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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3233165" data-attributes="member: 4937">I do not see these as rules.  Or to the extent that they are rules in that some of the game balance (which is pretty poor in D&D to begin with, but no more so than most game systems) was obtained with certain assumptions in mind, they are so flexible as to not force anything in particular on the DM.  You are making very specific assumptions about what players want, and then using your assumptions to justify assumptions.   But not only is that logic circular, it all falls apart when you point out that those assumptions are just completely wrong.  A case in point in a little bit.No, I don't underestimate thier importance to producing a particular experience.  But that's just it.  I don't think that that particular experience is the goal of D&D or that it stops being D&D when it produces a slightly different experience.That is a whole different tangent, and tempting as it is to address the tension between playability and complexity, lets just not go there.I don't think its pretending anything.  Almost all RPG's are play experience neutral, and in practice they often create play experiences radically different than what you'd expect even if you are playing by the stock rules as written.I view your counter-theory to be absurd, but there we are.Sure, that happens.  Some game masters have a tendancy to be never satisfied with the rules and to tinker and fiddle endlessly.  Sometimes this is directed to an explicit goal.  Other times its just personal preference.But that's hardly the only way in which play experiences differ.  It's not like every group playing with the same set of rules generates the exact same play experience.   Play experiences are largely rule independent.  The only real role of the rules in determining play experience is what direction the rules will take the game when the groups social contract breaks down and one or more players starts using the rules to obtain some new game goal.For example, if you read 1st edition Vampire the Masquerade, its clear that the designers imagined a social contract in which the characters in some fashion objected to thier status as young vampires and who wished to be free from the 'curse'.  There is nothing in the rules that prevents the game from being played in that way, but on the other hand there is nothing in the rules that explicitly encourages the game to be played that way.  The reward structure encourages revealing in ones vampirism, resulting in a game which tends to 'super heroes in black' when that 'style' contract breaks down or is ignored.   Is that a failure of design or a failure of player imaginition?   Whether or not it is a failure of design, it doesn't change the fact that the play experience of the game itself depends entirely on the intention of the players and not the rules.As for D&D being designed to favor combat resolution over other forms of conflict resolution, I've already agreed with you over that completely.  Where I continue to disagree with you is over whether that forces any particular play experience.  You are making a big and flawed assumption in your analysis.If and only if we agreed to note have alignment an integral part of the game in the first place.  In another group game, removing alignment from the game might have an profound impact on the game as a whole.   As it happens, the degree to which alignment is important rarely has anything to do with whether a group has agreed to drop it from the rules, and more to do with whether they take it seriously and make it central to the campaign.  But, there are no rules as to how central any one particular element of the game ought to be.   No you don't, and for the same reasons.  Fiddling with encounter design and reward placement might break a game which heavily depends on those things, but it isn't gauranteed to break D&D games in general.No you don't, any more than you have to explain why characters who primarily swing swords get better at Diplomacy or Move Silently even if they didn't use those skills over the course of the adventure.I read through that, and at the end I had a really big guffaw.  There is something basic going on here at such a low level you aren't even noticing it.   You are certainly right that D&D has never developed the same complexity of rules for adjudicating social interaction that it has for combat.   There is however nothing which prevents it from doing so.   You could have a game system with complex and adequate rules for resolving conflict resolution of every sort - negotiation, fight, flight, contests, whatever.   But there is strong pressure on a game system to develop good rules for resolving fights and not detailed rules for resolving negotiations and it has nothing at all to do with the preferred way players have for resolving conflicts.   The reason D&D doesn't have as complex rules for resolving negotiations as it has for combats is that the players who care - the ones that prefer RP resolutions to problems and highly political games and lots of socialization - don't want a game system that provides a detailed means of resolving such challenges through recourse to the rules.  A game system that explicitly supported gamist resolutions to role playing conflicts wouldn't be attractive to players that wanted to resolve conflicts through role playing.  It would in fact remove the satisfaction such players found in that method of solving a problem.D&D is actually a very good game system for supporting problem solving through role playing and highly political games, precisely because it doesn't provide rules for resolving role playing conflicts through die rolls.     - emphasis mineNot supporting something well is very different from forbiding it.  Creating a list of costs for bribing officials, maintaining a court, and so on (all of which can be found in various issues of Dragon) doesn't break the rules of the game.  In fact, it would have never occurred to me that price lists were rules, a term I find you use to generally, as price lists strike me more as something specific to a game world and not all D&D games as a whole.  The ones in the PH are just 'default gameworld to get you started'.  They are convienent to use (although they are notoriously badly designed and largely handwaved) in most cases, but it is a rather strange suggestion to say that if your game world had its own price list, or even that you modified the price list from town to town that you were breaking the rules and no longer playing D&D.I disagree.  I don't think we need to do any of those things to explain why some modules are enjoyable to some people and a snooze-fest to others.  I don't recall anyone before you ever had trouble explaining why some people like ToH and other don't, while they were 'pretending' that D&D could support a wide variaty of play experience.   I mean, it seems to me that the very fact that ToH is enjoyed by some people and not by others seems to suggest that D&D can ecompass a wide variaty of play experiences.</blockquote>

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