Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wulf Ratbane" data-source="post: 4169486" data-attributes="member: 94">Thanks for tying the discussion back neatly to my original point: It is Item Creation that is broken, not the items.I learned early on as a budding designer to "Extrapolate to Absurdity." It's similar to Extrapolating to Infinity, except of course that Absurdity need not be infinite-- it's just large enough to be absurd. I learned this doing trading card game design. A failure to extrapolate creates design fallacies like this:"Yes, this card is very powerful. But it's also very rare. It's unlikely that a player would own enough of these to break it."Extrapolating Item Creation would have revealed the Big Six much earlier. The designers did not extrapolate, and so the "absurdly large" playerbase did the emergent design for them.Iterate, iterate, iterate. A playtest is ideally large enough to create enough iterations to extrapolate to absurdity, without being so large as to be impossible to manage. My strong suspicion is that 4e will not prove to be sufficiently iterated, and there will be a lot of broken  design emerging within the first month of release.EDIT: One last point. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I also have the suspicion tickling the back of my mind that any system that can survive an absurdly large number of iterations without breaking is probably also a pretty bland system. It's going to feel like you never get anywhere. This sort of ties into "mastery."</blockquote>

Verification