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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5029489" data-attributes="member: 4720">Purely as a player... You don't.  The guy writing the game might.  He wants it to be fun for new players and experienced players.  He wants to obviate the rough edges some DMs might have to ensure the group wants to play again.Also, what if you're someone who changes groups a number of times as I did?  People move.  DMs get girlfriends who don't like the game and they suddenly decide the game isn't for them.  Etc.  With 3e I at least found that DM style didn't completely trump the rulebooks.  I could sit down to a 3e game and find enough familiarity to other tables that I could just play.  When I was younger... not at all.  Every new DM or even new campaigns from the same DM, was like playing a different game entirely.Let me illustrate.  With the change in tables under 3e, you might be playing a different game.  But it was like knowing all the rules to Sorry! and sitting down to play Parcheesi.  Same concept (standard Cross and Circle game) but the execution is a little different.  You catch on quick and are only occasionally slapped by a quirky difference.With AD&D, I'd sit down to a new game and find it was like knowing all the rules to Chinese Checkers and sitting down to either Axis & Allies or Chutes and Ladders.  All 3 are played on a board.... and there the similarity ends.Selection bias from Hades.  People on this board are the people who played Keep on the Borderlands back in the day and are still playing or, like me, still interested in playing.That is a very small percentage, if I had to guess.  I played through that module 3 times myself and had fun once.  One of them wasn't recognizable as being the same module.  That one and one other were also not recognizable as "fun" or even as a genre of fun that might be enjoyed by a bipedal mammal in some parallel universe.The problem came from "days of old."  You see enough tables tank because of bad DMing for 5, 10, 15 years.... and you start thinking about how you can help new DMs.  Leastways I did.  If they had brought me on as a designer, that would probably have been my number one priority: Find a way to make DM skill more consistent or less important.It is admittedly a sad truth that the former is impossible to achieve while the latter is at least something you can attempt.Exactly.The former method works for a population that seems common on these boards but who I have only rarely met in real life: people who have a reasonable sense of how to work with rules and change them without bringing death and destruction to the game.  I cannot stress enough how rare this type of person is in the wild.  ENWorld is some sort of wildlife refuge for this species.The latter method works better (IMO) for everyone else.  And it still has value for people who know how to work with the rules.  Tweak and steal away!</blockquote>

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