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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7593207" data-attributes="member: 4937">True.  But I had completely forgotten about Pandemic and it is a good call out.  I'm not sure it overturns my claim by counter example (you seem to think it doesn't) but it does come at least close enough that I'm going to spend some time thinking about applying the lessons of Pandemic to RPG minigames.Also a good call out.  However, this goes back to you could make basketball as important to your RPG as combat is to most RPGs, but only by having a system that invested as much in the mechanics of basketball as RPGs normally invest into combat and only if all the characters were basketball players.   It should also be obvious that if you wanted to simulate or even just narrate a basketball match in any detail, that it would probably take longer to play than a real game of basketball.  Still, I could easily imagine a Hoosiers: The RPG simulator that put you, as the movie does, into the last portion of a game and asked you to finish using a process simulation.When you mention that one difference between 4e and WoW is who does the math, it reminds me again of Risk.   As a kid, I was really fascinated by the game of Risk.  The problem with the game though was it was rare to actually play it to completion, since a game could take 8-16 hours depending on the pace the players played it and the luck on the table.  One day I got ahold of a Risk computer program.  What I discovered somewhat to my surprise is that a full game with 6 human players could be played on a computer in under 45 minutes, and a game with a single human player and 5 computer opponents much faster than that.  Not only did I never play Risk on a board again, I pretty soon never played Risk again.   By automating all the dice rolling and leaving the game only with its decision making points, I quickly realized that it didn't have enough meaningful decision making relative to the amount of dice rolling.   Further, with the ability to play 10 games in the time that it would have taken to play one, I quickly exhausted all the depth of the game in a period that I might not have done in a whole lifetime were I forced to stick to a table top.A computer game taught me that, relative to the effort required to play, Risk wasn't a very good game.  It was after that experience, only a tolerable game if most of the effort was automated away so that it could be played at a faster pace.I agree this is the crux of the problem with a three round hard limit.  As with my hypothetical Hoosiers: The RPG, it's not the last rounds of combat you would want to narrate away, and if you had to choose which rounds to handwave away with narration you'd choose the ones leading up to the resolution and not the all important resolution itself.</blockquote>

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