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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2420947" data-attributes="member: 10201">I think his point was that "entirely of the GM's imagination" was, itself, hyperbole--that no one was advocating playing like that in the first place, and that he is skeptical that anyone plays like that.I glommed those two bits together because i think they illustrate the fundamental difference in viewpoint: what you describe is one POV, not necessarily shared by all RPGs. Lots of RPGs at least blur the "player=PC; GM=everything else" dichotomy, and some throw it out completely. Also, whether the rules are made up by the GM or by a game designer has zero impact on how much input the player has. Think of it like this: if the game rules define 10% of the game experience, and the GM defines 60%, the players are left with 30%. If the game rules define 60% of the game experience, and the GM defines 10%, the players are still left with 30%. And while the former might technically be "rules lite", that's not what most rules-lite advocates are describing. IME, most "rules-lite" games look more like rules: 10%, GM: 40%, players: 50%. And while i've invented all those %ages [i'm not even sure you could meaningfully measure the distribution of power in an RPG in a way that added cleanly to 100%], their relative magnitudes are intended to be reasonable approximations. That is, the bigger difference between crunchy and rules-lite systems isn't so much the decrease in rules input, but the increase in player input. IME--and this is much of the appeal of rules-lite games for me--players have a *lot* more input into the game, at the cost of the GM having considerably less control.In other research, i just stumbled onto a thread on The Forge that expresses what i want to say better than i can, i think: <http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8471>, specifically the first post. In short, the vast majority of commercially-visible RPGs are mechanically pretty much interchangeable, so, if those are your only experiences, and you're happy with at least some of them, systeom won't seem to matter. But if that style doesn't work for you, you won't be happy, and you may see the system as the problem. And once you've tried other styles of RPG, and discovered one that doesn't make you unhappy, you'll probably decide that system does matter. [Though, honestly, given our discussions, i suspect you're already aware of that--it's just that not many commercially-visible RPGs use systems that you'd strongly dislike.]</blockquote>

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