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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6185697" data-attributes="member: 22424">That's an interesting question. My take on it would be to view it from a software engineering point of view.When I'm doing my job, we have various levels of acceptance. Software that's only going to be used in the office can have all sorts of short-cuts in place - because we know that this combination of inputs causes problems, it's enough for us to simply not issue that combination.Conversely, when software goes to the customer, it must be working - there can't be any areas where sensible inputs cause it to break. Additionally, we should be looking out for all the odd cases, the things that happen only infrequently, and also the stress cases (for us, that generally means them setting up and dropping calls in quick succession). Those also need to be working.But, realistically, we can't catch everything. We could work on the software for a million years, and we'd still never catch anything. So there inevitably comes a point where it's "good enough", and we let it go. And there's also always the possibility that something might come up when the software's out there that we simply didn't foresee. That sucks, but there's not really anything we can do about it.Anyway, that's where I think an RPG should be - used 'normally', the rules should work. Even when used for the 'hard' cases, the rules should generally work. But there should be an understanding that there will be some corner cases that break the rules, and if you look for those exploits, you will inevitably find them.(Of course, in SE there's also the safety-critical systems - the ones which must not go wrong, because if they do then people die. Those get a whole other level of attention paid, get multiple safeguards and levels of redundancy. And even then they can't be perfect - so generally several such systems are run in parallel, and if everything else fails then it works to fail safe. I don't work on such systems any more, and I can't say I'm sad about that.)</blockquote>

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