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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4971415" data-attributes="member: 80487">When the focus is more on the "role-playing" aspect than on the "game" aspect (in terms of formal rules) as an object of interest in itself, RPG design comes down to providing tools for answering the question,"How likely is outcome X?"The original D&D game left a lot strictly up to the DM, defining things more in areas of particular interest. That's an example of how focus can be a characteristic of elegance; an elegant design is streamlined by cutting away irrelevancies and trivia in terms of the particular design goals. D&D was a game "about" certain things and not others, and not even all of those things were thought to require special rules.The BRP system provides a standard basic set of characteristics (essentially the D&D set, with Power in place of Wisdom and the addition of Size). CoC adds Education, and derives basic Sanity from Power. Then there are skills with % ratings.All that has familiar echoes in d20 System, but a lot more is laid on top. First, there's the business of skill points (and classes and levels and feats) turning the rating of skills into a whole sub-game. A key feature is how rigidly it is a "zero-sum" game: you can have this, but only by giving up that.Then, there's all the all the apparatus of modifiers and procedures for a great many specific situations. There's a line in at least one edition of CoC about not needing to look up a "dropped oil lamp table" because there isn't one. In the old RPG design paradigm, such "incompleteness" is often seen as a good thing! The GM's judgment and ability to improvise is considered a key asset of the game form.There's a curious case in Castles & Crusades, which slaps of coat of d20 System paint on old D&D. The whitewash is really just an illusion, though, of giving players precisely predefined probabilities. In the end, it's really left to the referee to apply ad hoc situational bonuses and penalties and thus determine the effective chance.</blockquote>

Verification