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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 4591038" data-attributes="member: 9225">Sure. How important do you think that was compared to playtesting and internal review? I'm not against theory at all. I'm against the 90+% of theory discussion that disguises itself as unvarnished fact when it comes from one guy who is unhappy with his gaming group but instead of telling them, looks for intellectual and moral support online -- the common "agony aunt" scenario you can find on many fora.The problems people are talking about are not necessarily informed by things that happened in anybody's game. In fact, I'd go as far to say that in most cases, the relationship between a given instance of play and anything here ranged from cloudy to nonexistent.I'll give you one example ripped from 3e. There is a huge difference between the way wizards and sorcerers work in a typical game session compared to how they work as builds, because of the vagaries of player competence and scenarios. Sorcerers end up being far better than they look on paper.To me, this shows how faith in a certain kind of discourse leads people the wrong way. Groups develop distinct relationships with games, and not only is some agreement here about a system's "limits" hardly the last word, it may not even be representative of most people's experiences -- and it may even be factually dodgy. For example, because early 3e marketing told you that 2e became an ultra-Byzantine system divided among too many books, and because enough people here repeat that, you've taken that on faith and passed it along -- but as a line, 3e and 3.5 included an even greater rate of expansion, and 4e is projected to be comparable. See <a href="http://6d6fireball.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/imagesdndbloat-large.jpg" target="_blank">http://6d6fireball.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/imagesdndbloat-large.jpg</a> But more to the point, even though in reality few people bought every book and used every rule option, there's a tendency to take this as an axiom for discussion's sake, because otherwise, you can't argue the issues around a game line's size on this forum. In fact, the real relationship between gamers and this material was, and always has been mediated by them in a variety f ways -- and many of them worked pretty well. Unfortunately, these highly individual perspectives don't allow consensus building, so they have less value to the community than making broad statements about "proliferation." In any event, you are right that you can't come to conclusions, but the demographics and social dynamics of the medium bear much responsibility for that.</blockquote>

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