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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7616522" data-attributes="member: 996">I can understand that philosophy, but I don't find it helpful when judging the quality of a given RPG.&nbsp; I mean, if you assume a superlative DM, all games are pretty good.&nbsp; If you assume a malicious DM, they're all crap.&nbsp; &nbsp;Yes!&nbsp; See, that analogy extends reasonably well.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />&nbsp;Yeah, but if you have nowhere to feed in your punchcards, how are you supposed to play it?&nbsp; ;PSeriously, though, 4e did deserve credit for functional mechanics* that were clearly &amp; consistently presented.&nbsp; It just used those mechanics to deliver things that some fans took great offence at.&nbsp; Like class balance.* 'cept Skill Challenges!&nbsp; They were a perfect example of an objectively broken or dysfunctional system at release.&nbsp; When you designed a DMG1 Skill Challenge, you picked a difficulty, the higher the difficulty the more successes before half as many failures you needed to complete it.&nbsp; The problem:&nbsp; that actually makes the 'hardest' skill challenges a cake walk and 'easier' ones very dicey.&nbsp; (Nor was that the only problem, just the one that was unarguably borked.)It took like three iterations to get SCs banged into a worthwhile shape - sure, a smart DM (like our own Stalker0) could spot the problem and fix it, and once the number of failures was fixed, it was /functional/ just in need of a lot of DM contribution to make it fun - but, by the time it was decent, the rest of the game was getting the Essentials treatment...</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 7616522, member: 996"] I can understand that philosophy, but I don't find it helpful when judging the quality of a given RPG. I mean, if you assume a superlative DM, all games are pretty good. If you assume a malicious DM, they're all crap. Yes! See, that analogy extends reasonably well. :) Yeah, but if you have nowhere to feed in your punchcards, how are you supposed to play it? ;P Seriously, though, 4e did deserve credit for functional mechanics* that were clearly & consistently presented. It just used those mechanics to deliver things that some fans took great offence at. Like class balance. * 'cept Skill Challenges! They were a perfect example of an objectively broken or dysfunctional system at release. When you designed a DMG1 Skill Challenge, you picked a difficulty, the higher the difficulty the more successes before half as many failures you needed to complete it. The problem: that actually makes the 'hardest' skill challenges a cake walk and 'easier' ones very dicey. (Nor was that the only problem, just the one that was unarguably borked.) It took like three iterations to get SCs banged into a worthwhile shape - sure, a smart DM (like our own Stalker0) could spot the problem and fix it, and once the number of failures was fixed, it was /functional/ just in need of a lot of DM contribution to make it fun - but, by the time it was decent, the rest of the game was getting the Essentials treatment... [/QUOTE]

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