Loof

Its a matter of preference yes, of course anyone that prefers classbased games is obviously a raveing madman and so automaticaly loses his vote due to mental illness.

Since good is relative and all the players usualy have roughly the same amount of xp in a group, nobody can be good at everything in a skill based system either. If you increase every skill equaly you will be a jack of all trades, but master of none just like it should be So the players haveing different roles to fill in the group is the norm even in skillbased systems so your statement holds true as much for classbased as for classless systems.

True but having to reset your database sort of defeats the point of the learning AI. Impulsiveness in coputer algorithms is realy just inserting randomness into the codepath, and I would guess its more usefull for AI personality, or to create replay value then to set the difficulty. One use that machine learning can (and I beleve has) had in computer games is for the developers to train the AI before release and the lock it so it stops learning. With this technice you could train your AI a bit then copy it lock it and call it easy, keep training the original copy lock and call it normal and so on. This is a technic I defninetly think could work, I'm just not a big beliver in the free learning machine in games.

Don't know how many actual games there are where teh AI uses a leanring system. From what i have heard it's a pretty common feature in th eearly planning stages but it generaly gets scraped when the developers find they don't have time to do all they want. In some ways learnings sytems are actualy worse then the alternatives. The reaosn I say this is that the goal in game AI is to make a "good enough" oponent, as we want the player to have a reasonable chance of wining. Now if we realy implemented a learning system that did its job well it would only be a matter of time untill the player could no longer win. For this reason I think that I would prefer some kind of finite state machine AI, but as im far from an expert on the subjekt you should take this with bucketfull of salt.

Hurray I will be sure to avoid buying it ....

Did you miss the big "developer" icon on frankK's post or was his message to short to count?

Bah move to minisota, they have almost as many as we do in sweden from what I hear (just guessing)...

bah swedish isn't large enough for yah? yah just spoied!! :D

Yeah most companys aren't evil per see (even if hasbros buying of avalon hill and then more or less leveling it with the ground comes close). But I still agree with Jediphile that we don't want any one company dominating the gameing market as it kills inovation and diversity. Even if said company has several different games and settings, games from the same origin tend to have the same flavour, which in my opinion is bad if taken to far.

Of course they are they are a company isntead of the collection of rpg maniacs that traditionaly is the kind of group that has stood for most rpg development.

Learn swedish play mutant you know you want to (the original version of mutant was something of a port of gammaworld I think, but as I have never played gamma world I cant say how similar they are).

Umm well I don't think I have played anything except the ocasional one session game for the last five or more years so yeah I have been wondering the same thing...

I don't think its "just" D&D syndrome, I have never liked D&D in any incarnation and what you said is a big part of what I dislike about the storyteller systems. That being said the system has one advantage since its so streamlined and simple to get an overview of different characters its rather easy to play more or less diceless WoD games and improvise most things. Which is more or less what we always did when we played them...

Yeah nothing stoping us from doing that... Yes mage's magic system is realy cool. And although the structure of the storyteller systems in general is very nice I don't like them in practise, can't realy put my finger on why though. But I think it has something to do with rolling large amounts of dice and sorting out the ones over X, as this makes it rather bothersome for the GM to vary difficultys, for instance what is harder 3 dice vs diff 6 or 4 dice vs diff 7. Although I hear that they have set a standard target number for all rolls in later editions. But then you get the problem that 2 successes is twice as hard as 1, and 3 is 50% harder then 2 and so on which gives rather large leaps between diffener difficultys so it's still hard for the GM to set things at the level he likes... Earth Dawn it was ages since I played and I have never GMed it so I am a bit foggy on how it workes...

Yeah I know. But since this thread is about things we dislike about D&D and that is one of teh things I dislike (although a small one) I spit it out to see what the reaction would be. Oh and it would be much more interesting to hear why the nostalgic ones are so atached to their systems, I already knew they prefered things liek they are. A reason why my coment would be for the worse would be fun to hear and posibly debate.

dont bother me I don't have a nostalgic atachment to any D&D game

I agree that str shouldnt determin both damage and hit chance. And in general streamlineing is good since it speads up play so that the modifiyers are teh same size doesnt bother me. But effect increase only for every other stat point definetly does bother me. It would be much more elegant if they halved the scales of atributes and doubled the "cost" of increasing them and let bonuses increas for every stat point. Oh that reminds me of another anoyance, negative modifyers (not that this makes any real practical difference) I think it would be much more elegant if all modifyers where positive and started from the lowest posible atribute score... don't realy know why this mechanic bothers me though...

If this was intelegent I think I will skip visiting the codex this week

I agree completly GM and setting are much more important, then what rules are used. Your second statment culd even be altered to say that a realy good GM doesnt need the rules at all, and can crate a great experience in a totaly freeform setting. That being said I prefer to have a ruleset (preferably a fast and treamlined one). To you last point I agree that small details are easily fixed, but the things that I dislike about D&D are core mechanics, such as levels, classes, hp per level (don't have anything against hp in general just that they increase to fast), spellslots per day, and lastly the d20 is to large a dice without a bell crurve distrubation of results (its only one dice) in comparison to the stat range of the character, in other words the ruleset is to radom. So I fall in yoru second category as unfortunetly changeing any one of these issues (except spelslots per day) is so fundamental that it would more or less mean designing your own system. Therefore I avoid playing D&D if I can (but as you said with agood enough GM any system can be fun so nothing is set in stone).

That idea didn't originate in Exalted though, feng shui used it at least a few years before exalted was published. Don't know if they where the first though. Just my two shaved knuckles of useless knowlage General thread coments: No of course there isn't a "best rule system", and even if there was one you can always improve anything, so that doesn't mean that the topic is pointless. It also doesn't mean that there can't be a worst one... ok d20 isn't the worst one, but in my opinion its pretty close, for the reasons mentioned by the topic starter.

Sounds very much like every first year university programming course, where Java is always a language of choice. More radical approach is to learn Visual Basic first. Most novices find it fun to code with, hence the interest and motivation sparked by almost instant results. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> While I agree that C probably isnt the smartest language to start of with. I dont realy think a OOP language is nessesarily the best chioce of starting language. It depends on what the focus of your learning is. Java for instance is a good language for sparking interest since its easy to get something to show for your work (this is probably even more true for MSVB). But if the goal is to learn the basics of algorithms and datastructures the object orientation can in my opinion distract from the learning. I think its thoughts like these that have led the university that I study at to chose different languages based on who the students are. Most non computer science programs learn java first (and probably only) while we computer geeks are forced to use Standard ML (a functional language), to begin with I hated SML but after a while I realised that by forceing us to develop everything recursiveliy it actualy helped us understand the underlieing structure that we where programing. Hmm wonder where I wanted to go with this post, I think im sidetracked... Oh well I think it was to say that I disagree that OOP is essential for a beginner and agree that the chioce of language isn't the important part.

Yes agreed, but that was what I found challenging and fun. All a matter of taste I guess...

Interesting... I actualy found wizardrys phase based combat more taktical then turnbased generaly is. Because it was more important to know your enemy and plan ahead. Which for me was a very enjoyable challenge, I aslo found that if you played smart you almost never ran into unforseeable, unrepairable situations. But then you should probably take this with a grain of salt since it was a loong time since I played wiz8...

Song of the moment: Levellers - Levelling the land - Another Mans Cause Oh and Tom Waits is overrated, he tryes to hard to be experimental and original (although he is great in coffie and cigarets).

Ramones - Rock 'n Roll High School