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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8850130" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't feel this is a fair challenge, since one can always play devil's advocate and argue against anything however reasonable it might be.  Your ability to be curmudgeonly or critical is no more in question than mine is.But I will give you examples were I think having rules make a difference, and that is any time the game moves off the rules map.Every game has expectations about how it will be played that came up when the designer imagined the game or began to play it, and the designer will provide rules for that situation.  But since table-top RPGs are defined by the freeform agency of the players, every game has the potential to morph into some other sort of game the original designer didn't foresee as some table jumps on some element of the fiction as important and interesting that the game designer didn't foresee.An obvious example might be that over the course of some lengthy campaign, the players become influential and in response to a problem decide to raise an army.  It makes a very great difference whether or not your game has a supplement for handling mass combat or not, both in the likelihood that this situation will occur and the ability of the most well intentioned and even experienced GM to handle it well.I make an analogy here to the discussion in B2 Keep on the Borderlands about what to do if the players leave the wilderness map.  Several suggestions of varying complexity and requiring varying skill are provided, but as the module was intended to be played with the Basic rules and wilderness travel was a concept silo'd off into the rules of the Expert set, it very much probably mattered whether the GM had exposure to even the concept of campaign building and wilderness travel how that situation would be handled.  It's a huge burden on the GM's ability and skill to be faced with a situation where the players take the game off the rules map in some fashion, and you can't possibly expect that the absence of rules to handle something doesn't matter.</blockquote>

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