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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5230093" data-attributes="member: 4937">Most of what is on your list is edition and rules set independent.  This is especially true of the second half.  Most of it is the outcome of good DMing and will be missing regardless of edition when that skill in setting design, encounter design, adventure design, and so forth is missing.Any edition which fails to give good guidance to DMs in the form of examples of excellent design is going to fail in the long run.  Older DMs will gravitate to systems where they see in print clear examples that the system supports complex mature adventures.  This is almost rules independent.  A bad system with good adventures will attract experienced DMs because in many cases rules are relatively easy to fix to achieve a result.  Worse come to worse, you can toss the system out the window and pick up another one.  Newer DMs become successful DMs by running other peoples adventures, learning from them, emmulating the style of what their player's enjoyed, and gradually developing their own style.  That doesn't happen as often when the system, however good the rules set, doesn't light the way.One big mistake a rules designer can make is thinking that he can solve issues of game mastery and adventure design with rules design alone.  No rules set is so good that encounter design and adventure design are rendered purely mechanical issues.   You can provide guidelines, but if you don't provide examples of play, then you haven't provided much.  If you only provide mechanical examples, then you haven't provided anything.  Another related mistake I see in some games is a system with great flavor and great mechanics, but where it is clear that the designer has stopped at that and never seriously thought about how his game looks like in play.  Or if he has thought about it, it's a secret known only to him and which cannot be divined from the text.  In that case, the designer should have spent less time making a 'tight' rules set and more time communicating the real mystery of his game, which is, how he himself runs it.</blockquote>

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