Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9750376" data-attributes="member: 6790260">My apologies. I got about three hours of sleep last night and just...completely forgot to write the others.2: While your (Lanefan's) math adds up--"each person is good at 1/4 of things, therefore to be good overall you need four or more people"--it doesn't actually equate to effective gameplay in practice. Because what that actually means is, "Only one person will actually be playing at any given time, everyone else gets to be that person's cheerleaders." We already know, from other systems, that this kind of design is pretty bad and leads to serious frustrations. Or, if you prefer: why would you sign up for an hour of fun, chunked up into a dozen five-minute increments sprinkled over four hours of play, when you could sign up for four hours of fun? It's incredibly inefficient to design this way. Instead, it is better to design for, "At any given moment, you can contribute 1/4 part of the goals typically sought by the party. Sometimes it will be less than 1/4, sometimes it will be more than 1/4. You'll still need other players."More or less, this is saying "you get to have fun for 4 hours doing 1/4th of the work needed to reach each goal", rather than "you get to have fun for 1 hour out of 4 doing all of the work needed to reach one specific kind of goal". This is what 4e did with its roles in combat situations. (I freely admit it would have been wise to consider non-combat roles as well.) The player is thus engaged all the time, but flying solo, they couldn't even achieve the theoretical 1/4th of the amount of stuff the group as a whole can do, because chance, time constraints, and action economy prevent one person from being able to do enough to even finish one hour's worth of work for the party of 4. (Some tasks, you really can just use one worker and produce it 1/4 as fast as you would with 4. Some, you simply cannot accomplish with less than 4--e.g. holding up a loop of rope by its corners can't be done with just one person!)3: "Most of the people most of the time" really actually is what most mean. This is both because most people recognize that sometimes the stars align against you, and because they recognize that flexibility in character creation usually means being able to choose to do slightly fewer things very well, or some things pretty well, or several things only fairly decently. In other words, nobody is demanding the perfection you assert. We recognize that it is a spectrum and that that is okay.</blockquote>

Verification