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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5638301" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, and since you may use either (or one of the several) combat  systems at any given point in play in those systems it is less of an  issue. There could be the oddity that my bard is awesome if the abstract  system is used and sucks if the tactical system is used, but at least  my resources apply in some situations. In Mearls' proposal by contrast  you'd be playing with module X OR Y, but once you pick tactical combat  then my bard just sucks... Or you have to now provide a whole alternate  set of resources or hacks to all of a whole set of resources when you  introduce the tactical combat module to fix all of that. It is fairly  easy to see this becoming unworkable quite quickly.Sure, and when you design a system all in one shot you can easily correct those things (even if it doesn't always manage to actually get fixed). Even here though we can see how including enhancement bonus threw things off, as I'm guessing they dealt with the consequences of magic items AFTER they roughed out the core math. Supposing items were a 'module' in a modular system, well, this example would be easily fixable as you've outlined, but there would certainly be a lot of these kinds of things that would come up as each module interacted with the core.Some people have suggested limiting modules to only tweaking some sort of restricted "API" of things in the core, but I feel like that is a pretty harsh restriction to place on modules (IE no, no, you can't make a module that affects AC, that's off limits). It made lots of sense late at night. Try having a couple drinks and staying up for 24 hours and read it again <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=";)" />Right, I think that all makes sense, modulo how 'meta-game' you want to get with that kind of thing, but fundamentally that's kind of a separate question I think. The real question again is with the value of resources under different variations of the rules. Right, and this is kind of the beating heart of the issue. Is it possible to make a set of modules such that choice of alternates won't change the balance of value of resources so much that it breaks other modules. Again, people have suggested that modules only expose a limited set of things that can be tweaked by other modules, but that doesn't help with this kind of question. If tactical factors are not important in the simple combat module or represented in a very different way (as they almost have to be) then items, powers, feats, etc will have significantly different values under each system. Again this is not too big a problem if you start out with a design where you know what all the alternatives are. When you contemplate adding new versions of existing subsystems later on it seems like it would get ugly.Right. I would expect adding modules would create almost geometric increases in complexity and issues. A system with 3 parts where 2 are replacements for each other is fairly trivial, there are just 2 instances interactions between the 2, so there is a single increment of added complexity. Now add a 4th module that relies on either of the previous 2 permutations (IE you have A, B or C, and D) you have now ABD and ACD on top of AB and AC. So you now have 4 increments of added complexity, and 4 different sets of values that every element in the game might potentially have. It isn't too hard to balance 2 things against each other, but it gets a good bit harder with 4, especially if the balancing is say between abstract combat and tactical combat, or between say a spell point system and Vancian casting.</blockquote>

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