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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5916079" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I think the issue of tradeoffs is far too often not understood. Look at the oodles of posts over on the DDN forum that amount to "I want AD&D except with TONS of character options, but it has to be simple!" lol. You can only fit 10 pounds of stuff into a 10 pound bag. No amount of trying for the last 100 years has yielded a flying car. Some things just aren't possible and some goals are diametrically opposed. At the same time game design is both an art form and a discipline subject to logical engineering-like constraints which arise out of, well, logic, but also human factors, practical constraints, etc. Nobody REALLY knows when they start on a game design exactly what is going to come out the other side. You make some decisions and trade-offs based on intuition and experience, and some based on logic, and you TRY to make aesthetic choices to create what you want, but truthfully you don't often end up with exactly what you went in looking for. You may often end up far from the original goal, or you may miss it by a hair and still be off by a mile.I really think 4e falls into the category of only really missing by a small percentage. I think the people designing it, because it was a pretty large team and surrounded by a layer of closely associated playtesters and whatnot just started out to make something closer to maybe say a better AD&D. After you spend a year inside that you've made lots of decisions and committed yourself to a lot of approaches, and you've played the death out of all the parts and figured out how to make it do what you wanted to do. So you have this great thing, but when you go and put it in front of a whole other audience they may not 'get' what you're doing. Furthermore they don't use it like you did, they don't interpret it like you did, and it doesn't work the same way for them. It is almost a completely different thing.I think from a pure perspective of just making a game that could do something much closer to what say AD&D does than what 4e does though, 4e isn't actually all that far off. It isn't really about the sort of mechanics you're using, that's a side issue. It is about how does it feel and what things does it encourage you to do. If you rewrote 4e and say made the combat system faster and cut back on some things and just polished and re-presented some things that would make a huge difference. The fan base isn't in the mood for that now, so it isn't really quite that easy NOW, but if you were Mike Mearls back in your time machine to 2007 (or whenever) to say "hey, lay off on that and make this simpler, and present this like so and not like such" you could easily have a hit game that is recognizably 4e. It just never happens that way in the real world.</blockquote>

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