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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2417878" data-attributes="member: 10201">Hmmm...I'm not sure whether i'm arguing for a theoretical situation, or only for my own experiences. IME, while failing to consistently use all of the rules, it is nonetheless slower than a rules-light game. Yes, if i actually stripped it down to a rules-lite game, it probably would be neither more consistent, nor slower. But that'd be a *lot* of stripping--i'd have to toss 90% of the rulebook to get to that point. As is, i'm probably using 90% of the rules, and only [unintentionally] screwing up or [intentionally] glossing over 10%--or maybe much less. I'm hardly "playing [it] ... as if it were rules light".Hmmm... hadn't thought of it like that. I can tell you that 2.5yrs of playing D&D3E, and ~9mo of playing Arcana Unearthed has not been sufficient for me to get anywhere near mastering the rules. I'm not sure if my on-the-fly rulings are getting more consistent with themselves, but i do know they are not getting more consistent with the written rules--roughly the same things are still getting "screwed up", and i suspect some of them will always be that way, until and unless i do memorized the rules, because they're precisely those things that are particularly counter-intuitive for me.I guess my counter to that particular hypothesis [that the rules are expected to be more than anyone can master quickly, but are intended to have a consistent underlying structure such that continued experience makes improvising rules consistently easy] is as follows: That may have been the goal, but (1) i question the goal and (2) i question the success of reaching it.1: I think that's a poor choice. But i may just be outvoted. Based on both discussions here and the WotC survey, continually increasing complexity is a feature, not a bug. Personally, i want the mechanics side of my RPGs to be something i can sit down and read once, and have the whole thing figured out and remembered.2: Even were i to accept that premise as desirable, i'm not convinced that D&D3E has achieved it. Maybe it's just the way my brain works, but i'm constantly frustrated by the inconsistencies--just when i think i've figured things out, i discover another subsystem/modifier/whatever that breaks what i *thought* was the underlying structure. So, either i still haven't found it, or the game is riddled with exceptions (or both).Finally, even assuming i'm wrong (or in the minority, as applicable) on both of the above points, there's still he issue that each D20 System game is different. Since it's not the underlying structure, but all the little details, that require referencing and make it a crunchy system (if all the combat rules consisted of was "+/-2 per advantage/disadvantage", thus stripping out 20+pp of combat rules, it'd no longer be high-crunch), the fact that there are essentially no two D20 System games that agree on all those details pretty much shoot any advantage they might have on the learning curve, in the foot. [At least some of my "mistakes", above, come from remembering the D&D3E rule, rather than the Arcana unearthed rule. Others i've talked to have made similar points--most notably about D&D3E/D&D3.5E-- about minor changes to nominally the same system.]</blockquote>

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