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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8140261" data-attributes="member: 6790260">When people say things like "it's impossible to cover every possibility in the rules," they're often enforcing a false dichotomy and then showing how one limb of that dichotomy is implausible. To whit, it boils down to the following syllogism:Either every possible situation must have a discrete rule, or there must be expected situations where there are no rules whatsoever.It is impossible to make a discrete rule for every possible situation, because there are infinitely many possible situations and the rules must be finite in length. Therefore, there must be expected situations where there are no rules whatsoever. The problem, of course, is that the dichotomy premise is false. There is at least one other way to design rules: not as singular discrete cases, but as extensible frameworks that can be adapted to many similar situations as needed. Such frameworks DO still need human judgment in order to BE extended thus, but this does not suddenly mean the rules are completely absent on that subject. It means the rules are able to abstract relevant inputs from and furnish useful outputs to varied situations, with one rule covering many situations.4e's Page 42 and skill challenges are examples, as are 13th Age's Backgrounds and OUTs, Fate's Aspects, and PbtA's dungeon master moves. It is entirely possible to construct extremely useful, well-designed rules that, while they might still have the occasional exception, are almost always applicable and effective for the spectrum of things players generally wish to do.4e, to pick the example I know best, is only "rules-heavy" if you think you need to memorize every single power, feat, item, etc. You don't. You only need the things you actually use (and combing through them for optimization is either unnecessary, or easily outsourced to friendly and supportive forum-goers/drawn from already-written guides). Combat has precise rules to help cultivate pitched set-piece battles. Nearly everything else either doesn't really need rules, or is perfectly well-handled by Page 42 and SCs (though I admit you must go beyond the limits of SCs as presented in order to make them truly sing).</blockquote>

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