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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7464962" data-attributes="member: 5142">I would wager that the intent represents the sort of play that the game rules were designed to support and engender. Often nowadays, the writers will state their intent in the game book. Savage Worlds, for example, uses the slogan "Fast! Furious! Fun!" to describe its intended playstyle that harkens to its desire to simulate pulp action adventures through its gameplay. Ideally, the rules as written and the rules as intended overlap as much as possible, but that is not always the case. I would say that this would suggest bad game design, though I would not equate "bad game design" here with "designing a bad game." Just that the designer failed to appropriately design a game that harmonized well with their design goals. Then new meta-strategies form. But if the unintended way proves more effective than the intended way, then that may be a symptom of game design incoherence. There may even be a sort of game design cognitive dissonance between what the designer claims was desired and what their rules actually seem to suggest is more desirable. Here I am reminded of Monte Cook's Numenera. Since it was first released, a number of players voiced dissatisfaction with the game (among other things) because its mechanics and character customization options seemed more focused on D&D-style combat encounters than on supporting a playstyle more congruent with the game's premise: exploring and creating a future for humanity living in the shadow of an Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd Law alien world. The game was intended to focus more on exploration and discovery, and to that end, most XP came from discovering and recovering numenera devices. But one problem was that since most creatures carried numenera devices, combat became a more efficient means to "discover" numenera as part of the loot. Add onto this, most adventures seemed fairly focused on combat encounters as well. So when character options and encounter design seemed more focused combat, the game seemed to fallback on old d20 playstyle modes rather than engender the desired exploration and discovery playstyle that was stated. The game writers* said one thing while the rules seemed to say another. I think that one plausible reason for this design gap was simply the sheer familiarity and psychological design-comfort that Monte Cook had with D&D. (And I think we see similar issues even with other non-D&D systems, such as Green Ronin's Fantasy Age, where the writers seem to fallback into a D&D design mindset that handicaps the potential design space of the system.) * Namely Monte Cook here at this point. Incidentally, most of MCG is now a pretty noteworthy assortment of who's who of the 3e era writers and staff: Monte Cook, Bruce Cordell, Sean Reynolds, and Charles Ryan. Addressing this design gap was one of the explicit goals for the revised Numenera 2. When Numenera was launched, it had the conventional fantasy-adventure "classes/types": the warrior (Glaive), mage (Nano), and rogue (Jack). But now with Numenera 2, they added a socialite leader/face (Arkus), a scavenging explorer (Delve), and an inventor (Wright) along with rules about building up communities with the discovered numenera devices. I have not played out the new rules yet, so it remains to be seen whether they succeeded in fixing the design gap.</blockquote>

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