Quote from: SettembriniPlease refrain from swinish comments like these, unlest total carnage is thy wish.

I like swinish, it helps to bring people back down and remind them that this is the internet and that any conversation is for the most part of no bearing.

QuoteHave you never read any of those Ron Edwards basic articles? I assume, so you must have heard of a thing called CA? Last time I checked, there were others than NARR.

Heard of him, read some of his articles and largely don't give a rats ass.  He can preach all he wants on the subject and that doesn't change the fact that this is a game.  That people will play it how they want to and his holier then though attitude really is there for his forge lackies to drink up like mothers milk.
 

QuoteThat´s plain wrong. it´s only true in illdefined raillroad adventures. Any module worthit´s salt has the ressource of the antagonists defined up to the last bullet.

Modules are only a small equation of gaming.  They are also pretty much the PnP equiv of playing a board game (so see first comment).  But since modules have come up they are often extremely limiting in Player Power, *if* the GM is crippled by what's presented in the modules.  More often then not players are penalized by thinking out of the box when coupled with a GM that can't roll with the punches and keep things going on the fly.

A good GM shouldn't need to rail road players, should be able to react to what the players are doing and adjust the challenge accordingly.  The players even in this situation aren't empowered by the rules, but by the simple freedom of choice.   Match freedom of choice with a rules light RPG or one that rewards creative PC's and that's true empowerment.    

I'll even go so far as to say that D&D is one of the worst games for stripping away player empowerment because character creation cripples freedom and inhibits choice.  You can't make the character you want, you are forced to like the character you create.  

On the GM side of things D&D offers no better guidelines on how to run an adventure or how to be a good DM, any more then the standard 'How to be a GM' blurb in and RPG product.  On the tools front D&D offers the ECL.  Well it's broken and for the most part meaningless.