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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9009443" data-attributes="member: 7035894">I keep thinking about why having tons of rules can be fun even when it seems like bad design, and particularly in the context of character building. I used to play World of Warcraft pretty heavily, and when Cataclysm, the 4th expansion, came out, they heavily revised character progression, so that instead of a ton of options, many of which you built up incrementally level after level (options like "add +1% to crit chance), they switched to far fewer but more meaningful options (supposedly), so around every 10 levels you would add something that was a real choice.This was far more logical and elegant, from a design perspective. It was also a disaster. Characters became more homogenous than ever, and levelling became way less fun. Having all those options and making choices more often, even though most of them were barely real options or choices, was much more satisfying for most players. We like tinkering with our characters and getting intermittent, incremental rewards. D&D-style games (super rule-heavy games) are not very well designed for creating a great role-playing experience in terms of at-table story - it happens, but mostly because of great DMs. However, I think all the rules do an amazing job of providing an intense role-playing experience outside of the gaming table, in the heads of the players. They get players obsessing about their characters in a way that is very difficult to quantify, yet most of us have probably experienced.I've speculated elsewhere that there are some deep psychological/brain process things that Arneson, Gygax and co. sort of accidentally discovered how to poke at. I think the rules are their stick.TLDR: I think that D&D rules are not just rules to facilitate a game, I think to a significant degree they are the game.Edit: Thinking about McLuhan now, and his classic argument that content was often secondary to the medium. If the rules of D&D are the medium and the games are the message, then it might be the nature of the rules themselves that is significantly impacting our behaviours.</blockquote>

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