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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6843727" data-attributes="member: 85870">That's an interesting take. I've sort of mentally turned myself off to d20 / D&D as a whole for long enough now that it seems hard to rationalize how that would be the case. That and the fact that in retrospect, I was never truly getting the kind of game from D&D (at least the 3.x/PF variety) that I really wanted, at least as a player.In fact, I might even ask those that actively play D&D 5e if there's been a real paradigm shift in play from the 3.x era. Is 5e demonstrably different in play?And GURPS is the poster child for this line of thinking, and having played it a bit now over the past 5 years, there's definitely a byproduct of that sort of thinking all throughout the system. The whole idea that if we could just stop rationalizing over what "hit points" mean, and have real "active" defenses like parry and dodge instead of static armor class, and if taking a sword blow actually meant something, etc. etc., that somehow the game would improve in leaps and bounds over what "D&D" was giving to the hobby. In my experience, the end result was actually worse. At least, it was worse once you had to start engaging with the actual mechanics. But see, this partly goes to my original point --- is there design space for more innovation in "core resolution" mechanics? For example, is it simply impossible to do a "bell curve" system that uses most, if not all the polyhedral dice? All of the popular "bell curve" systems that I know of historically (GURPS, HERO, Mechwarrior, Star Wars d6) all used d6's exclusively.Is it just too hard to do a bell curve using stuff other than d6's? To me, "bell curve" distribution for mechanical resolution just "feels" right. Most of the known physical world operates within principles described by a statistical "bell curve," so it seems to me that a "bell curve" system should feel "most natural." The fact that I really dislike GURPS implementation of it doesn't mean the idea "clicks" in my mind. But as you say, maybe "bell curve" resolution is a byproduct of the mindset that RPG "realism" is this sort of cure-all that makes play inherently better, when really that isn't the case. I can see that. I'd agree that that holding up "one way to play" as being "perfect" for everything is probably unhealthy. At the same time, I'm also much more aware these days of what rules are actually doing to a game. I don't really care about "rules lite" or "rules heavy" so much as I care about "rules necessary" and "rules effective." What rules are necessary to provide the type of playstyle you want?That's an interesting take. I don't know that I totally agree with it. In one sense, I think "innovation" might come about if someone actually tried to double down on an existing concept, and then tried to work the rest of the system around it. If there's "just one thing" a designer thinks they absolutely MUST get right, and the mechanics look at building around that, it could lead to something interesting. There's a whole layer of human-computer interactivity that doesn't exist yet that could really bring about changes in the way we play RPGs. For example, how soon in the future will this little thing we call a "mouse" be completely obsolete? Hand/motion/voice interaction at some point, I have to believe, will get rid of keyboards and mice, at least for the vast majority of computer technologies.</blockquote>

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