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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7020290" data-attributes="member: 4937">First we better define 'silo', because while a 'silo' and a 'pillar' can be congruent, they don't have to be.  A silo is simply an area of game play which is served especially by one class and no other class is allowed to shine in it.  An example of congruence is deciding that no other class could be better than the fighter in the combat pillar.  I'd like to point out that D&D doesn't really do that, as instead the combat pillar itself gets broken up in to all sorts of tasks.  No one character is both best at bashing iron golems and fending off hellwasp swarms.  But, presumably in some hypothetical RPG, 'combat' could be a skill that one class does, and every other class during combat has only a supporting role.   In D&D, the rogue ('thief') has a silo'd 'find traps' ability and the ranger has a silo'd 'follow tracks' ability, but neither of those silos holds an actual pillar of the gameplay.  Each is just a very small part of the 'Exploration Pillar' that is the 'dungeon' part of 'Dungeons and Dragons'.  I don't very much like silo's either, because putting anything in a silo has a tendency to make that portion of the game a solo game with no real interaction.  But I wasn't actually talking about silo's, nor really suggesting it.  In fact, I prefer a design that allows a character - indeed all but forces a character - to be at least a little bit useful in each intended pillar of gameplay.  I was talking about the tension between forcing each character to be useful in all aspects of play - which you might do in cooperative game like 'Zombiecide' or in a linear solo game with multiple well defined mini-games, and allowing a player to play a more narrow character that only excels in certain areas.  That is, do we allow a player to create unbalanced characters?  Some game systems I think inadvertently demand that a player create unbalanced characters, creating narrow savants that can only do one thing but do it very well.  I don't very much like 'silos', but I do like archetypes.  For example, in 1e the fighter all but completely had a silo on non-magical combat, leaving the rogue utterly inept by comparison by the mid-levels.  Compare with the 3e design, where the rogues BAB progress 3/4 of the fighter and it gets iterative attacks, but at a slower rate and it has situational damage burst capability.  The fighter (in theory, if not in practice) could still shine in combat, but the rogue is not so helpless in that situation as the thief was.  Conversely, the 3e fighter has some 'skills' and might be able to do some exploration things that the thief can't (although in my opinion that fighter got too few skill points).  Worse, it's very hard to predict between tables how much focus any particular pillar is going to have.  The game may have minigames that make for compelling stealth, evasion, crafting, negotiation, navigation, and so forth minigames.  But there is no guarantee that a table or GM will think that is in any fashion important, leading to characters that are stealthy, evasive, charismatic, crafters that are judged on how well they kick down doors, kill monsters, and take their stuff.   Or to put it another way, it's like designing a fish and then judging it by how well it rides a bike.   One of the problems I had with free form skill based games is that skill based systems often imply pillars of gameplay that don't even exist in the system, much less at a particular table, leading to completely dysfunctional characters.  With a class based game where you have to put at least a little into every area of play, especially early on, every character is well balanced.   The wizard might not be very good at swinging a club, but he's probably only 50% as good as the fighter.  The same is not going to be true in a skill based system (or in the late stages of a class based system progression).   The 5e design seems to me to be in part an attempt to address that problem. With true 'ego gaming', there is nothing you can do to solve that problem.  But I think you can allow one class to shine a little bit more than others in certain situations.  Just don't make it the only class that can shine, or you are pretty much forcing the party to have that class (see cleric and the traditional silo around healing).Narrative mechanics have their own issues.  A lot of them depend on a table agreement that defines 'winning' away from success.  They work fine when you have a group of players with a solely dramatic aesthetic of play, but I think they offer competitive aesthetics of play less well than simulation games offer dramatic aesthetics of play.  I don't think you could play most narrative games I've seen with true power gamers at the table, and I think they do rather poorly with fridge logic (or at least no better than action movies or comic books, which often themselves ignore the fridge logic problems, so maybe that's genera emmulation)I think it's inherent to the combat pillar.   I've seen to many attempts to design around it that failed to make me think otherwise.</blockquote>

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