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"Hot" take: Aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overvalued
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8112566" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>LOL, since my own personal rules could effectively be called this "heartbreaker" I have to interject here. The 4e approach, which resulted in the existence of NORTH OF FIFTY THOUSAND POWERS (literally, no exaggeration) is clearly neither elegant nor practically beneficial. Our game, were it to be commercialized, would probably contain on the order of 500 powers. Yet it contains virtually all of the flexibility of the original. Call it 'elegance', call it anything you want, but 100x decrease in the necessary number of powers to achieve the same level of expressiveness, that is what I call A HUGE WIN.</p><p>And make no mistake, I did NOT set out with some sort of 'aesthetic' goal. I felt from the beginning that the 4e approach was flawed, but I had no special axe to grind beyond making it better. I DO feel it is more elegant to have basically a unified list, but I base that entirely on observation of the improvements gained! Frankly there is simply no way I could possibly design thousands of powers anyway, and there were goals I had in mind which didn't allow for simply making everything compatible with 4e's specific detailed structure. Honestly, at this point our game has diverged a lot from 4e anyway, but my advice to anyone who wants to make a game with the core 'power' concept is, don't make the mistake of putting them in too many niches. Its fine to say "you can only do this if you have met certain requirements", but in our case we shifted those to the narrative side, and then made the narrative construct a very solid part of the game. So, your fighter could have a fireball, but there would be a darned good reason, in narrative terms, for why, and there's probably a wizard someplace who will cast a better one.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8112566, member: 82106"] LOL, since my own personal rules could effectively be called this "heartbreaker" I have to interject here. The 4e approach, which resulted in the existence of NORTH OF FIFTY THOUSAND POWERS (literally, no exaggeration) is clearly neither elegant nor practically beneficial. Our game, were it to be commercialized, would probably contain on the order of 500 powers. Yet it contains virtually all of the flexibility of the original. Call it 'elegance', call it anything you want, but 100x decrease in the necessary number of powers to achieve the same level of expressiveness, that is what I call A HUGE WIN. And make no mistake, I did NOT set out with some sort of 'aesthetic' goal. I felt from the beginning that the 4e approach was flawed, but I had no special axe to grind beyond making it better. I DO feel it is more elegant to have basically a unified list, but I base that entirely on observation of the improvements gained! Frankly there is simply no way I could possibly design thousands of powers anyway, and there were goals I had in mind which didn't allow for simply making everything compatible with 4e's specific detailed structure. Honestly, at this point our game has diverged a lot from 4e anyway, but my advice to anyone who wants to make a game with the core 'power' concept is, don't make the mistake of putting them in too many niches. Its fine to say "you can only do this if you have met certain requirements", but in our case we shifted those to the narrative side, and then made the narrative construct a very solid part of the game. So, your fighter could have a fireball, but there would be a darned good reason, in narrative terms, for why, and there's probably a wizard someplace who will cast a better one. [/QUOTE]
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