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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6211019" data-attributes="member: 4937">There are several things you want to avoid, but one of the big ones is a mechanic that causes the same outcome regardless of the fictional positioning.  'Hit on a miss' is just such a mechanic.  These mechanics are 'absolute'.   They usually involve no fortune roll, or they pay only binary attention to the fortune roll in a case where the fortune roll is actually determining degree of success.   They just tell you what must happen.One that isn't obvious but which I try to be really careful about is immunity to X.   If you want to give a creature 'Immunity: Fire', it's almost always a smarter move to give it 'Fire Resistance 100'.  If you want to make something 'Unbreakable', it's almost always better to give it something like 'Hardness: 200'.   Quantifying things like that gives you answers to questions like, "What happens when an unbreakable object meets an irresistible force?"   It means that the DM has already considered what sort of fictional positioning might cause him to reconsider the objects 'unbreakability'.  It means that say a fire elemental can potentially be burned by a 20th level Pyromancer, that a frost giant can be frozen in the Well of Utter Cold, or that the God of Smashing Things can smash even things that are presumed to be unbreakable.  Or, that he can't; but, either way you don't have to rely on fiat rulings.In short, you want a mechanic that takes into account the 'edge cases' and the possible range of fictional positioning right from the start.  I mean, as a guy that does lean toward process simulation, I'm judging rules by the same sort of standards that I'm judging good computer code.  Did the designer think to check for zero before attempting to perform division?   If posting actuals to an accounting system, did the designer think to check if the date was beyond the present?   If the designer is designing a handicapping/rating system for a competitive game, did he think to include a ceiling on the handicap so that small result sets (awesome performance on one game being the only game in the reviewed time frame) don't produce insane results (this one game is used to assess the player as best in the world).   And so forth.  If the designer doesn't seem to have given much thought to what the algorithm actually represents, and to the inputs it can receive, and to the outputs it ought to give in extreme cases, guess what... I don't think much of his design.</blockquote>

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