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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 2389109" data-attributes="member: 22882">'Designing' a role-playing experience is pointless; if it's not 'cops and robbers with a GM,' it's not far from it.  There's nothing wrong with that, and I've personally enjoyed some very rules-lite "games" - but at their core, they are not games, they are not designable, and they really don't need rules, only maturity and trust in the GM.You also can't sell them, because a person would have to be incredibly foolish to buy a set of rules that essentially said nothing but 'use your imagination' - and a person foolish enough to buy such 'rules' would almost certainly lack the maturity and wit to play the resulting game.  Although, they're clearly gullible enough to trust any GM... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Designing a game (the category of entertainment of which role-playing games are a subset) to be rules-lite, rules-heavy or somewhere in between is valid and necessary.How detailed should a particular game be?  What detail level is most marketable?  What level are the game's designers comfortable with?  What level are they competent to design for?Risk and Axis and Allies both model world-spanning military engagements; both are enjoyable games, at least to the subsets they appeal to; their detail level is quite different.Final Fantasy 7 and Baldur's Gate are both best-selling electronic games; both are enjoyable to the subsets they appeal to; their detail level is quite different.Once you've established a detail level, there's still plenty of design to do.Is the game competitve or cooperative or somewhere in between?  Single player tournament Magic the Gathering is completely competitive.  The original Heroquest was partly competitve, partly cooperative.  Basketball is competitve between teams, semi-competitive between players, hopefully cooperative within each team.  D&D is largely cooperative, with slight competitive undertones.How important is balance?  In a competitive game?  Absolute balance may not be necessary, or even a goal to aspire to: Hawks vs. Pistons isn't balanced in NBA basketball, for instance.  In a cooperative game?  Some balance may be necessary.  Or maybe not.  If so, why?Say you decide on a highly detailed, largely cooperative, carefully balanced experience.  How do you make that experience as fast and, more importantly, as intuitive as it can be without losing the three elements you've already selected?That's game design, and it applies to RPGs as well as other types of games.</blockquote>

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