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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6571852" data-attributes="member: 82106">I dunno. I think as a general system for anyone to use things are just as much in the hands of the GM in the longrun as in a 4e game. All the various factors you list are mostly things that GMs aren't going to be sure about ahead of time. Taking your foraging example; is the area 'lush'? What is meant by 'area'? Is the character's expertise in swamps really applicable to a swamp in the Shadowfell, and to what degree? There's thus this '20 questions' process that MUST happen in the vast majority of cases which is entirely open to GM judgement and fundamentally is the heart of the process. PERSONALLY, designing a system I would just talk about and emphasize the value of transparency as part of the GM instructions for pretty much everything, along with using a 4e-like design where transparent mechanics are the norm. I can see that your system certainly emphasizes transparency, but there's just so much that you can achieve in terms of player empowerment within the confines of a basically classically structured RPG. I'm sure you get the results you are looking for, and I'm sure that if you carefully prime someone to run the system exactly the way you do, they can get similar results. I'm just not convinced such a system could work for the general public that way, it would probably fare about as well as say 4e, where if you are a reasonably good DM and inclined to use the system as it was designed (but not always well explained) then you get good results, but you can easily get terrible results too, if you're a controlling freak of a DM. IMHO I would rather spend my game designer/DM resources on other things than trying to nail down such a vast array of modifiers and conditions, especially when my assumption is that I'll be just setting most of them to fairly arbitrary 'common sense' values that may or may not work in practice unless I playtest the whole thing for years.</blockquote>

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