I have no idea what this has to do with the school discussion, and suspect that other posters would be similarly confused. Would you please clarify your contribution?
Roll d20 and add to it for "high enough" for just about everything if you like, or don't. That is about as irrelevant as you can get, unless you get into the ideological baggage that has come along with the "core mechanic" puffery and clobbered common sense in some quarters.
It's the layout of the board, the victory conditions, the way that players interact, that makes Monopoly what it is. "We roll a pair of dice" is trivial, no different from Backgammon, and you could get the same spread -- which is what matters most,
not the cubes as artifacts -- in other ways.
Ever play Monopoly with a bunch of cock-eyed house rules? "How come the game takes so long?" Well, that's what happens when you don't put properties up for auction. "How come a couple of lucky rolls gave Andy such a lead?" Well, that's a consequence of your "free money for landing on Free Parking" variant.
"While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed." That's the facts, Jack, about the original D&D game, and some particulars of what "the campaign" meant in Blackmoor and Greyhawk practice were pretty essential parts of the whole. They were not slapped on "play styles" with trivial effects; they
were the game that had been playtested and developed and demanded and in 1974 offered.
It was a "massively multiplayer" game, in which "the referee to player ratio should be about 1:20 or thereabouts". Two referees handling 50 players would be fine. In Blackmoor, there was
Dave Arneson said:
... a great deal of emphasis being placed on the players themselves setting up new Dungeons, with my original Dungeonmaster role evolving more into the job of coordinating the various operations that were underway at any given moment. At the height of my participation as chief co-ordinator there were six Dungeons and over 100 detailed player characters to be kept track of at any one time."
It was a game in which risk of character mortality, along with other probabilistic factors, played a key role:
Men & Magic said:
Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magical types until they have worked up.
One powerful way to get fighters for protection was as henchmen (or "hirelings of
unusual nature", to use the original phrase). Drop that aspect from the game, and there you have the notion of charisma as a "dump stat".
Of course, there was no rule limiting a player to but one character at a time in a campaign. Gary Gygax (with Rob Kuntz as DM) eventually had his Circle of Eight, including at least one character (Bigby) who I gather had gone from monster to henchman to PC.
Magic users and fighters, clerics and dwarves and elves -- the options had a different character, a different balance, in that strategic context. Remove them from it, and it's like removing various pieces from their design context of a World War Two game.
Now, start whacking away at what's left in seemingly random fashion:
-- No more 1 attack/level for fighters vs. normal men & equivalent, and no more armies of such troops for them to command or conquer, and no more baronies to develop and defend.
-- No really notable limits on demi-humans to offset their advantages.
-- Preservation of the formerly endangered species of m-us, even if only by a general protection of PCs from having done unto them as they do unto others.
-- More easing of life for m-us with a "nerfed" spell here, a dropped rule there, much more frequent use of spells (especially those of higher levels).
-- Much easier manufacture of magic items.
-- Instead of it getting, at higher levels, ever easier to land a hit and harder to land a spell, swap in a different scheme.
-- Drop XP for treasure (scoring a goal), awarding points instead for getting into fights and having to deal with traps.
And so on.
I don't like 4e much as something for me to play, but it seems to have been more carefully designed, little "mechanical" details meshing better with the larger scheme, than 2e or 3e.
Some bits removed from the 4e context and slapped haphazardly into another game (or vice versa) might produce more than just the desired effects. A lot of pretty basic things are not just "a play style" but
the game as it was designed to work.
