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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 5078094" data-attributes="member: 85870">I hope the gist of my question comes across correctly. I notice frequently that any time the relative merits of one of the current rule sets is brought up, invariably one of the participating posters will say in essence, "Oh this is just an edition war waiting to happen." And I suppose my question is, why is this a bad thing? Coming from a humanities academic background, arguing and persuading others using sound logic and rhetoric is essential to promoting progress. If core issues cannot be debated, then there's no way to "sort out," or ultimately move discussions forward. Thus, I find it somewhat disappointing that any attempt at discussing opposing rule sets is met with opposition because it's no longer discourse, it's "an edition war." Now to an extent, I understand the rationale behind this, especially from a moderator's point of view. This being the "Interwebz," getting consistently high level discourse on RPG systems is a dicey proposition at best, and all it takes is one "My system rul3zz, your system dr00lz!" type of response, and the whole thing burns to the ground. Putting myself in the shoes of a moderator, I realize that they're probably just sick of these types of threads, they feel they're not productive, they're not adding anything to overall community. But at the same time, the need to have real discourse on the subject is not something to be taken lightly. To some extent, I understand that "personal preference" can never be adjudicated. If one rule set appeals to a player or group, then telling them that there are "flaws" in the rule set probably doesn't interest them. As most of us are aware, one man's "flaws" are another man's "critical features." But again, my experience tells me that the reality is that an argument of one rule set being better than another is not totally subjective. There can be hard and fast, provable ways that one rule system is superior to another--and I think we should be able to discuss what those are, no matter which edition they came from. Will there ever be a 100 percent "perfect" rule system for all types and styles of play? Probably not, but I feel strongly that there's still a lot of progress that can be made in game design, game balance, adjudication, and appeal to the broadest possible player groups. Just because no edition will ever be perfect doesn't mean, in my opinion, that we shouldn't be allowed to discuss ways that systems can be improved just because the threat of an "Edition War!!! ZOMG!!!!" response hovers over the proceedings. I'm very curious to hear what the community thinks. Thanks! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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