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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 6503045" data-attributes="member: 5100">There's a balance, IMO. Too rules-light (or interpretive rules) and you end up with an arbitrary game of "the GM said so", which can work well for some groups, but not for everyone. Too rules-heavy and it gets bogged down, unless everyone at the table is really into mechanics -- again, that works for some, but not all groups. D&D (at least BECMI, 1E, 2E, and 5E, IME) occupy a middle ground. It provides enough structure to stave off the majority of ham-fisted GM rulings, but is still light enough for most newbie or casual players. The classes, races, and implied setting also provide enough pegs for folks to hang their hats upon. To me, that's why it endures and that's what it should strive to be good at. It's a large-grained, but "complete" system. It requires little prep time, but prep and tinkering provide a linear rate of benefit.For my part, I prefer character creation to be more like Hero -- for PCs. For GMing, I tend to prefer quick and dirty NPC creation, with just a couple of tweaks. My players tend to prefer easier PC creation with greater appearance of options that are generally ignored (until they aren't). Since I almost always sit behind the screen, D&D works great. I can ad lib all I want and have enough interpretive space to make appropriate use of DMO, while the players have a menu-driven system from which they choose the same options for 90% of what they do. Savage Worlds handles that 90% just as well as D&D, but has the appearance of being less precise, so it's not appealing to the group, even though I'm pretty sure it would suit the casual nature of the table better. Hero provides all the options a body could want, and has a couple real fans in the group, but we're mostly professionals with kids and busy schedules looking for something that is friendly to chilling out. That puts us square in that middle ground.I would also say the the WoD/Storyteller system fits into the middle zone, just emphasizing "fluff" tinkering instead of mechanical tinkering, which is why it saw a nice ride, for a time. Pathfinder (and d20, in general) is on the upper end of that zone. It has strong ties to traditional D&D, and most tables can use it casually, but it strongly presents itself to the crunchier crowd while remaining menu-driven -- which isn't a bad thing.</blockquote>

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