Guest (Unregistered) at [unixtime wrote:1143186912[/unixtime]]
It's not that D&D is too codified, but that D&D does a really half-assed job of codifying. Literally half-assed... as in, "We're going to give you detailed rules on how to build any one of our pre-printed magic items, but if you want to make your own spell, check with your DM."
And really, the best way to do things is to say "check with your DM". Unless you want to make the game like a MMORPG where everything is effectively sterile and unimaginative, having any kinds of rigid rules are bad. You're better off just pointing to the DM for common sense or on the spot adjudication.
There are mechanical flaws in the game, like the hulking hurler, where the designers just screwed up their number crunching or got too cute (like basing damage off of object weight). But a lot of the problems come from things that happened to be too big for the designers and so they just wrote blanket uncontrolled mechanics. Polymorph for instance. The same is true about planar binding, gate, simulacrum and all sorts of other "story" spells. They're better off just not writing mechanics for some of these at all. Because probably anything they write is going to get abused.
The more mechanics you write, pretty much the more open you make them for abuse. Because we are talking about an open ended game, not a MMORPG, and we've got a lot of smart people out there, like Frank, who can find a hole in almost any rule that the designers write. So unless your designers are complete geniouses who are going to try to outthink everyone and write airtight rules, we might as well stop kidding ourselves that more rules are a good thing.
You want just enough rules to balance PC versus PC reasonably well in combat and that's it. The rest is more framework than real rules.
Because lets face it, fantasy is full of exceptions. Everything in a fantasy world that isn't combat related, from making magic items to casting divinations to wizards mass producing goods serves the story. That crap isn't really governed by concrete rules in fantasy stories, so why should we try to apply them in a fantasy game? Like it or not, the magic in the very medium that we are trying to recreate in a game is not codified.
We have no damn clue what Gandalf the Grey can even cast. We have no idea why oracles in stories always give cryptic predictions that usually aren't solved until the last minute or until it's too late. And that's the fantasy genre. We don't want rules for crafting the One Ring, because it seriously doesn't even matter. All doing that does is give people something to potentially abuse.
