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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TiQuinn" data-source="post: 9608400" data-attributes="member: 4871">I think speed of play and engaging, interesting game play should be the foremost concern. A mechanic could be very precise and realistic, such as the aforementioned calculation of distance from a character on the ground shooting a missile weapon at a flying monster, but if it slows the game down, and an abstraction is easier for the players and DM to understand and use, I'd rather go with the abstraction.I think it's an ever-evolving cycle of design, and the game is never operating in a vacuum. There are always outside pressures dictating how a game needs to be designed. 2nd Edition absolutely HAD to be backwards compatible with 1st Edition, because "OMG, we've still got all this old product on our shelves" to the point that Zeb Cook had to stick with THAC0, even though he KNEW that it made more sense, and was just plain easier to have ascending ACs. But in general, I think you try out a mechanic, you play-test it, and you see if it makes the game better. Certainly that works for house rules; I don't think it's terribly different conceptually from professional design. I think there were a lot of rules initially written that made logical sense to the designer, but didn't really undergo any kind of play-testing, and were quickly discarded. This obviously happened a lot in the earlier editions. Other editions had different goals. I was all-in for 3rd edition and the customization of classes, the way bonuses would stack or override each other, feat chains, and it all made logical sense on paper...and then I DM'd it, and it was probably the most excruciating version of D&D I ever ran. The sheer weight of the mechanics and things to track from the DM's side overcame the enjoyment that I was getting out of the system. Part of that was discovered over time, part of it was by design. I think Monte Cook's notion of system mastery was, looking back on it, a pretty flawed idea, for instance. The Gen Con 50th Anniversary videos were very interesting from this standpoint - in listening to the designers, I think they were very upfront about the limitations they had, the constraints at the time, what they were attempting to do, what they thought worked, and what didn't. For instance, I highly doubt Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet and Skip Williams would design the game the same way they did if they had a time machine.Does that answer your questions?</blockquote>

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