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<blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5679546" data-attributes="member: 80487">WHERE THE &quot;REAL GAME&quot; IS&nbsp;Different players find different decisions important. Having the opportunity to make them is key to an engaging game.&nbsp;I have found a fairly strong correspondence between liking to have a lot of stats on a character sheet -- and a lot of control over what those are -- and liking to have an extensive &quot;back story&quot; for a character before it enters play.&nbsp;At the opposite extreme are people whose interest is only in the events of played-out adventures. What a character &quot;is&quot; in game-mechanical terms matters little next to what they have done with it. The power of a treasure or experience level is less important than its significance as a token of what they have accomplished, a reminder of the adventures by which it was acquired.&nbsp;Chivalry &amp; Sorcery has a different approach from GURPS or WotC-D&amp;D, games like old D&amp;D yet another. Games that emphasize &quot;system mastery&quot; and &quot;builds&quot; appeal strongly to one demographic, those with quick random generation of characters and less detail to another.&nbsp;When there's a well developed sub-game of investing limited resources in skills, feats, powers and equipment outside of &quot;actually playing&quot;, those choices demand to have effects in action that give a satisfying payoff for the investment of time and thought.&nbsp;Basically, that sub-game really is a key part of &quot;actually playing&quot; the game!&nbsp;When those things instead are results of a combination of random factors and in-play action, players' relationship with them tends to be more casual. There's a different sense of &quot;where the real game is&quot;.&nbsp;For example, I never encountered in old Chaosium RuneQuest the kind of game-balance concerns that get so heated when it comes to modern rules sets more in the mold of The Fantasy Trip or Champions.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ariosto, post: 5679546, member: 80487"] WHERE THE "REAL GAME" IS Different players find different decisions important. Having the opportunity to make them is key to an engaging game. I have found a fairly strong correspondence between liking to have a lot of stats on a character sheet -- and a lot of control over what those are -- and liking to have an extensive "back story" for a character before it enters play. At the opposite extreme are people whose interest is only in the events of played-out adventures. What a character "is" in game-mechanical terms matters little next to what they have done with it. The power of a treasure or experience level is less important than its significance as a token of what they have accomplished, a reminder of the adventures by which it was acquired. Chivalry & Sorcery has a different approach from GURPS or WotC-D&D, games like old D&D yet another. Games that emphasize "system mastery" and "builds" appeal strongly to one demographic, those with quick random generation of characters and less detail to another. When there's a well developed sub-game of investing limited resources in skills, feats, powers and equipment outside of "actually playing", those choices demand to have effects in action that give a satisfying payoff for the investment of time and thought. Basically, that sub-game really is a key part of "actually playing" the game! When those things instead are results of a combination of random factors and in-play action, players' relationship with them tends to be more casual. There's a different sense of "where the real game is". For example, I never encountered in old Chaosium RuneQuest the kind of game-balance concerns that get so heated when it comes to modern rules sets more in the mold of The Fantasy Trip or Champions. [/QUOTE]

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