Something Ive noticed is that people will just get intellectually lazy and cynical if I describe the general scope of my game and what all it covers, and default to calling it unfocused when in reality they just aren't willing to engage with it on its own terms.
But its also a problem of them defaulting to a shallow criticism thats easy to levy at a lot of games simply because they fail to properly integrate their mechanics with each other.
For example, my game in the simplest pitch I can make is about being the legendary people that other games turn into background fluff and funny names for epic loot.
But when you look at the mechanics, you see a rather massive in scale sandbox RPG that seeks to thread the needle on a lot of different things, with an eye for integrating everything together between the "Pillars" of the game, to borrow DNDs take on the concept.
For example, my game has Taste mechanics. The reason for this is to support not only Crafting, which is a huge part of the game (Food is just as deeply customisable as Weapons or Spells will be), but also to further support Survival as an enjoyable and less abrasive part of the gameplay loop.
When Food is something you engage with on its own merits, because Food can provide benefits that reach out and hit every other part of the game, then Survival rules compelling you to take the time to Eat doesn't feel the same as when Food is just abstract nothings that only exist to serve the Rules. But at the same time, the need to spend time eating also makes for interesting choices.
Scarfing down rations will work in a pinch, but they'll never give you the same benefits as a proper meal will. This ties Food, Taste, and Survival all into the games Time Mechanics, which in turn touches everything else from Combat to Exploration to Settlement Building to Questing and so on.
And this meanwhile is reinforced by Survival all being tied into how characters restore their Energies, their essential "resources" to be useful whether its Combat, Exploration, Crafting, or what have you.
Whether its Composure, Mana, Stamina, or Acuity, they all get restored off a characters Energy Dice, which are basically universal hit dice that players can access by consuming either certain types of food (some of which won't consume the die) or, as they'll need ways to do it in a pinch, by consuming potions.
So, by eating food you get more Energy dice. By staying warm and well rested, you keep them for more significant lengths of time. And when you consume them you're automatically being told when you're hungry and need to stop because you'll already be tracking how many Energy dice you have available to use. This gives another critical tie in to several other areas of the game.
But thats not all, because through Bloodlines, my games race mechanic, you also have a lot more choices being generated that tie into Taste mechanics, as certain characters are going to end up having preferences, and meeting those preferences will have greater benefits, making those people stronger in the long run, so long as they meet their preferences rather than just their needs.
And meanwhile, all of this serves to reinforce the theme Im going for of an extreme power fantasy, but one thats actually meaningful to play.
Characters in my game can casually suplex dragons after a point, and you are directly intended to be able to solo entire armies, while leading your own.
And yet, these characters are fundamentally mortal. That is why Food matters and why Needs matter, and why whether or not your character likes Sweet over Bitter matters, amongst a great deal of other things that all reinforce this idea in similar ways.
In order to deserve to be called legendary you have to demonstrate you're capable of rising above mere mortality, and in a game, you can't really capture that idea if you're not depicting that mortality.
That is something I think is best encapsulated in another thing my game is doing, by having Modifiers grow in excess of the base roll. (You can gain a +30 of your skills alone, when you're rolling 1d20)
Conventional game design wisdom says modifiers shouldn't ever exceed the value of the roll.
But what my game accomplishes by breaking that wisdom is that it becomes a game that gets easier to run the longer it goes on. Theres no need to roll for certain things past a given point, and so the game becomes more narrative in nature, as players are free to just do, with the need to roll being naturally and immersively relegated to the challenges that truly matter at that level.
By simply breaking that wisdom I not only solve a specific problem that plagues a lot of complex RPGs, with high level play being too hard to run, but also solve the problem of enabling the basic theme of the game in the fullest way possible.
When you've earned it, you don't have to negotiate with the game or the GM to suplex that dragon of the mountain or rip off its scale and use it as a club to beat it to death with.
You just do it.
