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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7837281" data-attributes="member: 4937">I ended up clicking all the choices.Something doesn't have to be a big problem to be a problem. I'm a perfectionist by inclination, so even little problems can be irritating enough to me to want to fix them. It's also why unless I discipline my writing to serve a particular purpose, that it becomes grossly over reliant on adverbs. I want to put in those quantifiers of relative degree, even at the risk of reducing the strength of my writing, because there is some exacting nuance I'm trying to convey.If someone says, "This has a problem.", I tend to understand it as, "I have a problem with this." And most of the time I consider that perfectly valid. Even if the thing has never struck me as being a problem, being a perfectionist I can usually see the problem and sympathize with the person finding that thing problematic. Where we tend to not see eye to eye is not over the existence of the problem, but over the existence of a solution. Because, again being a perfectionist, the solution will tend to strike me as having it's own problems, and if those problems seem like they are likely to be at least as large as the problem they are trying to solve, I'll tend to not support the proposed solution.Or in other words, finding problems is easy: finding solutions is hard.But sometimes, particularly if it is a matter of game rules, a solution is available. If something is too good, you can make it slightly weaker. If something can be abused, you can find some sort of limiting factor that reduces its ability to be abused. If something isn't quite good enough, you can bolster it a little. If something isn't written clearly, you can rewrite it so that it's clearer what is intended - even if you realize that your tweak of clarity might result in a slightly different intention than what the original writer wrote or might not be as clear to the original writer as what they wrote for their own purposes. Would that all problems were as easily resolved as game rules.Sometimes though, a problem in a game is intractable, because the alternative is always creating another problem. Complexity is one example of this. No one likes that a system is slow to play or requires complex understanding. But it turns out that there is irreducible complexity in the sense that for a given goal of play, there is a system which is the minimum complexity to achieve that goal and anything less complex would fail. There is a spectrum from abstract to cinematic and as you move along that spectrum toward finer granularity in propositions and more concretely suggested outcomes of a resolution process, you pick up complexity inherently. No amount of ad hoc invented flavor text can reproduce the experience of less abstraction and more complexity, and if you think it can then it's likely because you have an undocumented process that tends to, by the nature of being undocumented, seem simple but is actual very complex. (And in that case, you also have a spectrum between system transparency and GM fiat with inherent tradeoffs.)</blockquote>

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