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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Conaill" data-source="post: 1631900" data-attributes="member: 1264">Never said that. But I do think game designers should not keep themselves ignorant of existing material *on purpose*. I can understand that someone may want to start from a creatively "clean" slate, so as not to bias the flow of ideas. But I would think it's only natural that at a later stage, a designer would check how his ideas mesh with what's already been published.[raises hand] I do!Ok, not for the firearms rules in particular, but I have for example expressed my frustration about the panoply of  incompatible naval rulebooks out there. (Ok, not exactly about the *availability* of alternative rules, rather about the missed opportunity to converge towards a set of "best practices" rules.) And so has my DM, and a number of other players in our current sea-based campaign, as well a number of people I've talked with online.Of course. It's also entirely possible that some chunks of it suit him just fine, and that he would think that it wouldn't make much sense to come up with  alternative rules that are almost but not exactly the same. Or - heaven forbid! - he might actually notice a good idea he hadn't thought of already. Or maybe he might want to focus a littel more on a particular aspect that BESM hasn't covered very well.I'm not saying game designers should slavishly follow what has already been done. If you see a poorly designed rule - or one which has proven to be so through playtesting since the rule was first published - by all means, come up with a better one! But "willful ignorance", i.e. refusal to even *look* at existing rules, is IMHO way too far towards the other extreme.Ah, didn't know that was a question... I haven't seen the M&M rules, but my impression was that they were more superheroes / D20 modern specific. Whereas the BESM system is much closer towards standard D&D, as is Sigil's system.I'm not just picking on Sigil. The topic came up, and I said what I had on my mind. If a topic came up about BESM, and the author said he purposefully avoided looking at M&M, I would react the same way. Besides, Sigil already said he agrees with me. So nyah! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> <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" />Actually, from WotC's point of view, the whole point of the OGL was that they thought it would let them sell more core books. But I think a lot of us were hoping that it would have the same effect as what the Open Software movement is aiming to accomplish: public discussion and improvement of the system as a whole. Alternative rules get proposed, bad rules get thrown out, people settle on a subset of "best practices" and continue to build on those.Instead we see an explosion of more rules, more feats, more prestige classes, more everything... and no sign of consolidation and standardisation whatsoever. No wonder the d20 industry seems to be going through a slump right now.</blockquote>

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