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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mattrex" data-source="post: 5686879" data-attributes="member: 81794">As someone who primarily GMs games rather than plays in them, I would have to say that, as a player, I would not much like a system where the rules are hidden from me, at least not without a lot of feedback on the extent of my character's capabilities and to a lesser extent those of my allies and opponents.One of the fundamental purposes served by a rule system is that of a game world's physical laws. Assuming you're applying the limits of the rules impartially to all actors, PC and NPC (and here I am assuming there are rules as opposed to the game just being improv), the players and the PCs both will have a good idea not only of what they can do personally, but also how the "laws of physics" work in their world. In the real world, we have a roughly intuitive understanding of concepts like speed, distance, physical strength, and mechanical concepts like work and power multipliers. We know that driving a hundred miles an hour is pretty fast and that being able to bench press five hundred pounds is a prodigious feat of strength.What we don't know--because these concepts don't exist in our reality--is how hot a dragon's breath is, how hard its scales are, or how sharp its claws are. The only means of judging fantastical variables like mythic creatures or the limits of magic is by arbitrarily fixing some standard point of reference and comparing it to the things we do know. This is where the rules abstractions come into play. We know that a dragon's breath does, say, 10d6 damage, which is an awful lot--and I know that because my squishy wizard only gets 1d6 hp per level. But what if my wizard got 5d6 hp per level? 1d10? 2d8? The relation between the heat of the breath weapon and my personal propensity to cook like a side of beef is different with each set of numbers, but none of those relations are ones I can apprehend intuitively based on my knowledge of real-world dragons and wizards.As the GM, you could tell your players, "The dragon's breath is incredibly hot, enough to melt stone and superheat metal," which certainly communicates the idea of "you don't want to get hit by it", but didn't you know that anyway? And besides, in a fantasy world, assuming I am a somewhat heroic character in my own right, depending on my abilities something that is hot enough to melt stone might be more or less dangerous to me personally. Is my magic shield strong enough to resist the fire? Can I repel the dragon's breath with my magic? Once you start thinking about these variables and the way you'd have to vaguely respond to them in practice--let's say, "The enchantment on your shield is powerful and can resist a great deal of heat"--then you're trending very close to simply telling the players the numbers you're rolling anyway.Once someone figures out that "almost no chance" means 10% and "very likely" means 80%, and all the others in between, only the window dressing changes, and now you're having to keep track of everything and keep the details--which you're all but communicating to them anyway--hidden.One other important element, at least for me, is that a significant portion of the fun of RPGs for me is derived from the sense of increasing competence and mastery--this is the sort of thing that people have been saying about video games and other hobbies for the longest time. Taking a complex system and gradually learning to understand and master it is a great pleasure, and much of that is lost if the actual nuts and bolts of the mechanics are obscured and unavailable.</blockquote>

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