E vc é o q, agora?

The playtest material for D&D Next was released with characters who were very far from such a equal distribution of rules. In fact several people complained on the boards that their fighter character sheet was missing pages, as it was the only one being only 1 page long. But what was missing wasn't some pages of a character sheet, but pages of rules in D&D Next regarding the fighter. We are back to a situation where wizards have lots of rules pages full with spell descriptions, and the fighter has to make things up. That turned out to be especially annoying for those players who envisioned their fighter as being "a tank", a protector of the squishier characters in the second row. As D&D Next in the playtest version has no attacks of opportunity, no zone of control, no "marking" an enemy, or any other form of aggro control rules, the fighters were told to make up those rules by roleplaying. Which would have been a good idea in a system like Ars Magica where the wizards have to make up stuff through roleplaying as well. But having rules for wizards and rulings for fighters struck many people as unbalanced.

Both rules-based and rulings-based systems can work. Rules-based systems have the advantage of being more predictable, but require the DM to learn more rules. Rulings-based systems are more flexible, but can easily become bogged down in negotiations between the players and the DM. A good system has an equal amount of rules for everybody, and allows everybody to roleplay based on DM rulings. That is the sort of mix of rules and rulings that works. Mixing rules and rulings by assigning them to different character classes works a lot less well: Why should a players preference for rules-based or rulings-based system end up determining his class choice? The guy who hates rules might have wanted to play the wizard, while the guy who never roleplays might have wanted to play the fighter. In D&D Next, like in pre-4E versions of D&D that leads to problems.

The problem gets worse once you realize that the power of a rules-based character is fixed, while the power of a rulings-based character depends on the generosity of the DM. If all your "may I" requests to the DM are answered with "No, you can't", you not only have a bad DM, but also end up with an extremely underpowered and boring fighter standing next to a powerful wizard with lots of options. But if the DM allows any crazy idea, it is the wizard who ends up being underpowered and restrained by the rules.

Nossa, vão unir ninguém liga com ninguém usa?