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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3883888" data-attributes="member: 4937">Thinking that any idea deserves "the ol' college try" is a bias.  It's a bias against discrimenatory behavior, as if discrimenation were a bad thing.  But, discrimenating between two ideas isn't necessarily a bad thing despite the fact that we most frequently encounter the term in a negative context.  We engage in this sort of preselection all the time for good and sufficient reasons.  There are some ideas that we conclude aren't worth trying.  There are some experiences that we conclude are so negative that they aren't worth having.  Sometimes we answer the question, "How do you know unless you try?", with "No.  It's obvious.  I don't need experiential knowledge to affirm what I know." A good designer is a good designer in part because they can discrimenate between a large number of ideas and select from the very broad space of possible solutions, one or two worth trying.  A good designer sees the root problem and looks at how to address it.  A good designer needs to do that because in the real world, you don't have unlimited time for play testing.  A designer that can detect and discrimenate against bad ideas at minimum saves his company money, and generally produces a superior product.  The closer your first approximation is to a good solution, the better off you are not just in terms of reduced cost of development, but in the likelihood of finding a good solution, and the elegance your final solution is likely to have.My bias against this idea has nothing to do with not liking computer games.  It has to do with understanding pen and paper games and computer games and knowing why the things that work well in one work, and hense whether or not they would work in a different environment.  Each 'platform' has advantages over the other.  Taking something intended to correct the deficiences in one (say 'readied actions' in pen and paper games or 'aggro' in computer games) and apply it to the other platform where that deficiency doesn't exist is ridiculous.'Aggro' rules and core gameplay based on the manipulation of same may be perfectly good design in an MMORPG that doesn't have robust collision detection (for whatever reason), or exactitude in tactical position (because of latency), or any number of other problems to correct.  Certainly it seems to work for WoW.  But that in no way indicates that it is something worth adopting to a completely different situation.  A good designer who thought that the core issue 'aggro' was designed to address (for example, allowing a tank to be a tank) needed to be addressed in a PnP would be better off looking amongst the tools we already have in PnP games and seeing if something can be used.</blockquote>

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