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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9505993" data-attributes="member: 6790260">So, there's a pair of important facts that I think explains both of these things handily, but the two often get misconstrued.The first fact is that players and DMs often do not know what they actually want and why they actually want it. This is not unique to D&D, it's a common problem in many things. Food, for example, is full of received wisdom about what one "should" want, rather than being driven by what actually produces better outcomes. The discovery that people wanted Extra Chunky spaghetti sauce is an example there. Now, this absolutely cannot be used as a "your opinion is invalid" card--but it's worth remembering that it is quite possible to believe very strongly that some particular thing is necessary, only to later realize that you don't enjoy it as much as you believed you would.The second fact is that it is often difficult, even for experienced players and DMs, to foresee the consequences of a set of rules before engaging with them. Rules are abstract things, by definition, and abstractions are harder to work with than concrete things. A rule may result in a particular consequence just like the rules of gravity result in a ball rolling down a hill, but without that visual intuition to guide us, it can be hard to see the consequences. No one is totally immune to this.One of the key ways these two facts often get misconstrued when combined is to say that rules don't matter. If you can't tell what they'll do before you use them, and you can't be sure that rules that sound good are actually rules that work good, some conclude that that means all rules are equally bad, so bin 'em and just do whatever. This is, of course, the death of game design (and, indeed, the death of all creative media.)What it actually means is that rules design is difficult, and self-understanding is difficult, but that there are ways we can do better or worse, and (perhaps most importantly of all), we can learn ways to better understand the impact of rules before they're used, and ways to make rules that do better at achieving the goals for which they were designed. (All rules humans make are, necessarily, designed for some purpose, though some purposes are better or more achievable than others.)</blockquote>

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