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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9667809" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Sure. I pretty much recognized that from the beginning. My point was not to say "HAHA LOOK AT THESE JERKS DOING JERK THINGS". It was to say: We can, genuinely objectively, see that some of the stuff from "the GM's traditional role" was bad, all of us agree that it was bad and ought not be included in that role going forward. (At least, I presume we all agree that passive-aggressive dickery to manipulate player behavior is bad? God I hope so...) That makes things a hell of a lot more complicated, because it isn't and cannot be just a reversion to past form, unchanged. We can't dodge all change. But that means I cannot know what "the GM's traditional role" means unless it's explained. Because it isn't 100% identical to what the books say, I know that, I expect that. But it also is different from that role today.That means it's incumbent on Micah, or on you, or on whomever is using the term, to tell us what it means. Otherwise, it's a vague term with no real meaning, but which can be mined for any meaning the user might desire. It can be used in different senses without the interlocutor knowing what those senses are, meaning discussion is impossible and the person using the term can always declare victory--simply by flexing the vagueness to include or exclude whatever is inconvenient in the moment.I do not need to be taught the value of the idea of chronological snobbery, I promise you. What is out of fashion is not necessarily bad; what is in fashion is not necessarily good. An idea being old has no direct bearing on whether it is good, right, useful, or wise. We must argue much more carefully than that.I cannot argue with your feelings. I want to stress that in advance, because I know some will try to use that to dismiss whatever else I have to say. Your feelings are yours, and I can't question nor challenge them; they are what you felt.But I will challenge the non-feeling conclusions you drew from those feelings. These older systems are not "much more open to exploration" than newer ones. The exploration is different, and you flow better with the older system way than the contemporary system way. I am so bloody sick of people claiming that an absence of rules is automatically "more open to exploration" than any amount of rules no matter what, because that's simply false. FOR SOME PEOPLE, a total absence of rules is better, because they're already overflowing with ideas and the sight of rules, even helpful ones, causes them to shut down. I, personally, don't understand that, and never have. I don't understand why the idea that there are rules of any kind, no matter what they might be, destroys creativity. I just don't. It has never once made sense to me. Now, I'll certainly agree that rules which are: heavily interfering, heavily exclusionary, and in particular unknown or unfamiliar to the user are rules that produce that kind of experience! And I'll 100% grant you that that's how 3e's rules often worked in practice: if an action wasn't defined in the rules, it was expected to be genuinely impossible, not just "we have to figure it out". 3e is the edition of "anything not permitted is forbidden". But that isn't the only form rules can take! Rules can be abstracted, open-ended, supportive, rather than denying. In 3e, the existence of a feat which...say...lets you use Knowledge(Religion) in place of Spellcraft checks means people who don't have that feat cannot do that. But that isn't true in 4e. The whole point of exception-based design is that exceptions are, relatively, self-contained--and that big rules are expected to have many exceptions. 3e's absolute top-down rules design is interfering and exclusionary in ways that do, IME, shut down creativity. That simply isn't the case for other editions, to say nothing of other systems.And this is where we get into the most deeply subjective part of all.Personally, I really dislike having too many parts that feel too different. Instead of making the game feel rich, it makes the game feel forbidding. I have to keep so much more of the system in my head, I cannot focus on the experience anymore. I have to be constantly re-remembering "oh, right, this spell is for some reason a death save, not a wand save...even though I'm casting it from a wand...", or the absolutely horrible nature of THAC0, or that roll-under is better in this case and roll-over is better in that case, or which dice I need for this specific subtype of skill check, etc., etc. The system becomes a never-ending distraction from play, rather than a rich and textured supplement to it.And I know, since you literally just said so, that some people love this sort of thing. Personally, I think there's room for something somewhere in the middle. Something that isn't the extreme and overwhelming number of bewilderingly ad hoc subsystems of 2e, but also isn't quite "essentially everything is the same" either. Something where different parts can still feel different to use, without needing to front-load "okay, now remember these 17 subsystems, each of which has five variants". I don't know what form that would take, but I have to believe that something could do it.</blockquote>

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