Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1146777010[/unixtime]]
D&D went from RPG back to cops-and-robbers recently, and there's a reason children stop playing games without balanced rules...
Not cops and robbers. D&D has become Magic: the Gathering. The whole flaw with cops and robbers is that there were no rules. D&D certainly has rules and we know what they are, they're just designed towards creating imbalances.
Basically in magic,you started out playing all sorts of crazy decks, because you weren't quite sure what worked. And it was fun because everyone's deck more or less sucked. Then you started gradually developing better and better decks, until it became apparent that only a few deck archetypes actually worked well enough to be considered competitive. Gradually the game moved from being a casual game among friends to being a cutthroat competition between two brutally efficient killer decks.
And that's where D&D is at right now. There are a select few builds which can compete with other top tier builds. And like M:tG, the more you learn about the game, the more cutthroat and competetive it becomes. With each new set or book that comes out, the game adds more and more options and killer builds become even more potent.
And sometime you long for those innocent days when everything felt more even because people hadn't yet discovered those uber combos. That's how 2nd edition was for me anyway... nobody really knew what they were doing, so you saw people making fun characters as opposed to killer characters. But seriously, I think for all of us, the innocence is gone. We know just way too much about the game to go back to that.
And oddly, a cops and robbers style game, where the rules are flexible and non-concrete, tends to promote most people to roleplay more than a well defined crunchy game. Simply because the C&R style game can maintain the rules innocence of its players. Though like C&R games like that can really devolve into arguing matches if someone feels the DM is treating them unfairly. Since those are fundamentally DM games.
Though it does sometimes ask the question,
"Do codified rules actually make RPGs more fun?"