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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 5522452">I think we are getting a little off track with these semantic points. And I do think this is an interesting topic the OP started. What I am really interested in here are how different people approach designing a role playing game. Personally what approach I take, depends on what my goals are. For example, our game Terror Network is rules light across the board because our aim was a gritty light weight system that fades into the background and facilitates naturalistic (mundane) modern RPG play. To the OPs point about subtraction, we realized in this case attributes weren't something we really needed, so we made everything in the game a skill (and our skill list for TN was about 7 groups of 6 skills each (give or take a couple in each category). That does sound like quite a bit, but there wasn't much else to track aside from wounds and something called clout. Because TN was a counter terrorism game we included some mechanics for interacting with Federal Agencies (called mandates, which allowed PCs to call on resources from within their agency by making a single roll--the Clout Roll). Recently we started work on a wild west game. This time, we wanted a gritty lightweight system that fades in the background, that supports colorful and in depth characters. So we made the Mechanics of actual play rules light, but created what I would call a rules medium-heavy character creation system. We are still working out the kinks, and haven't yet achieved our aim. But I think this gives others on the board here a sense of how I approach the design process.</blockquote>

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