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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5353989" data-attributes="member: 4937">But do you really totally agree with that? It seems to me that you probably do, but that you haven't fully considered the implications of totally agree with that.  If I had one theme I wanted to emphasize in all my contributions to this thread, it is that this is wrong.   It's precisely this attitude towards rules design and games design that ends up heading in the wrong direction.   The logic underneath this is something like, "Ok, maybe we can't entirely elimenate the DM, but we can mitigate the DM sufficiently by providing elegant rules that the minimally required role of the GM will simply be mechanical.   If the rules are elegant enough and capture the intention of the designer sufficiently, then the car will simply drive itself provided the GM turns the crank and pedals."   This is entirely wrong because it imagines that running an RPG is mostly something of a science, when in fact an RPG is mostly an artform and its qualities are mostly aethetic regardless of how much math and numbers are involved in resolving its in game propositions.   You can no more have an enjoyable RPG session by providing elegant rules, than you can insure an enjoyable novel by providing concise advice and a mechanical structure to the writer.Much of the problem I have with 4e - or more precisely, much of the problems I have with the 4e design process and its criticism of 3e - is it consistantly failed to see the problems which annoyed the designers as problems of game management and game design, and instead consistantly say them as mechanical problems that were solvable with rules design.   This is something like finding a dysfunctional culture and thinking that what it mostly needs is more laws and regulations.   It misses the point entirely.  So it attempted to fix problems that really couldn't be fixed with rules alone (like 'how do you design a trap', 'how do you pace the game cinematically', or 'how do you make skills matter'?), and ended up leaving in the problems more or less intact while trading one set of rules artifacts for another.Not that 4e is a 'bad' system.  I don't want to turn this into a narrow system bashing session.  But in the context of the original topic, I keep trying to point out that the system doesn't really matter that much and certainly not as much as some here think it does and not for the reasons that they think it does.   Modern D&D variants (by which I primarily mean 4e) are unlikely to attract new players because they attract less strongly existing GMs than say 3e did (though they do attract some and for good reasons, don't get me wrong), and they do little to actually inspire new GMs.   They generally seem to think that system matters, but in this context what really matters is the GM.I'd be alot more sanguine about WotC's abiity to attract new players if I had any hope they could write a book that was less dry than a cookbook and more interesting to read than a dictionary.   But I can tell by who they've chosen to retain in their employment that they just don't get it.  (Note, I'm not knocking cookbook writers or lexicographers; both are useful.)   At least, in their favor, Paizo seems to get it better than WotC does.</blockquote>

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