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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8118385" data-attributes="member: 6790260">We must be very careful with such statements, as they run the risk of asserting game design does not matter, which is in opposition to the rest of your post.That is: Are there true game design universals which apply to absolutely 100% of all games that ever have been and ever will be made? Probably not! That's a tall order, and I certainly grant that I'm not qualified to claim that any such thing does exist. If any DO exist, they'd have to be either so generic that they'd be impossible to fail, or so fundamental we've never noticed them before. Either way, I doubt many games are running afoul of them.But once you start choosing the kind of game you want to design, the style or methods or mechanics, there ARE objective things you can say about that, for exactly the same reason that you can say "if you want to save money, you ought to avoid situations where you will be tempted to spend it." And that's why I keep returning to certain elements inherent to the kind of game D&D is, both from designer intent and at-table play for the vast majority of groups.One example: D&D is a game where choices are supposed to matter for both their immediate effects and their long-term consequences, but to avoid a totally deterministic experience, the game invokes a probabilistic resolution mechanic most of the time in order to create uncertainty. This then means that risk management is a necessary component of the D&D gameplay process, regardless of which version you play. In order for "managing risk" to have real meaning, and actually have consequences that matter, the player must be able to make reasonably informed decisions, and those decisions need to be the fundamental cause of the consequences faced.If the players cannot truly learn about the world (e.g. if established facts can be changed without the players being able to learn that they changed and how they changed), the players aren't capable of making informed decisions even in principle, and thus the consequences that follow from their actions can't be learned from or adapted to--the players have no real idea why they succeed or fail and will develop false ideas (effectively, superstitions) about why they do. Thus, the game's design truly should discourage rules or referee behaviors which prevent the possibility of becoming informed. (If the players fail to try to become informed, that's their fault, not the system's nor the DM's!)Likewise, if player actions are not actually the cause of the consequences experienced, there is no link between "what player chose to do" and "what happened after." The player cannot learn to manage risk better, because they are never actually taking the risks they believe they are taking; the whole situation is no longer merely fictional, it is deceptive, with the true results arising from a hidden black box the players are never allowed to see or learn about. Thus, the game's design should discourage rules or referee behaviors that secretly disrupt or supersede the link between player choice and in-game consequences: openly doing so, in whatever way, is fine because the players can learn from that still. (E.g. how many DMs have asked, "Did you really say that?" Or the dreaded, "Are you sure?")Hence why, here and elsewhere, I emphasize that D&D is "meant to be" (as in, its internal description says it is, and its designers say it is) a cooperative, symmetrical, probabilistic, role-playing game. Each and every word in that description is a game design objective, and thus we can speak with SOME objectivity about what one should seek or avoid along the way to those objectives. There will still be plenty of places where multiple valid approaches exist, and thus perfect objectivity will elude us. But that doesn't mean we can say nothing whatever, nor that literally all possible arrangements of text are equally valid attempts to meet those design parameters.TL;DR: We must be careful to separate "there are many valid designs to pursue, and few if any universal design rules" from "if you intend to design a game with characteristic X, you should do Y." The former is the denial of prescriptive philosophy applied across all possible games. The latter is the affirmation that once you specify the kind of game you're making, there really are SOME oughts and ought-nots.</blockquote>

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