NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6179014" data-attributes="member: 42582">That's fine, but if the rules you use are not found in any published version of D&D, I'm not sure on what basis you claim that they are, or exhaust, what D&D is about. Or are truer to the aspirations of D&D than (say) Moldvay Basic.But nothing in those rules pulls out clerics as especially implicated, except for the alignment rules.For instance, it is MUs, not clerics, who have the Friends and Charm Person spells, and the ESP spell.And druids, not mainstream clerics, are the ones who have a min CHA and a Charm Person spell on their list.And Gygax, in his discussion of playing the role for training purposes, emphasises clerics as providing support and remaining faithful to their deities - not as particularly addressing the "human" side of the gameworld.Not all games are story telling. Obviously chess is not. But D&D is not the same as chess. For instance, it abandons some of the features of chess that make it a puzzle-solving game, such as fixed parameters for moves and for victory conditions.It's no part of reasoning in chess to wonder how a bishop might deal with an enemy knight. (Attack him? Convert him?) It is obvious that this sort of reasoning is part of D&D.Why the world simulation rules? Well first, D&D doesn't actually have many of these. It has world creation rules (ie the random map generation rules in the DMG), but has no rules for simulating weather, trade, political transformation, etc. (D&D has always been incredibly weak on the sociological front.) RuneQuest and Traveller both take this sort of world simulation a lot further than D&D did.What are they for? Good question. Different people seem to do different things with them. Some use them to establish challenges. Others to create material for world exploration. Others as inspiration for imaginative creation. I've never met a group who treats them as puzzles to be solved (ie I've never met a group who regard the goal of D&D play as being to recreate the tables in Appendices A through C of the DMG). I have met groups who play the game esssentially as a wargame, and use these rules as battlefield creation rules.I suspect it's part of it. After all, that's what D&D adds to a wargame. (Whereas the need to master the algorithms that underlie action resolution is something that it has in common with a wargame.)</blockquote>

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