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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9104128" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I think it's a mistake to focus on asymmetric systems, when we're talking about asymmetric impact. Homogenizing your systems necessarily involves shrinking the play space as you give players less levers to pull. It's why I'm so pointedly against generic difficulty tables and scaling DCs: they reduce what has the potential to be a quite broad system of action declarations down to one in the interests of making it easier to balance and plan around.It will absolutely lead to unforeseen difficulties, and it should do so! Game design that provides more options to the player is necessarily a harder task than game design that funnels them into limited action declarations. I've argued before that if we had to pick one basic task resolution system to run the game on, it would be better to give everyone access to low level spells than skills; assigning a limited daily resource to overcome problems and playing a press-your luck game as you run out of it is more interesting than the usual reactive skill rolls. At least then players have a choice of what they prepare to do each day, when they sped their resources, and so on. Skills don't have very good gameplay.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9104128, member: 6690965"] I think it's a mistake to focus on asymmetric systems, when we're talking about asymmetric impact. Homogenizing your systems necessarily involves shrinking the play space as you give players less levers to pull. It's why I'm so pointedly against generic difficulty tables and scaling DCs: they reduce what has the potential to be a quite broad system of action declarations down to one in the interests of making it easier to balance and plan around. It will absolutely lead to unforeseen difficulties, and it should do so! Game design that provides more options to the player is necessarily a harder task than game design that funnels them into limited action declarations. I've argued before that if we had to pick one basic task resolution system to run the game on, it would be better to give everyone access to low level spells than skills; assigning a limited daily resource to overcome problems and playing a press-your luck game as you run out of it is more interesting than the usual reactive skill rolls. At least then players have a choice of what they prepare to do each day, when they sped their resources, and so on. Skills don't have very good gameplay. [/QUOTE]

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