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Message: <blockquote data-quote="steenan" data-source="post: 6371887" data-attributes="member: 23240">In each RPG, I focus quite a lot on the rules.I may play a freeform game just fine without any rules. So if the game has rules, they should positively affect the experience. If I'm playing a game with rules, I'm not going to ignore them. If the rules don't work as they should, the game is not worth playing.There may be different kinds of rules, depending on what the game is about. But whatever they are, they are important.In D&D specifically, a lot of the rules are for combat. Players are given many mechanical tools for fighting, while there are none for, for example, building organizations, inventing new technologies or resolving emotional issues. So the focus on combat is not players' idea - it's in the game itself.And it's not just combat. It's specifically tactical combat where one focuses on winning.The rules don't care why are you fighting, what are you fighting for. What matters is what abilities you use and how. The rules don't care how the combat expresses your character.There is no incentive to do something that fits the concept if it's a bad move tactically.The rules do nothing to make defeat interesting. It's either win or die (where "die" is either meaningless because of resurrection, or removes you from the game).So what is left is playing to win, using whatever advantage you can get. And that's what most people do.In games that work differently, players put emphasis on other aspects. For an extreme example, check Chuubo's marvelous wish-granting engine by Jenna Moran. The game has many rules, but there are no "combat" rules at all and hardly any "conflict" rules. In most cases, tactics is meaningless; in some, it actively hurts character development (both on story level and mechanical level). It's not surprising that discussions about Chuubo's are much different than discussions about D&D.</blockquote>

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