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<blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8808270" data-attributes="member: 29398">There's a difference between intended success (the wrench is good at turning things) and unintended success (it's lousy at turning things but great for pounding nails).Thus a game - whose designers' intention was to give a hard-core gritty survivalist experience to its players through their PCs - ends up being wildly successful as a game that gives those players a soft-core big-damn-heroes experience through their PCs is still in my view a success in result, even if not a success in intent.Put another way: while the designers might look at how their game is actually played and consider their design a failure, both the company selling the game and the player base enjoying the game would consider it a success, original intentions notwithstanding.&nbsp; And as most of us aren't game designers it's that end-result success/failure state that matters: does the game's design deliver a clear, consistent, playable game that people enjoy playing, even if that play doesn't necessarily line up with the advertising?&nbsp; If yes, all is good.The game books and rules, perhaps; but the whole point of game play in an RPG is that a fiction is generated (by whatever means) and the people experiencing said fiction get the most out of it that they can.&nbsp; The rules-set being used is but a means to that end, with different rule-sets providing better experiences for different players and player types; and in the end what the end-users (the players and GM) get from the fiction really is all that matters.I'm not sure how clear that is, on re-reading it, but I can't think how better to put it without filling several screens with text.&nbsp; I'll spare you that. <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&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Failure of design as intended, perhaps, but I don't see unintended success as failure overall.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lanefan, post: 8808270, member: 29398"] There's a difference between intended success (the wrench is good at turning things) and unintended success (it's lousy at turning things but great for pounding nails). Thus a game - whose designers' intention was to give a hard-core gritty survivalist experience to its players through their PCs - ends up being wildly successful as a game that gives those players a soft-core big-damn-heroes experience through their PCs is still in my view a success in result, even if not a success in intent. Put another way: while the designers might look at how their game is actually played and consider their design a failure, both the company selling the game and the player base enjoying the game would consider it a success, original intentions notwithstanding. And as most of us aren't game designers it's that end-result success/failure state that matters: does the game's design deliver a clear, consistent, playable game that people enjoy playing, even if that play doesn't necessarily line up with the advertising? If yes, all is good. The game books and rules, perhaps; but the whole point of game[I] play [/I]in an RPG is that a fiction is generated (by whatever means) and the people experiencing said fiction get the most out of it that they can. The rules-set being used is but a means to that end, with different rule-sets providing better experiences for different players and player types; and in the end what the end-users (the players and GM) get from the fiction really is all that matters. I'm not sure how clear that is, on re-reading it, but I can't think how better to put it without filling several screens with text. I'll spare you that. :) Failure of design as intended, perhaps, but I don't see unintended success as failure overall. [/QUOTE]

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