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If you make one skill work mechanically differently from the other 12 in the game, because of some vague notion of "realism" trumping your consistency, you may or may not have made a good decision. If you did, it was luck. On the other hand, if you "denormalize" that skill from consistency because you realize that it being different is going to add certain benefits to the play experience, and that these benefits are surely worth that bit of inconsistency, and worth more than other such inconsistency that you could have introduced--then you've got a good decision, and it has nothing to do with luck.![]()
I agree with you that playability is almost always important; I do think realism can also be very important if it is one of your design goals. One thing I've found is the more consistent a system is, the fewer design options I have for each part of the game. And this narrowing can make it harder to achieve the specific results you want (which is often very important if realism is a key consideration). With our game, we decided a light weight consistent game would still yield believable results because people weren't thinking of the system. But if we wanted to make a realistic game for fans of rules heavy or rules medium games that got down to the granular details of things like fire guns or operating heavy machinery, I think dropping the consistency would be really important.
But to your point, we did exactly what you said in your example. One of our crime skills works differently than all the others, it can be used actively to kill people (whereas the remaining crime skills are more like knowledges). The mechanic for it largely remained the same,but it had different uses and the Target NUmber for the roll was set differently. In this case, the reason wasn't realism, but to better emulate the mob movie genre.
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