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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6580710" data-attributes="member: 87792">First before continuing I'm going ot say thank you for posting this - and I'm going to appear to be disagreeing with it in my reply more than I actually do. The areas of conflict are the ones I'm focussing on because they are interesting.I think that there is a very important distinction round here, but missed quite what it is. I'd rather differentiate between Hacking and Design whith hacking mostly equating to your bottom up design and Design being your top down design. Hacking is changing the rules of a pre-existing game, and it is entirely possible to reach the "Same old axe, three new handles, two new blades" situation through hacking.And here I am going to praise two specific game engines that have core mechanics that are immensely flexible for design work and seriously blur the boundaries between design and hacking. They are the Powered By The Apocalypse engine (Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, Dungeon World (not a great implementation), Black Stars Rise, Monster of the Week, and <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1whsN3C5e31CZfo8hqlJbiKTPBX9kkCDSEG_An9FlP5s/edit#gid=0" target="_blank">over 100 more</a> including my <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1avqZm0uZXEVLLki7OfvveyxEF4awjWSQ_62aABPO3Ko/edit" target="_blank">Houses and Wands</a> and <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IZN2EYB5p96fdbIdY5kiRujanNZDgaYZuvX6FGQGIVM/edit" target="_blank">Panem et Circenses</a>) and Cortex Plus (Smallville, Leverage, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Firefly).Cortex Plus is the easier to explain - and is a very swingy system. You roll your dice pool and take the two highest numbers as your outcome - and any 1 is a botch. Your opponent does likewise. The core mechanic is apparently simmilar between all the games. But each dice represents a different layer of what the game considers important and these vary game to game. Firefly's very trad - the two core layers are Stat and Skill. In Smallville on the other hand the two core layers represent your values and your relationship with the most important person directly or indirectly involved.Powered By The Apocalypse games are trickier to explain because the core mechanic is simple - 2d6+stat (very few modifiers). 10+ is a complete success, 7-9 is a partial success, 6- things go very wrong. But after choosing that you need to pay attention to exactly how each move works - especially on the partial success list, a key factor is who chooses which part of the success you get (so on a partial success at Going Aggro, whoever you targetted needs to do something but they decide whether they retreat, fort up, suck it up, or what). There's a lot of design work to be done here after choosing your core mechanic.D&D has two morality systems called alignment that were haphazardly jammed together. oD&D was a game about frontier exploration, conquest, and settlement and had Law (urbanisation, settlement) vs Chaos (untamed wilderness, nature). There is also an entirely different High Fantasy Good vs Evil morality system. And they were just kinda jammed together in 1E AD&D without checking how well they fitted. Confusion all round.I think what you're looking for is simulation vs game.Nope, nope, nope, nope. Utter misunderstanding of what happened. In the beginning D&D started out as a hacked tabletop wargame with two classes. The fighter, and the wizard (who was the fantasy equivalent of field artillery - and could only cast each of their spells once). The Cleric came in in the early 1970s specifically to combat a vampire PC who had got a little overpowered - the Vampire was called Sir Fang and based on Hammer Horror Studios - so they based the vampire fighter on Hammer Horror Studios Jonathan Helsing and gave him magic that would help deal with vampires. And then gave him clerics' robes that are somewhat less authentic than the average costume at a Rennaissance Faire.Again, nope. oD&D was produced to work with Chainmail rules. The core D&D rules came later.Neither were remotely important in any way, shape, or form. This was one of the big reasons <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?328837-Gygax-on-Realism-in-Game-Design" target="_blank">Gygax railed against realism</a> - and where games like <a href="http://mrlizard.com/characters/chivalry-sorcery-eyestrain/" target="_blank">Chivalry & Sorcery</a> were made (and generally sank without trace ). What was important was that the game itself was fun and provided useful and engaging things for the PCs to do. D&D as written wasd a game about managing platoon sized units of followers, exploring hostile environments, and getting rich to the point you might rule a kingdom. An utterly artificial setting - and the very artificiality of the dungeon was part of its appeal.Also a desire for realistic combat is a common feature of <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/9/" target="_blank">Fantasy Heartbreakers</a>. D&D wasn't about that either.This, I'm sorry to say, is begging the question. What is "an adequate amount of time"? I've spent more time playing a single RPG campaign than it would take to watch Breaking Bad from start to finish. Actually there is a completely different issue going on here.Between 1974 (oD&D) and 2003 (My Life With Master), with the notable exception of Pendragon, there were almost no RPGs that gave a sense of closure to the story. oD&D had the Adventurer/Conqueror/King arc in which the very nature of levelling up and your relationship to the world changed at around level 10 and you retire into a king or statesman. Pendragon was generational. And My Life With Master always has the same story (although a lot of variations). You start off with all the PCs as minions of an evil master who treats them badly. Eventually one of them snaps and tries to kill the Master. The Master fights back and tries to kill the minion. Win or die, the story came to an inexorable conclusion and is satisfying. In only a couple of sessions. Monsterhearts lasts five or six sessions per season, and that's very satisfying because it has growth and transformation built into the rules. But a game designed round procedural mechanics frequently doesn't have this. You grow upwards as you level, but don't fundamentally change. There's no narratively satisfying conclusion.I'm going to once again poing you at Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts. Leading GMs to become good GMs is a part of a good ruleset.</blockquote>

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