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="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8289976" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, there are a lot of variations in how things can break down or work in a sub-par way. The root of it is always some variation of granularity of detail WRT the dungeon, or some disagreements or lack of expertise about how things should play out in a given situation 'in reality' (or maybe even in terms of knowledge of genre, say how exactly a fireball works in a specific situation where players have a pre-existing understanding that is not shared with the GM or something like that). Or else the dreaded 'differing agendas' where the players maybe don't WANT to meta-game, but the GM's setup is based on assuming they will, etc. Actually, the history of D&D kind of recapitulates what is probably the most common trajectory. Players enter the game with the assumption that heroic fantasy of some variation is on the agenda, but it isn't in early classic D&D... At least not as-written. At best you can only do it at high level after you 'gain skill' (and mostly as a caster, or with casters being an integral ingredient to it). So, with each retelling of the game (edition/supplement/modification) the rules first slip in the direction of providing 'skills', which are an attempt to enable story telling by letting the players do stuff they cannot accurately describe or gauge the difficulty of.Then comes the addition of 'DM Force' (already present in Gygax's explanations of how he GMs in 1e DMG). That is the initially ostensible neutral referee role becomes more 'game facilitator' and then 2e explicitly labels the GM as a story teller. Now the game is incoherent, because the rules are derived from, and the process is built around, basic skilled play GM describes the dungeon.That leads to more attempts to add rules for everything, until you have 3.x, and finally someone designed 4e, a story game which can basically still be played in a 3.x-ish way, but frustrates people who want to do that. Then the trend finally breaks, 5e is basically 2e-redux, just as incoherent as ever! sigh.</blockquote>

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