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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 2393383" data-attributes="member: 16574">Hi Ryan,IMO the true dichotomy isn't so much between rules-lite/rules-heavy (which are subjective terms, anyway) but rather between rules-opaque and rules-transparent, especially from the players' perspective. Does the player state what he's doing in 'real world' terms and leave the actual mechanical resolution of those actions mostly or entirely up to GM (regardless of whether the GM is then using a 'rules-lite' or 'rules-heavy' mechanism), or does the player think and state his actions specifically in terms of the rules (which again can be done whether those rules are 'lite' or 'heavy')? 3E seems (at least in my personal experience) to have shifted significantly towards the latter approach (by encouraging players to keep track of their own modifiers and synergies and feat effects and such, not to mention the entire concept of 'character builds'), which at least from my perspective is unfortunate, because I greatly prefer the former approach whether I'm playing a so-called rules-lite or rules-heavy game.  While 3E can be played in a rules-transparent manner, I suppose, this doesn't seem to have really been the intent (based on, for instance, putting almost all of the core task resolution rules in the PH, as opposed to the model of the 1E PH which described most of the actual resolution rules (i.e. combat) in 'narrative' terms and confined the actual 'crunch' almost exclusively to the DMG) and isn't an approach that I suspect would naturally occur to most novice players/GMs from reading the 3E rulebooks. Was this difference in preferences something you saw in your research (my anecdotal experience is that younger players and dedicated hobbyists tend to prefer more rules-opacity (they want to see how the numbers work -- that's 'part of the fun' to them) while older and more casual players tend to prefer more rules-transparency (they don't so much care how the GM is making his rulings, they just want the story/challenge/exploration (i.e. what they consider to be 'the fun part') to continue)? If so, how did you rectify it with the fact that the 3E design seems to favor the former approach so markedly over the latter?</blockquote>

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