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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5643650" data-attributes="member: 82106">Any opaque design, especially in an RPG system where transparency is a fairly important concept, will be brittle. It won't easily be understood by the players or the DM and is thus both hard to explain and hard to understand and thus use correctly. It is also hard to maintain because chances are that many developers or home brewers won't understand it very well, and even if they do there are many 'knobs' to twist. You can see this last kind of issue with 4e feats. These feats have a BUNCH of different potential 'limiters', prereqs of various kinds, and bonus types. These clearly were not well understood in the initial design and while all the tools existed to make the design work it was too complex and too opaque and thus couldn't really function. I think a system which requires silos, prereqs, costs, etc in order to try to put different categories of player resources in balance is doomed to fail. You need one simple blindingly obvious mechanism that works across the board. No, I agree, I don't think he does, but he may well be forced to by the realities of what he is attempting. Just like the 4e devs were compelled to have bonus types and several types of prereqs. I'm sure no system that isn't fully generalized will work perfectly for every concept, no, but I think throwing a whole bunch of firewalls in there doesn't help. Look at all the issues with prereqs and bonuses. Often some stupid restriction like Arcane Implement Proficiency (as it was originally written) making it impossible to gain access to some implements for some characters and making the rest jump through an absurd number of hoops (often requiring 2 or even 3 feats to get the desired implement). Ah, well, yes. OTOH I think 4e had a good idea when they simply said "OK, we will center the focus of each class around what is important, combat." That actually WORKED, unlike every previous attempt. Every 4e class is meaningful and useful. There are far less distinctions 'out of combat', but the distinctions that do exist evolve naturally out what the character primarily does. Fighters are generally great athletes and that seems quite organic and logical.</blockquote>

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