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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5523780" data-attributes="member: 54877">In any kind of model design work, I think of consistency not a technique but as a pool of "design capital" from which you can draw. That is, any decent model that relates to something meaningful to people, there will be some inconsistency ... "suggested". It happens for various reasons, and each one has different costs and benefits. So by default, you make the design consistent, but when you have a good reason not on some particular case, you weigh the cost of inconsistency and decide if it is worth it. I think of this as "capital" because I think humans process a small amount of inconsistency with no problem whatsoever. We even expect it. But each time you add to the inconsistency, you increase the cost for less and less benefit. That is, ten inconsistent design choices may be individually worth the cost for the related benefits, but the sum of the costs is greater than the parts, while with benefits the sum of the benefits is often less than the parts. So that implies an opportunity cost to every inconsistent element you introduce. For those of you exposed to relational database design, this is very similar to database "normalization". A perfectly consistent database is in "3rd normal form". However, most real life databases are "denormalized", that is, made deliberately inconsistent in certain parts, because then the model will be more useful, more convenient, etc.  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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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