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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6241839" data-attributes="member: 17106">I do. I'll bite that D&D is roleplaying and also a game, but to me it has a lot more in common with freeform games like children playing house or running around on the playground shooting pretend guns at each other than it does with tactical or competitive games.This is where I think you and I are going to differ. I agree that 90% of things don't practically require dice rolls, and I agree that mechanics are important, but to me the point of the mechanics is descriptive. They explicate the rules of a shared world that the players play in and the DM controls.So when I think about mechanics being important, I think it's important that they are logical and consistent world-building tools. The notion of balance between different character concepts is almost irrelevant to this end; that's a metagame goal that to me is something to be tacked on to a functioning rules system as an element of style, not a fundamental precept that gets built in from the start.For example, to me, performance skill and arcane knowledge are clearly different domains. However, it's important to represent them in a comprehensible way, which the d20 skill system does. Any moderately competent modern D&D player has a basic understanding of skill bonuses and DCs and the probability distribution of the d20, so they know what their character's skills mean. A +5 in Perform means the same thing as a +5 in Knowledge: that the character is 25% better than a completely average schmuck on that probability scale when attempting tasks using that skill. The skill points and ability score generation resources used to get those bonuses represent how rare the aptitudes are and how much work it takes to learn these things. The DCs control how frequently the requisite tasks are accomplished and represent how hard those tasks are. There, done.It's essentially irrelevant that arcane knowledge is much more useful in a typical game than stage performing. It's also irrelevant that some circumstances or class abilities turn the tables and make performance much more useful. The only place balance really comes in is in determining the scope of the skill. For example, a knowledge skill that let you know every type of fact equally well is clearly broken (though even this concern is secondary to the fact that "blanket knowledge" fails to meaningfully describe the character's expertise).The same logic applies, scaled up to other mechanical elements such as classes. It matters how good of a bard the bard is, but not whether the bard is equally useful to the wizard. Because singing is not equal to arcane knowledge, and, scaling up, bards are not the same thing as wizards. To me, saying mechanics matter means that it matters if the bard fails as a performance artist dilettante, not if he fails at being equally useful in combat to an evoker.The player's experience is completely irrelevant in my picture of it; the point is for the rules to define a set of characters and situations that make up the game world, of which the players are only responsible for an infinitesimal portion of. Not a line of reasoning that you are mandated to agree with, but one which to me is pretty essential and is an explicit assumption of quite a few D&D texts I've read.</blockquote>

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