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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4971353" data-attributes="member: 4937">I would suggest that 'complete' is not 'versimlitude'.I can come up with a system that is complete.Now we have the heart of a complete system.  It can handle anything that we throw at it and provide a means of resolution.  We can expand on the base rule infinitely, to describe tanks, dragons, spaceships and fireballs.  The problem with our complete system though is that it will have no versimlitude because there is no correlation between the task at hand and the likelihood of the outcome and we very much expect there to be one.  Under our system, we might have rules for jumping:But under this system, the player is equally likely to jump a 2' puddle and the Atlantic Ocean.  To get some versimlitude, so that the jump rules give us something like the expected outcome, we might write 'Advanced Jump Rules'This is an improvement in terms of versimlitude, but it comes at the cost of elegance for now we must begin tracking a new attribute ('height') and pretty soon if we proceed along this path we will find ourselves tracking all sorts of things.  Moreover our advanced rules will not share nearly as much in common as our basic rules did (which all said basically, 'see rule <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=1" target="_blank">#1</a> ') and so we are very much less likely to remember the particulars of them off the top of our head.My absolute favorite RPG subsystem is the experience rules for the original Chaosium Call of Cthullu.  Taken by itself, it's an absolute masterpeice of design that is at the same time both elegant, complete, and provides a very degree of versimlitude.  It also character progression in any number of skills using a very simple mechanic that has the very elegant and 'realistic' attribute of only allowing progression in those skills that the character has actually used.  The system as a whole may be inelegant and some of the other subsystems (thrown weapons, for example) are really ugly from a realism standpoint (its easy to do more damage with certain thrown weapons than with high caliber hand guns), but the experience system itself ought to be front in center in the RPG design hall of fame.My problem with 4e is that it is neither elegant, nor complete, nor does it provide a lot of versimlitude.  What the 4e designers seem to have been going for is something that I think has hitherto seldom been considered in RPG design - depth.  This is the reason that to me it doesn't feel very much like an RPG because its salient features aren't the things that have marked RPG design in the past, but the sort of things that have marked wargame and board game design.  It's undoubtable an RPG, but its definately not 'your father's RPG'.</blockquote>

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