Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5813899" data-attributes="member: 54877">There should be at least three sample settings developed concurrently with the initial rules. These should be as different as possible, and contain mutually exclusive element. Unless one of them turns out to be completely non-viable, they should all have setting material released at or shortly after launch (i.e. within the first year, with teaser material earlier, if it takes that long.) The core rules should use examples liberally from these settings, without favoring one or the other.   Reasons:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Designers and developers are human too. If they don't need to consciously support mutiple settings every day, setting assumptions will creep into their rules. These will cause trouble immediately for homebrew fans (a large chunk of people) and later for the WotC itself.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">With less than three settings, you won't get enough differences in enough places. Ideally, you'd have far more than that, but practical limits means that it has got to be no more than 4-6 setting concepts, and a subset of those more fully developed. Practically, this means you might get 4 viable ones, but 3 is more likely.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">This teaches new players right from the beginning how to distinguish between rule elements and setting elements.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">From object-oriented software development, a hard won truth--a thing is not guaranteed resuable until you have reused it. Meaning, if you want people to swap out this kind of wood elf for another kind of wood elf, you don't know that you have achieved that until you actually do the swap. This means you need two types of wood elves to test it.</li> </ul>All of the above goes double for cosmology. The number of people who think that the Great Wheel doesn't cause trouble for some of us is truly staggering. By all means, use the Great Wheel in one of those defaults. Then use two other, substantially different cosmologies in the other defaults.  Edit: And before someone even tries to tell me this is too much work, my answer is that if "professional game company" is going to have any meaning, this kind of work is right up there with good proofreading, testing the rules, etc. Yes it is work. It's the same difference you expect when a business pays a software company $250,000 for a custom solution, versus hiring a the CTO's nephew to write an Access app in 12 weeks. In any case, the thing will pay for itself simply in the increased playtesting capabilities, and should be done for that reason, even if none of the above stuff applied.</blockquote>

Verification