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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9345977" data-attributes="member: 4937">I obviously disagree.   This idea that you don't need subsystems if you just have a strong core rule is why so many modern game rules are just so bad and fall apart so quickly when you move away from the toy examples of play that were carefully chosen to illustrate the rules because the designer was carefully constraining play tests to what the rules work for and not paying attention to how much fiat he was using, or perhaps just assuming that fiat is how RPGs work so why do the rules matter since every GM is going to fudge them anyway?Yes, in general, having strong core mechanics that can be adapted to many different situations is a good thing, but it is not the end all be all of good design, and the reality is that those tests represent things and simulate things that differ wildly from each other.  Some of them degree of success matter, and some of them it doesn't.   Some of them are better thought of as a linear range of equally plausible outcomes, and others of them cluster more strongly around a mean.  Some of them simulate something that is abstract, and others something more concrete.  Some of them are pass/fail, and some of them produce a quantified result.  Some of them passage of time matters, and some of them it doesn't.  Some of them have different time scales.  There are a whole bunch of things that go into this if you want a system that helps a GM produce plausible outcomes to propositions.  The more things you try to cover, the more you find exceptions where the abstractions of the system doesn't suit the imagined fiction.  Like in 3e D&D you can nicely abstract away facing if you are assuming a typical melee, and it just works.  But you might find that abstracting away facing when you are in aerial combat and so maybe can't turn 360 freely doesn't feel right and produce answers that feel right.  Or in an RPG you might find that abstracting away simultaneous action and taking turns works fine in a typical melee combat and produce a nice transcript of play, but that if you do a chase then that doesn't work so well.  The situation should govern the minigames.  It doesn't work well the other way around, and generally I find people avoid this unconsciously by just only doing the limited things that the rules actually work for.</blockquote>

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