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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 5915226">I did not intend to come off as condescending. I am sorry if my post seemed that way.   This is a fair point. I may have read too much into your statement about removing unecessary elements.   I am not accusing your point of view of being trendy, I am saying there is currently a trend in game design toward streamlined and unified. RIght now the preference you developed 25 years ago is experiencing a good deal of popularity and that is what I was talking about. My point is in five years we may all be talking about fiddly and non-unified systems again. Because these are aesthetic design trends.    Again, not my intention to suggest this.   I agree that a system should meets its design goals. I think AD&D had very broad goals though. Your criticism of it appears to be the fiddly bits, which for some is going to be a distraction from the game, for others is going to enhance it.   I just don't think this analogy holds. Mind you I like streamlined design and strive for it in most of my own games. But I also know it has shortcomings. Streamlining can be good, because it makes the game more intuitive and easy to understand. The downside is it is harder to rig the numbers in the system and harder to achieve granularity. I point to the intiiative system in 2E as an example. It isn't streamlined, but it arguably achieves its function better than moving initiative to the d20 mechanic. Not everyone will agree with that assesment. But streamlining isn't neccessarily better than a more "clunky" system. With clunky you tend to get a lot more texture. It all depends on what you want at the end of the day. Right now I think most people want streamlined. But there are times, when I am designing I wish I didn't have to worry about streamlining at all because it would give me a lot more freedom to design individual mechanics int he game exactly as I want them.</blockquote>

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