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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6660546" data-attributes="member: 42582">Nonsense. Off the top of my head, here are three great RPGs with no rule zero: Marvel Heroic RP, Burning Wheel, and 4e D&D.The concern with rule zero isn't its affect on the characters (who don't actually exist, and are not affected by anything that happens in the real world - including use of rule zero). The concern is its affect on the players - namely, it subordinates their agency to the GM's agency, which - as  [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] posted above - can undermine the whole point of playing the game.This is very confusing to me. If "good" is subjective, then how is anyone supposed to assign positive or negative terms except by reference to what s/he likes? If "good" is subjective, then when you assert that various non-4e RPGs are good, aren't you just reiterating that they meet your personal preferences? In which case, why are you rebuking another poster for doing the same?If the aim of the game is for casters to be dominant (eg Ars Magica), then casters becoming dominant looks like a display of good design.If the aim of the game is for both spell-using and non-spell-using build options to be viable strategies for play, then casters becoming dominant is a design flaw.In the case of AD&D, complications arise because the game was designed for more-or-less competitive play by players running stables of PCs. MUs were harder to keep alive at low levels, but were a long-term winning strategy because they tended to become dominant at high levels.This perfectly workable framework for play is obviously broken as soon as the actual goal of play departs from that which the system was designed for - skilled-play dungeon-crawling - and turns towards single-PC-per-player, character-and-story-focused play. Unfortunately, rather than try and adapt to the system to support this quite different sort of RPGing, 2nd ed AD&D just reproduced the old mechanics but added a whole lot of broken GMing advice, including to ignore the action resolution rules.</blockquote>

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