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Message: <blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 8970342" data-attributes="member: 6779310">Very few game designers actually have a good knowledge; the best have serious amounts of playtest to ensure that it does something close to what they expect it to do.Probably the biggest unintended consequences are in The Fantasy Trip and Tunnels and Trolls... in TFT, and in pre-7th ed T&T, wizards power their spells off fatigue, which is a temporary reduction in Strength... In T&T 5th, it's pointed out that the ST 30 Wizard isn't bulked out like conan... but most players envision it that way anyway. It's not uncommon for the T&T Wizard to best the fighter in strength scores... T&T 5.5 adds an option for a magic point attribute; 7, 7.5, and Deluxe, it's no longer optional. Oh, and Fighters tend to have a pretty high luck score ... cheapest way in 5.5 and earlier to raise one's combat adds...John Wick -- noted for Legend of the Five RIngs, 7th Sea, Houses of the Blooded, Cat and Orkworld -- had some very serious issues with putting down what he did in sessions into rules to enable others to do so.  L5R  sea had a lot of editorial oversight in 1E... 2e is much better a ruleset as a ruleset. 7th Sea uses the same core mechanics as cleaned up by AEG in L5R. It's good; 2e is an almost unrelated engine, is hard to grasp, harder to teach, and thanks to John's wife quitting him, and thus also quit editing his work, a poor choice of font renders it almost unreadable on top of the other issues. Cat's missing a few key bits; if one makes the logical leap, it's playable. Orkworld?  Orks are, essentially, incapable of surviving the winters RAW. It needs a rewrite of the mechanics.... simply because some of them are self-contradictory and/or improperly explained for using the  associated result table. Many small press games' writers truly have no bleeding clue. The low barrier to electronic publishing, plus the ease of using one of the open systems... it's set the bar very low.Meanwhile, the bar to successful monetization is also much higher than it once was, because Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) really tends to drive people to bigger, better edited systems, where at least the major chunks work well.And then, there's the issue of "Problem exists between table and chair"  (PEBTAC, the analogue equivalent to PEBCAC)... basically, what the user is doing isn't within the scope of what the designer intended.As an example, I once complained on the Deep7 forum about Arrowflight 1E and the rapid gain of power by PCs... I got a response, don't recall if it was Gavin or Todd, asking, "how long have you been running your campaign?" They didn't expect people to play a single campaign more than 10-12 sessions of 3-4 hours. I was 6 months in on 6 hour sessions... my PCs were 4× the spent XP intended to be "retirement time"...</blockquote>

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