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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilbob" data-source="post: 6852515" data-attributes="member: 9789">I have been thinking about a related question as we are about to start CoS.  The thing about D&D now that was different before is:  since 3.0, D&D has been more about explicitly defining things.  Vampires have X powers and this is how they work.  Your character is a fighter.  They can do X, Y, and Z, but never A, B, or C.  When you level up, here are your three choices.  Pick one.  All these powers work exclusively inside combat.  Your power is:  "good at greatsword."  Now role play that.I think older D&D systems - and many, many other systems that aren't D&D - aren't so explicit.  This makes them harder to adjudicate, harder to balance, and you rely much more on the instincts of the GM that way (which can be good or very, very bad).  But it doesn't bind you, either.  Your powers aren't just "good at greatsword."  They're whatever you can reasonably think of doing with whatever it is you happen to have.  Unbounded.  Implicit instead of explicit.D&D went down an explicit path with 3.0 (and SUPER explicit with 4.0) because balance was a primary concern.  They also wanted portability; if you played D&D with this group, you could switch to that other group and have a reasonable idea of what's going on.  This is good:  it helped expand the hobby and made it more accessible.  But it also became a focus.Eventually you can get to a point where when you ask a player what their character is doing, they look at their sheet for what they can do.Other games - and early D&D - was not so explicit.  You asked someone what their character was doing and they thought about what their character would do, not what they could do.  The less definition your boundaries have, the more you can expand them.  Obviously this has downsides, too - unreasonable people with no boundaries will ruin any game, period.  3.0 tried to reign that in:  it tried to enforce you to not be a jerk.  But the unbounded wackiness was also more creative.  It also let you do things you could never do if the boundaries were more explicit, because you never would have tried them.I remember reading an article some guy wrote about his childhood D&D experiences, and his RBDM, who was the biggest RB there ever was.  He constantly killed them on a whim, and eventually they found out he wasn't even following rules - he made it all up as they went along.  He was literally torturing them, emotionally, like a sadistic [insert naught word of choice].  But although the author played in games later where things were different, and tried other stuff, he actually had a (Stockholm-y) wistfulness for the crazy insane death-at-any-second game.  Because anything could happen:  there were no rules.  It was interactive storytelling at its best.Most would agree that a base line of rules helps set expectations and give things some cohesion.  Most would believe that without ANY rules, you couldn't play a role playing game.  Of course neither of those are true; I know for a fact because we used to play what I would call "free style" games all the time.  And honestly those are, on the whole, still much more memorable.My point being:  back in the day, there were fewer rules.  And sometimes this was a good thing.Edit:  Specifically, the part I quoted is a good example, because you're asking:  which rule being different made it more fun?  My response would be:  you're coming at it from the wrong perspective.  Not having so many things explicitly defined made it more fun.  What rule did what is just personal preference.</blockquote>

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