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<blockquote data-quote="FrozenNorth" data-source="post: 8642389" data-attributes="member: 7020832">By its nature, D&amp;D has to appeal to a wide range of players with mutually contradictory preferences.&nbsp; It has to be acceptable to beer &amp; pretzels players and hard core optimizers, to dungeon crawlers and players who never leave the city, to old school characters-are-disposable types and to characters-as-virtual-avatars types, to I-roll-Persuasion players and “Hirrah, good sir, what info hails from yon hills?” types. It has to cater to both solo campaigns and campaigns spotlighting 8-players.What is more, in reality, the above aren’t binaries, they are continuums.&nbsp; So one party’s optimizer is another party’s table stakes, and yet another party’s “user of cheesy tactics”.All of which is to say, generally speaking, D&amp;D succeeds at its conflicting missions well enough. A specialized RPG will generally outclass it in its specialty, hence the OSR movement, and heist-based games such as Blades in the Dark. But those systems generally don’t switch gears as well as D&amp;D.With all that in mind, IMO, there are a couple of conclusions to draw. First, D&amp;D is far from perfect.&nbsp; The fact it’s popular is irrelevant to the fact that as designed, there are missteps (even as admitted by the designers) and in many places, things are poorly or confusingly presented.Second, and more importantly (to me at least), the rules are sufficiently simple that it is relatively easy to tinker under the hood without breaking anything (I also found this true of 4e).&nbsp; I have recently played others games that I liked but for which the mechanics were so tightly bound to the system that changing one element required tweaking 15 other rules.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FrozenNorth, post: 8642389, member: 7020832"] By its nature, D&D has to appeal to a wide range of players with mutually contradictory preferences. It has to be acceptable to beer & pretzels players and hard core optimizers, to dungeon crawlers and players who never leave the city, to old school characters-are-disposable types and to characters-as-virtual-avatars types, to I-roll-Persuasion players and “Hirrah, good sir, what info hails from yon hills?” types. It has to cater to both solo campaigns and campaigns spotlighting 8-players. What is more, in reality, the above aren’t binaries, they are continuums. So one party’s optimizer is another party’s table stakes, and yet another party’s “user of cheesy tactics”. All of which is to say, generally speaking, D&D succeeds at its conflicting missions well enough. A specialized RPG will generally outclass it in its specialty, hence the OSR movement, and heist-based games such as Blades in the Dark. But those systems generally don’t switch gears as well as D&D. With all that in mind, IMO, there are a couple of conclusions to draw. First, D&D is far from perfect. The fact it’s popular is irrelevant to the fact that as designed, there are missteps (even as admitted by the designers) and in many places, things are poorly or confusingly presented. Second, and more importantly (to me at least), the rules are sufficiently simple that it is relatively easy to tinker under the hood without breaking anything (I also found this true of 4e). I have recently played others games that I liked but for which the mechanics were so tightly bound to the system that changing one element required tweaking 15 other rules. [/QUOTE]

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