ONCE AGAIN AESCHINES AGAINST

You see, fellow citizens, how certain persons have played the game: how they have mustered their offset lithographs and how they have gone scolding up and down rpgnet in an attempt to assert the primacy of their preferred cadence of play. But I have come trusting first in the dice, and THEN the rules, and in you, the players, believing that with you no scheming preparation can override law and justice.

There are, as you know fellow-citizens, three forms of the game — as a wargame, as a resource manager/worker placement apparatus, and as the Monty Haul wherein no martial concern or supply and demand need interfere with the adrenaline rush conferred by the acquisition of glittering things. How, and by what supplement, can these forms be more purposefully leveraged together to create a meaningful artifice? As per a comment by James Settani regarding Monsters and Manuals' "Against the RPG Rulebook Spartans" (concerning USABILITY vs AESTHETICS) that "Art has value, but I cannot run a game using the Mona Lisa," I say:

David Gibbons

I could wish, indeed, fellow citizens, that you could not run a game using the Mona Lisa, for then it would be permitted to the oldest citizen, as the law prescribes, to come forward a run a modern module uninterrupted by shouting and tumult. But now all our standards of procedural generation have been set aside; there are men who do not hesitate to interrupt the description of a staircase with their opinion on every question. For he will say, "I am in charge of mapping these knight-jinx-ed passages, and the graph paper don't line up," and an feasible answer will elicit charges gamism from the caller.

What then is it that you want to audit, if not my half tone Royal Blue. In this game, so ancient and so great, no man is free from the audit who has held any public trust.

source

Or even, the mellophonium pitched to F:

this is a trumpet tho

Be ye my witnesses, O Earth and Sun, and virtue and Conscience, and the Oral tradition by which we distinguish the honorable and the base, that I have heard the "games master's" call and spoken. I have spoken according to my desire, if insufficiently, according to my ability. It remains for you to answer according to your inventory.

Obligatory: