Ah, it seem like you might have slightly misread me. The way I read you, you are rather amplifying than disagreeing with my final point? That is that the community effect "forcing" them into this extreme is more important than the intrinsic factors of the game previously mentioned?
I agree that presentation cannot mind control people away from being creative in their interpretations. But I assume you agree that presentation can contribute to attracting or pushing away people with certain opinions regarding how they want their game to be played?
"Contribute" is a squishy word. Much too vague. You had said:
So while the theoretical gap might be quite huge, for practical purposes most games today tend quite closely toward one of the extremes. This is also further compounded by the community attraction polarization effect. Even if a game might be "hackable" in theory - if it is presented in a way that appeals to those strongly believing in firm rules, the community around the game will likely quickly be dominated by these, making finding a group interested in playing the game in a more lose fix it as you go manner relatively hard.
Emphasis added. This boils down to "because of how you phrased the sentence, nobody believes anyone can be creative with how the rules are applied."
I reject this as fundamentally wrong.
Particularly when it applies to D&D-related things, because we're talking about a community that already exists full of people who ignored blatant, explicit, repeated,
vehement claims against ever doing such tinkering.
Remember, the following is a
verbatim quote from AD&D1e:
"One of the things stressed in the original game of D&D was the importance of recording game time with respect to each and every player character in the campaign. In AD&D it is emphasized even more: YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." --
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) 1st Ed. Dungeon Master's Guide, p. 38.
The books--the
community--had been overlooking text that had said there were hard-coded requirements as aggressively as a text could possibly say it. It is simply absurd to argue that later editions are somehow different because of small turns of phraseology and subtle notes that encourage a certain kind of community is.
The D&D community has been flagrantly and knowingly ignoring what books say for ages. Why is it that it becomes an ironclad cage only when the books actually
tell you what they're doing and why they're doing it?
(Edit: "So while the theoretical gap might be quite huge, for practical purposes most games today tend quite closely toward one of the extremes" was it this assertion you questioned? I guess in that case it could be a question about different metric. For instance I could have a hard time seeing how to make a game much harder to hack, and hence considering it close to that extreme, while you can easily envision an extremely intrinsically unhackable game, and hence think we are far from the extreme? A fully straight jacket game is hard to envision unless it come bundled with pinkertons..)
That is the assertion I take issue with, yes, but the problem isn't the one you're referencing.
Consider rules like 4e's XP Budget. This subsystem is
frequently alleged to require perfect, lockstep matching of character level to combat level. Nothing could be further from the truth--and the text explicitly and repeatedly says so, in at least three different sections. It twice goes into how necessary it is to have both easier and harder encounters, and that placing encounters in flat, no-detail environments likewise leads to boring experiences.
In other words, even when the text
literally TELLS you to engage creativity, to include variation, to elect to throw in occasional well-designed
difficult encounters as well as well-designed
easy encounters, they claim it ironclad requires the opposite. They literally claim that the rules
forbid creativity, when those rules repeatedly say that creativity is absolutely essential to make the rules worth using.
Contrasted with, as above, parts of these allegedly "hackable" rules which explicitly, in all-caps text, tell you you cannot ever fail to do some particular task or you've ruined your game forever....and then the vast majority of gamers, even at the time, never kept time records of any kind, let alone "strict" ones.
The actual text is irrelevant to whether people claim that something is a straitjacket or not. Hence why I have made several other arguments with my particular speculation as to why this claim gets made. I won't repeat them here; they aren't relevant to the thread and I don't think speaking them here would be productive.
I could for instance design a monster that everytime would take damage, you need to also defeat the GM in a best out of 3 rock paper scissors match, or else the damage is ignored. I think most would consider this pretty serious house ruling.
But, hey, like I said, this is just bog standard edition warring stuff that's been hashed out for over a decade. Why bother letting things like facts interrupt now?
It's just so frustrating because it's not true in the slightest. It frankly baffles me how anyone could read pulp fantasy (of which I'm a huge fan) and then look at D&D and think, "Yup, that's pulp action right there."
