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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Roman" data-source="post: 5075279" data-attributes="member: 1845">Hello Stacie Gamer Girl, You are right, having Basic and modular Advanced rules can help cater to more types of gamers, but it significantly expands the scope of any design project, you have to design while keeping in mind that various combinations of rules can be used and then to playtest those rule-combinations. The simpler approach of making a game that tries to do both within a unitary ruleset, on the other hand, is likely to run into problems. A game needs to have clear design goals of what it wants to accomplish, lest it tries to become all things to all people and does not satisfy anybody. That's not to say that some things cannot be made both simpler and more realistic, or more balanced and more flavorful, simultaneously, but oftentimes it comes to a tradeoff between the two and which way the designer will lean in making calls affects the type of game that it will produce. I can afford less rigour in setting goals than a project seeking to produce a book, since I am just making it for myself, but here is how I would tend to make the calls if it came to tradeoffs between issues: Class/Race/Character Balance versus Mechanical Differentiation/Uniqueness/Flavor: Leaning towards mechanical differentiation... Simulation/Detail versus Game Speed/Simplicity: Leaning towards simulation/detail... Realism versus Cinematics: Leaning towards realism at lower levels, but cinematic heroism at higher levels... (plus, of course, magic breaks realism...) Games have been more or less moving in the opposite direction for a while now and so is e20. I can certainly understand that - speed of play, super-balance and cinematic gameplay are worthy goals to strive for and it seems for the vast majority of gamers they are preferable to the other things on my sample list of design calls, or so I would assume, as those companies making these games have surely done their market research and wouldn't be moving in that direction if that weren't where the market lay.</blockquote>

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