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Message: <blockquote data-quote="keterys" data-source="post: 5034986" data-attributes="member: 43019">Any rule, rule subsystem, or minigame aspect of a RPG should basically hit the following points:* Does this encourage or discourage the action it's modeling?* Is this enjoyable? * How does participation interact with the rest of the system?And depending on what you're going for, you'll land in different places. For example, it is entirely possible to have basic stats for characters and then have any action - be it combat, social, physical, or investigative (those are how I tend to divide challenges, I'm sure someone has come up with a better division) - decided by player and DM fiat. Amber and Theatrix largely do that. In some cases, you might decide that particular challenges are best resolved by their own system - combat being the most popular. You can still decide some challenges by player and DM fiat while combat requiring its own ruleset - many groups roll no dice for roleplaying at all. I'd imagine that for most groups, they'd rank the order of rules necessity for challenges like Combat -> Physical -> Investigative -> SocialThat is to say, a group will be most willing to not roll dice for Social. Or to kinda sorta throw a roll or two here in there, but still largely rely more on what is said at the table rather than follow a system of rules. People will also be most bothered by rules that seem to interfere with their ability to play in that way.  Personally I'm somewhere in the middle - I think that it's very easy to harm social RP by screwing up the mechanics or DMing thereof. Any game in which you go in expecting to have a good conversation with an NPC and the DM goes 'Roll this skill. Now this skill. Okay, you get the information you need, go to the warehouse, and roll initiative' has clearly missed its mark from my standpoint... but at the same time, I don't like being at a game as a superb negotiator and all of my charismatic skills and powers being ignored and based entirely on what I happen to say. Nor do I like character creation requiring that I expend valuable resources in order to have RP quirks. For example, the ability to say I can brew a really good beer or like whittling wooden puppets for orphans should not impact my ability to survive a physical or combat challenge.How the rules all interact with each other really comes up too - for example, I think that a lot of the times system are setup so that you _either_ do social interactions or combat interactions, but they don't really intersect well. Whether that's because you roll a d20 on a social roll and 'poof win the combat' or need to take expensive actions to do social skills during a combat, to use D&D examples.</blockquote>

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