NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5864590" data-attributes="member: 54877">There is a certain amount of truth to the idea that lots of people can get all kinds of useful results out of a game when they aren't pushing it too hard in play.  I find, for example, that most systems run better overall when you don't make every fight a life and death struggle.  (There are exceptions, of course, both in systems and groups using them.)  So in that sense, playing at "full throttle" is abnormal. OTOH, I've also found that people who aren't pushing the system are often missing key experience when it comes to the design of the system--and yes, that includes me balancing encounters. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  There's a sense in which if you say that pushing full throttle isn't a concern, then your opinions on what makes for good balance in design tend towards the not very useful--since you don't care enough about balance to have thought about it much or tested it in play. At its most extreme, this comes out in those who advocate purely from what is simulated in the game, often from their own peculiar view of what fantasy verisimilitude entails, and are quite happy fudging away large sets of results if they are otherwise happy with the simulated process.  Whatever else may be the virtue of their approach, they have nothing to say to me about design--as if they aren't even speaking the same language when questions of game design are the subject. I think I am about as big a fan of, "the spirit of the game it the main thing," as there can be, and still care about design at all.  I just happen to think that if the spirit is conveyed only in flavor, not in mechanics, that it will ultimately be rather superficial or hollow.  I recognize that not everyone sees things that way, but I'm not at all sure the recognition cuts the other way.</blockquote>

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