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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 2937556" data-attributes="member: 813">The limited structure of a strategy card game like Coloretto is such that you generally must have "cool rules" or nobody plays those games again. But RPGs with cool rules rarely get called out for the rule having been awesome. Usually the result of applying the rule is the front page story. When you find a game that lets you jump off the balcony, swing across the room on a chandelier and knock the evil giant into the fireplace without once having to make up or figure out a ruling. You cheer the jumping, swinging, and burning. You don't stand back and reflect on the elegance of the system. (You as a designer might do this but the general public won't.)Still, having a better appreciation for the rules because you found a quirk within it lends to the rules beauty, not to its elegance. But the difference between beauty and elegance is fairly esoteric. A beautiful rule can be admired on its own. Elegance is the system of rules taken as a whole. The D20 DC system is beautiful. D&D is not elegant.I still don't believe that elegance and fun are related. Even Chess has its fiddly bits (castling, en passant, 3-move stalemate) that have nothing to do with elegance and yet people still find chess fun.Elegance and balance should be related and there lots of threads on the rules forum about whether Cleave (and Great Cleave) are broken or not. This is probably something of thread derail though. I'm not picking on Cleave specifically. I'm just pointing out that where you see elegance in Cleave, others don't necessarily see it as "fun". Another example where elegance is not related to fun.I said this too. D&D is made up of specific feats that are inelegant. People still have lots of fun playing D&D.Needing a better design model for feats sounds like it should be my argument that feats are inelegant. Maybe I lost the train of the discussion. I'll skip to a different point:Magic would be inelegant because all of its rules are based on exceptions except for one thing: All of the exceptions are spelled out in front of you when they apply. When I play a certain card, all of the relevant rules for applying that card are right there in front of me. There's nothing to look up (or at least that's how MTG should be). In D&D, whenever you cast a spell, you should go read it and then apply it. But that bogs the game down. MTG rules exceptions are terse, bite-sized modifications. D&D feats/spells are generally much larger. Your own example of Disarm I, II, and III has a MTG feel to it. And the finer grain allows for those rules to be terse, bite-sized morsels you can apply as needed quickly and painlessly.I remember when our group played D&D 3.0 the first time we made a habit of reading the spells closely because "Yeah, we know what that does" was almost always wrong. The funniest one though was lightning bolt. I don't remember the details, but when we compared it to the 2e lightning bolt, we found out we had been playing the 2e lightning bolt incorrectly for the last 10 years. That just floored us.Trying to get back on track, while your goal of 100% fun is nobel, I don't think it is really related rule elegance. People have fun playing complex games like Star Fleet Battles and I don't think I ever heard those rules called elegant.(Oh, and what was the rule in Coloretto? I don't remember that game being very deep. Perhaps we missed something you found.)</blockquote>

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