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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8269441" data-attributes="member: 7026617">That may be, but I know a number of designers of supers games personally (its been kind of my jam for many years, though not as much these days) and I can say with certainty that degree of design consciousness is absolutely present in people like Steve Kenson, Chris Rutkowsky and Leonard Pimentel.  So at least in the discussion at hand, I'm confident saying its well distributed among modern designers.  I know they think about these things (how to balance game and genre issues), because I've seen them talk about them.Now the "iterating toward the market desire" part of my post is my perception of this; almost no one in RPG design is going to outright say they're doing that, or probably even think of it that way, but I maintain that's still what's going on.I've seen at least one of the designers I mentioned say exactly that.But part of that is there's been a growth of heavy genre representation in games in general--but I'll also note part of that is because people don't need to re explore the space of compromise systems because there's already plenty.  But I'll note, for example, Prowlers and Paragons is still a compromise system (though closer to the heavy genre end than Champions) and its new edition just came out this year.  So I think there's nothing to suggest that new games that ignore the liminal space prove anything other than a lot of new games (especially at the small press end) have moved away from the liminal space in most genres.  That was pretty much going to be a thing as soon as Fate and PbtA games became at least semi-popular.Its not the only place that's true, though; the amount of damage the high end strength does, things like how lifting and throwing are handled, the whole structure of the disadvantage system in general are signs of where it comes from.  You can argue that its support of genre tends to focus on the concrete realities of the setting rather than the higher order genre conventions, and I'd agree, but even things like the assumptions that supers will have a higher Speed attribute than normal people are intended as genre supporting.I think this assumes that everyone who wants the final result cares about things like what the flashback mechanic is representing though.  I don't think that's at all a given.</blockquote>

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