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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6656970" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think breadth of experience can also help someone see the counterfactuals as just that - possible artefacts of a particular approach to system or fiction that won't be actualised in this particular game/campaign.Or, to restate with slightly different emphasis - breadth of experience might make it easier to separate the actual fiction being generated via actual play from hypothetical fiction that might be generated using a different system, or using the same system under different parameters.To give a really simple example, someone who is familiar with HeroQuest Revised is going to have no trouble with the thought that Neverwinter compresses the fiction of default Heroic and Paragon into the mechanical space of 10 levels (eg by restatting monsters and NPCs), or with the thought that weapons in Dark Sun that are mechanically identical to weapons in the default are made of bone rather than the default steel.Whereas someone whose only RPG exposure was Rolemaster might find both these things very jarring, and perhaps even hard to follow (RM is very objective in its skill numbers and DCs, and has rules imposing objective adjustments for bone weapons). For instance, they might mistakenly think that Dark Sun is (nonsensically) asserting that steel weapons are no better than bone ones; or think that Neverwinter is making aboleths and mind flayers weaker for no good reason.Obviously I can't speak for [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], but I am guessing that this is the sort of thing he had in mind.In my usual way I'm going to drop in a slightly tangential anecdote, of a more baroque example of the sorts of differences in appreciation that exposure can generate. I've become increasingly interested in the idea of systems that encourage players not to always use their best bonuses. This is quite hard to pull off, I feel, and very contrary to the spirit of classic dungeon crawling D&D, but a system that does pull it off overcomes a number of problems that one commonly sees discussed (eg bonus stacking and similar exploits to trivialise challenges or even break the system; always letting the party "face" handle negotiations, and the allied issue of players whose PCs have low bonuses not getting involved; etc).It was Burning Wheel which first showed me how this can be done, and hence how it can help deal with these issues, and that then helped me recognise and draw upon certain aspects of 4e that can be used in a similar way (not as elegantly as BW, but no system is perfect!). Whereas if you're not familiar with the idea, you can miss those aspects of the system and end up having a very different experience - see eg [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION] upthread commenting that, in his 4e game, the players always just used their best skills in skill challenges, and hence (i) tended to make the SCs less interesting, and (ii) had no reason to invest PC build resources in building up non-combat capabilities.BW uses a version of this (roll armour dice against an obstacle to negate the incoming damage), which makes armour very strong in that system. Some weapons have a "versus armour" rating, though, which increases the obstacle for the armour dice.In Rolemaster attacks are resolved on lookup tables, which yield a "concussion hits" result (this is the RM system for tracking minor bruising and blood loss) and, at the upper ends of the table, a crit (which is rolled to determine the condition/debuff inflicted by the hit - crits are rated from A to E, with an increasing though partially overlapping severity of results as you move up the letter scale).Armour changes the column on the lookup table, increasing the likelihood of modest amounts of "concussion hit" damage (as armour makes it harder to dodge completely) but significantly at the upper end of the table significantly reducing both concussion hits taken and crit severity. Also, a sword does mostly Slash crits against an unarmoured person, whereas a person in armour is equally or even more likely to suffer a Crush crit (less bleeding and severing, more bruising and breaks).The need to go to a lookup table (and a second lookup table if a crit needs to be rolled) to resolve every attack is just one of the reasons why [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] is part of that fairly large group that finds RM mostly unplayable!</blockquote>

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