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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9727628" data-attributes="member: 6799660">What I've seen a lot of is people designing games where they have excessively massive amounts of rules ideas covering character creation, the game world and its history/interesting NPCs, and perhaps even a rock solid task resolution system -- but little or nothing related to a central loop of expected play (and mechanics which support or facilitate it). TSR-era D&D had the ubiquitous treasure-hunter game facilitated by the gp=xp mechanic (and for those not looking for that, it was easy--with some house rules on xp acquisition -- to turn it into some epic quest). Any of the other 'make rent'/'get more funds to get better at making funds' games like Shadowrun or Traveller likewise have obvious gameplay loops. As do any with assumptions of quests (like, say, in Star Wars games you are likely fighting the empire). But what about a generic 'you play as a _____ in a _____ world' game without an obvious central goal or conflict? You (the DM or party) can obviously choose a goal (and so long as accomplishing it is an uncertain task, it'll likely be fun), but it works better when there are clear tasks, avenues towards those tasks, and contributions towards those tasks with defined values. A recent example my group picked up is Wildsea -- a delightfully creative setting in an imaginative world. It's like Waterworld/Pirates of the Caribbean, except that the ocean is impossibly tall trees on a all-forest world, and the ships sail using massive conveyor treads or chainsaws or spider-like limbs or what-have-you. The problem we have with it is that unlike Waterworld, there is no central plot around a girl with a MacGuffin map tattoo or an irredeemable enemy ship/captain or dryland to achieve. Instead there's an endless sea (of treetops) -- with a few landmarks/port cities, some vague territorial boundaries, maybe a few resource-rich spots worth capitalizing upon, and few real goals except survive. Even the economy is nebulous. So if you are trading 20 giant wolf-spider pelt specimen units for someone else's 30 wroth-iron dreadnought scrap-fragments, that's good or bad because... you think you might need scrap more than specimens (for now)? Of course an imaginative group can rise to the occasion and decide the spider-pelts the 'ferocious' flag no one has a special ability tied to that, but wroth-iron has the 'haunted' flag and you have an Augur character that can boost their foresight ability with nails crafted from them and that will lead you to a plot line about searching for the Ghost Tree of Kwizzlewig which... etc. etc. etc.... but again that's something that works for imaginative groups with any system. This can be easy to overlook with your own system, as you likely have ideas for what characters will be doing. Likewise any group where the players and DM can just start a plot with anything. But for the rest, man is it helpful to have both ideas of what you might be doing in this game, but straight forward avenues to do it and quantify success in doing it.</blockquote>

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