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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 6241661" data-attributes="member: 3192">Tools are like Legos[sup]TM[/sup]. They aren't a game. They are toys. The game designer creates a batch, tosses them into a container, and incorrectly labels them a game. The players build whatever they want out of the pieces. That isn't game play, that's creation. Creation is part of gameplay. Players might be considered to create tactics and strategies, but a game requires a pattern or structure for the players to have an achievable future objective within. Rules for exploration, IMHO, are there to create and define the changing of the gameboard the players will explore. In this, they are every rule in the game; no sans combat, no sans "roleplaying". They are the code the players are attempting to decipher, if they are playing to master the game. The game structures these rules create are needed for players to actually discover and seek to comprehend a world rather than invent it. I've been talking with others recently about how Dave Megarry's "Dungeon!" boardgame is a major predecessor to Dungeons & Dragons. I believe its design helps others to understand why classes with differing XP requirements and ability levels can be balanced against each other.  In no small part it is the locations explorable on the Dungeon! game board that enable this. In D&D these challenges are far more complex, multi-layered, and not spatially separated (not necessarily), but are defined far more by separate class objectives according to class behaviors. Orc & Pie in a room can be about combat, magic, clericism, and thievery. And a mixed party can engage with all of it. Which leads back to Dungeon! as a cooperative game, a game without a rule for players to cooperate, but rather a design where cooperation is recognized as the most commonly successful strategy.</blockquote>

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