sure, bad mechanics can have a negative impact on skilled play. They can also have a positive impact on play or do you drop e.g. the combat rules entirely? After all the principle that more mechanics devalue "skilled play" means that freeform should be the one true way, right? Or is this not so and (a) a balance is a good thing and (b) the quality of the mechanics matters as well as the quantity?The mechanics can also have an extremely positive impact on the game as a whole. When mechanics aren't available for things like searching the game frequently devolves into tedious SOPs that might have taken skill to put together but are just rote things to follow that could be carried out by anyone, and to asking long and tedious amounts of questions of the DM that mean that searching a room in-game takes longer than it would in real life because no DM is skilled enough to describe all the details of an intricate room in a relatively small amount of time. It all depends on what you value.So why are you playing games that are a poor fit for what you want to do? I wouldn't use Call of Cthulhu rules for a Marvel Superheroes game or vise-versa. This has nothing to do with the weight of the rules and everything to do with tone.The more defined rolls can be placed in front of a character. But that doesn't mean the more defined rolls will be placed in front of a character. I think we'd all agree that 3.X has more rules than 5e - but there is nothing stopping the 5e DM asking for exactly as many and exactly as tough rolls as the 3.X DM - rolls that map onto the 3.X ones. Indeed I'd go further and say that if we're talking about what can be done rather than what's good practice at least the 3.X player can meaningfully point to the rules and say "it should be this hard"; someone in an old school or 5e system can get ridiculous DCs or ridiculous numbers of rolls.And an irritating DM in either system is going to point out that the chandelier was never meant to hold the weight of a human anyway and the whole thing comes down.Most of what the rules are is a framework that the designer thought was reasonable and the player and DM both agreed to. So all you really get here is "It can become less about what person A thinks is reasonable and more about what person B does". So don't play games you know to be bad. This is not an argument against crunchy rules. It is against playing badly designed games - or games that don't fit what you want to do.Agreed. But it's not just systems that do this, it's also GMs. It's not about level of crunch so much as individual biases.But there is absolutely diddly squat in your average rules light game that wasn't designed round swashbuckling (or even some that were) that says not to do this - most of them just have simpler resolution mechanics. And GMs can and do rule this way. This is why we have discussions about action and task resolution - a subject largely orthogonal to weight of the rules.</blockquote>

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