Just trying to quantify the effects of hundreds of pages quoting 3 paragraphs.

Woo my side wins, 100% of the vote!!!!

DS helps me finesse it but I know how I think it works and no-one has changed that yet.

@Knasser: I am genuinely interested in what people have to say, but I half meant my this poll as a jab at head-butters. I sigh when think about who much DS engery goes into repeating the same old contradictions.

Actually frank you are right here. Demonstrating the capacity miss understanding is important, and I did miss that. But I can't help but think that DS has long past the point of diminishing return and watched it slip away past the horizon. Also hope that all the gladiators out there will be able to chuckle a bit over this poll maybe just maybe continue with a slightly lighter heart

With the amount of brainpower weve put into discussing this issue, we could have written our own game...or cured cancer.

There is a profound limitation to simply allowing the distributed network of argumentative online posters to determine what rules are "broken" and in need of fixing. For a textbook example, look at 3.5 D&D. They don't playtest at all, and the result makes us very sad.

What they do instead is put out books as fast as they can, and then watch for the number of people who complain about things. If it's "abnormally large", they investigate changing it in upcoming publications. If that causes the complaints to go down, they call it a successful fix and move on. Repeat as necessary, it's cheaper than delaying publication to wait for Playtesters (because we know those fuckers are lazy bastards anyway!)

Right? Sort of.

That system is actually really bad at identifying and eliminating actual infinite power loops and other "truly broken" mechanics. Once you wish for more wishes there isn't a lot to say, and thus the total internet chatter on that topic is rather low (even if it is both scathing and compelling when it does crop up). But perhaps the more important problem is that it is bad at identifying problematic rules which are hard to interpret.

The classic example of this second case is D&D Polymorph. It's actually the source of nearly half of the confirmed infinite power loops from Core 3.5 D&D spells (Balor Mining, Chain Binding, Free Vaction, More Wishes, Phoenix Duplication, Re-Awakening, Santa's Workshop, Spell Reserve). And it still does that, despite the fact that revisions in D&D rules have dropped Polymorph balance complaints to virtually nothing. And how did they do that? By making the spell chain incomprehensible.

Let's say that you were a 15th level Wizard who wanted to take advantage of Spell Reserve - a relatively simple infinite power loop where every day you can cast 3 spells that will each give you an entirely new set of daily spells, each of which could itself contain 3 or more resets on your daily spells. Now to do this all you need to do is use polymorph any object to transform yourself into a creature with the "spellcasting" ability and pick up those spells and cast from that reserve instead of your normal reserve until eventually it comes time to do it again (and again use the bonus spellcasting to transform yourself). But first you'll need to actually read the spell! that's hard. To get the complete text, you'll need to read the following (listed in order of precedence in rules strength, not necessarily in the order you'll actually read them):

• Polymorph Any Object Errata (net)
• Polymorph Any Object Spell (PHB)
• Polymorph Errata (Net)
• Polymorph Spell (PHB)
• Alter Self Errata (Net)
• Alter Self Spell (PHB)
• Polymorph Subschool Rules (PHB II)
• Black Ethergaunt Monster Description (Fiend Folio)

And sure, when you're done it comeplete unambiguously says that every time a 15th level Wizard casts an 8th level spell on himself (or any of his friends), he can grant them the ability to cast spells as a 17th level Wizard in addition to whatever it is that they were doing before. But seriously, that's eight fucking lines of inheritance! And none of them actually have a pointer to both the text above and the text below them in inheritance hierarchy.

So have people calmed down in complaining about Polymorph now? You bet they have! The number of people who can even read the entire spell is actually very small because it's spread across seven different segments in three different books - one of which is not even for sale.

---

So that's a serious danger when you run game balance by committy. Just because people have stopped complaining about how broken something is doesn't actually mean it isn't broken. In fact, Spell Reserve only became possible when the Polymorph Subschool Rules in the PHB II threw in the side jab that any ability that a monster had which wasn't specifically mentioned anywhere else in the spell's effect hierarchy was granted to the player - which has very little effect except to make the "Spellcasting" ability transfer over to your new form.

-Frank

I really hope I haven't been viewed as a head-butter. I do try to have discussions based on the rulebook texts (not on feelings of what should or ought to be) and the logical conclusions from those texts. In any case, I've always found dumpshock to be a fantastic place to voice my view on things as well as to hear others views and to find out why they are the same or differ.

...voted "None of the Above" [null] as I have never used agents yet & really have no idea of how they work. They seem to be awfully expensive to set up considering the software required to work independently. Still working on the basics of dealing with the wireless matrix itself beyond simple data searches (man, bad enough Arsenal has been pushed back, I feel Wireless is really needed to clear a lot of this stuff up and it is several more releases behind).

I'm not really sure why so much effort was pumped into the argument. Debating over interpretations and sketchy wordings only muddies the waters. I'm not even quite so sure what the debate was about, much less why it ran on for four pages or so. Between the allegations of disrespect, and refutations of said allegations, and apologies for the refutations of said allegations, I found most of the debated material quite incomprehensible.

'Course, I only had one player who wanted to be a hacker, and I had to remind him to buy programs after he submitted his character to me, so you can imagine we never went very deep into the hacking chapter. So forgive my ignorance.

No disrespect or anything, but when it comes down to your game, if you (or one of your players) wants to deal with this stuff, clarify and rewrite it in the clearest and simplest way possible. The book's way is not always the most logical, clear, or simplest way. It's not like you're rewriting Scripture.

Of course, I'm a house-rule nazi and sometimes end up rewording half a chapter if it doesn't please me. Probably why I'm not a big fan of Scripture, either.

But isn't that why we pay the game designers? I hate having to re-design my characters for each game I'm in because every GM has to make up their own house rules just because the game designers can't post errata in a timely basis.

And when someone comes to Dumpshock asking what X means or how Y works, they may be interested in hearing suggested house rules, but they also need to know how RAW works because they have to take it back to their group. You can house rule everything, but you need a baseline to know where the house rules begin.

And incidentally - the subject options in this poll are deeply flawed. The argument was mainly about what the RAW was, so parties that violently disagreed could likely all tick the same "RAW is enough for me" poll option.