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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 2937482" data-attributes="member: 697">I completely disagree with this. The best games have mechanics that make you stop and think, "Damn, that's a cool rule."Last night, I played a card game called Coloretto for the first time. There were at least three moments where players noticed a strategy or move that nobody had picked up yet, and each time they used it everyone at the table had a better understanding of and appreciation for the rules.Every time that a D&D player gets to use Cleave, he's happy that he has those rules. Every time someone makes an attack against impossible odds and rolls that 20, they're exulting in the cool possibilities inherent in the rules. The most elegant rules are those that are so compelling that we forget they're rules and assume they're just cool parts of the game.As for feats, the structure of feats is very elegant. That doesn't mean that every specific feat is elegant. I don't think that anyone understood how many feats there would be in the game. At the end of the first year of 3.0, there were maybe 150 official feats in all of the supplements. There wasn't a sense that feats had to be simple.I think that's changing. I think that in today's environment, feats need to be shorter, simpler, and easier to use. I agree that those feats are difficult to use and learn, but I think the solution is to build a better design model for feats.Imagine this world:Improved Disarm I: You do not provoke an attack of opportunity when attempting to disarm a foe.Improved Disarm II: When you attempt to disarm a foe, your opponent does not have the chance to disarm you.Improved Disarm III: You gain a +4 bonus on all disarm attempts.IMO, that's a much more elegant structure. Each rule is its own thing, allowing you to vary the pattern between different attack types more easily. You don't hit three exceptions to your attack unless you spend lots of feats for it. Disarm only becomes complex, or at least wordier, if you want to spend a lot of your PC's "complexity budget" on disarming people.Best of all, feats II and III have reasonable BAB requirements, beginners can ease slowly into the rules.Elegance doesn't have anything to do with exceptions-based mechanics. Magic is an incredibly elegant game, and it's entirely built on exceptions. If anything, exceptions make a game much easier to learn. A DM or player need only learn the exceptions that apply to the monsters he runs or the character he builds.</blockquote>

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