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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6747578" data-attributes="member: 4937">I partially agree.Consider two very similar games like Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.  Both are made of a bunch of mini-games, but Mass Effect did a much better job of hiding it.  In Mass Effect 2 they introduced a cover based shooter as the combat system.  But to support that, battles could only take place on specially purposed combat terrain.  You could tell when combat was about to begin by the relatively open space littered with bunches of waist high obstacles.   In Mass Effect, combat wasn't as simplified or specialized, and so didn't need any special environment.  Combat could occur any where, and that allowed the original game to do all sorts of things that couldn't really happen in the sequel.   Mass Effect for example could do more compelling horror than the follow up, simply because in ME1 you never knew what could be around a corner.  You could find monsters anywhere and would.  In ME2 monsters happened only in monster terrain.  And as such, they couldn't really chase you either, because the fight couldn't really leave combat terrain.   And there were lots of claustrophobic environments in ME1 like staircases where you'd never meet a foe in ME2.  Lots of people seemed to prefer ME2 over ME1, but I found ME1 to be loads better in all sorts of ways, and part of that was the smoothness by which ME1 transitioned between mini-games.  But 4e while it had huge problems of the same sort - the transition to a skill challenge for example was potentially obvious and jarring - it was in fact trying to reduce its reliance on subsystems and mini-games.  The skill challenge system itself was an attempt to have a single mini-game cover all possible challenge scenarios, and could be ran as long distance travel, evasion, chase scenes, competitions, diplomacy and negotiation and pretty much anything you could skin it as.  One problem though you run into when you try to be this universal is you invariably have more a disassociated mechanic.  The game mechanic may successfully tell you 'pass/fail' during the challenge, but it won't necessarily make it feel like you were engaged in the activity that the challenge represents and it may even go so far as make the activity that the challenge represents feel irrelevant to successfully passing the challenge.   So there is a trade off here.  A more universal mechanic might hide the transitions between systems and let the game feel less like a game, but at the cost of giving up focus on the special aspects of a situation that the universal system might be bad at highlighting.  For me the obvious example in D20 is 'chase scenes', because 3e's combat model is so linear and turn based, and chase scenes are all about simultaneous action.  If you want to run chase scenes well in 3e, you can't really do it with the combat mini-game because instead of having the experience of slowly catching up to a quarry or pulling away from a pursuer, if you run a chase as a 3e combat mini-game you have the experience of flurries of motion that drastically change the relative position of the participants in all sorts of emersion breaking ways.  For me its better to create a new mini-game to handle that, than try to handle a chase as turn based linear combat.Every rules framework isn't up to the task of properly resolving certain types of actions or encounters, with the result that often without realizing it, players of those games simply will neglect to have actions or encounters of that type and focus on what the rules explicitly provide for.   You can sometimes get around that by giving the GM some generic resolution tools, and at this point I would agree that every RPG should include generic resolution tools.  But what actually tends to happen in play is that generic resolution tools tend to give the DM the ability to ad hoc a mini-game to resolve a challenge without the players thinking deeply about it because they are familiar with the generic resolution tools.Think about for example how you'd probably run a horse race, a rescue scene on a river with rapids, an audience with the king, and a murder mystery in non-4e D&D.   In all those cases, I'd argue that DM would introduce encounter specific rules in order to model it better, it's just that in most cases neither the DM nor the players would pick up on the fact that they'd created a mini-game.  But I feel pretty safe in saying that no edition but 4e really tells the DM how to run any of those scenarios, and that the more compelling the minigame the more interesting those scenarios would be.   Think about the "audience with the king" scenario.  If this is run as a pure theater game, it's still more compelling if there is more than one outcome and the DM already has some idea regarding what player actions might alter the outcome in terms of information gained and help received.  If this is run with regard to character skill, it's still more compelling if it doesn't depend on a single diplomacy check over which the player has very little influence.   And more compelling still might be some combination of the two.  In practice, I think most audiences with the king are in fact ran as some mini-game, only in an ad hoc fashion that the group doesn't document because the outcome is more important to them than the process that got there.But as people interested in design, I think it's worth thinking why particular mini-games work better than others in various situations.  There are no doubt a lot of very skilled DMs that have gotten good over the years at running ad hoc mini-games, but what we'd like to do is share those techniques.</blockquote>

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