Well, D&D has never really aimed for 'best system' exactly, the people who write the rules are obviously gamers, I'm sure they play other systems and get rules from other systems and try to incorporate them, same, lots of other systems borrow from D&D even though many deliberately try to do the opposite, wanting to establish a system they think better and/or delineate themselves from the established game.



I've played classless systems, obviously White Wolf is classless, and it works but not well with levels, its ironic then that Palladium, which has a fairly low power curve related to levels, goes the class route, but the fact of the matter is most novice and medium players are more comfortable with classes, and by the time your skill reaches the point that you don't tend to gain from using them your comfortable with or without them. As a GM, being able to know peoples level and class makes auditing their characters, guessing challenge levels, etc much easier, and having the same system most of the time helps too. If I start off a newer player in a 8th level fighter I know what his pluses on rolls are going to be, with D&D, with very little thought, so I know if he made a mistake. You take something like Palladium, where each skill proceeds at its own rate of its own base percentage and you gain to it based on the level you took it at and even with the pretty common skills it can be an epic pain to help them out, alternatively with 3rd Ed I can just scan down the standard character sheet and pretty much know in a few seconds if there are any errors. And I tend to emphasize skill usage more than battle because you can effectively RP a skill based challenge far quicker than a battle, I've noticed many players will be just as happy most times having negotiated a discount on a magic sword then actually using it in battle.



I don't exactly disagree but learning a system rules, to me, is really an exercise in familiarization, and I master it by explaining it to players, I'll still have rules I don't know and someone will bring one up from time to time, we'll use it, otherwise I just go with my gut. I'm a strong believer that unless everyone at the table is a vet, the GM should be the person who knows the rules best, unless it's the new or stand in GM so the regular can play something. But that said, once you've mastered the original singular rulebook you should never need to do anything other than skim the newest book someone bought and wants to play a class from. It's great someone took the time to work out a given thing but realistically I don't need to spend time reading some complex set of rules covering aimed shots or something when I can just say, on the spot okay, use an action to aim, and you can add a d6 to your attack roll', if people start doing it a lot you can adjust it then, but in a whole game session with people repeatedly doing it because it's a bit over-powered, you still won't gain as much time back as from reading the 'special rules' and you can just adjust it to a d4 instead, or maybe a d8 if people aren't using it much and you want them too, give a damn about realism, I used to, but these days, waste of time, detracts from game flow. Off the cuff guesstimates are better for anything you don't use multiple times a session and for multiple sessions.




Not necessarily for rules, sure, but flavor's more important, and they'll have rules appropriate to that flavor. Someone playing star wars needs rules for lightsaber duels, pretty useless in another system, but there you can count on them being designed to make such duels run well, and that's more important because its what players doing star wars are going to want. If players come up to you and ask "can you run a Star Wars campaign?" that specific player might not want to play a Jedi or Sith, but probably does, and if you put together a group to play, they're going to want to do that. Its easier to use a set of books where the rules have been adapted and play tested with that in mind that to adapt another system to it, because 'accuracy' isn't the goal, playability is.