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="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7935938" data-attributes="member: 29398">Though there's differences in play within the game, I've usually found one game of MTG is, in the end, very much like another.  And not just because I lose.More to the point, when the flavour of the cards is stripped away MTG is really nothing but a glorified exercise in mathematics, statistics and probabilities; and while different elements applied to that chassis (i.e. different deck designs) might encourage or trend toward certain results, the underlying chassis is always exactly the same.The only other mitigating factors are metagame actions by the players e.g. constantly fiddling with the cards in your hand in order to distract your opponent, or outright cheating e.g. shuffling but not really shuffling.  For these purposes I'll henceforth ignore them.The quesiton with regards to different RPGs (or D&D editions, depending on focus) is whether the underlying chassis is always the same, and-or whether it should be.It was clear even in 3e that WotC had learned from MTG regarding two things: unified mechanics (everything on a d20, etc.) and keywords (eschew natural language wherever something can be shoehorned into a keyword).  This, along with a very rules-first focus, made 3e appealing to MTG players - which IMO really helped its sales.In 4e they took it a step further and unified some underlying mechanics into AEDU, while at the same time filing off some rough edges.  Combined with the 3e developments (which were largely kept), and in comparison with 0e-1e-2e's mechanical chaos, it's not difficult to see how someone might start thinking in terms of 'samey' in a general sense, even while some specifics remained quite variable and different as we've seen by examples upthread.5e has backed off a bit from the rules-first focus and gone back to a bit more natural language in place of keywords; these two things make it 'feel' muc different from 3e-4e even though some of the underpinnings haven't changed much.  One could argue, for example, that at-will/short-rest/long-rest isn't as far removed from AEDU as it's been made to appear.At least, that's how it all looks from the peanut gallery. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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