What are the rules for?

[Thomas Shey]

It is objectively correct that balancing player options is better than making some player options obviously bad. If an option is strictly worse than another, than you just wasted page space and ink by printing it.

Not all options are required to be equally valuable; it may be that some are extremely valuable in a limited circumstance, or that the cost to acquire them is lower (or at least low enough one can acquire them without much caring, because the cost to improve the more valuable options has gotten quite high). Or it may be that the less useful options are bundled in with more useful ones.

 

[A_Carrington]

Remember when I said "strictly worse"? What you described is not strictly worse. So it's not relevant to anything I said.

 

[Thomas Shey]

They still wanted a realistic simulation for training officers and working out military problems. What they found was that a more complicated system wasn’t necessarily more accurate, and it was, of course, much more work for no real benefit.

'In which case they had made a flawed decision about what served their priorities in the first place. In that case, for example, there were presumable less problems with offloading most of the simulation on the officers involved than would be true in most recreational games.

 

[mmadsen]

It is objectively correct that balancing player options is better than making some player options obviously bad. If an option is strictly worse than another, than you just wasted page space and ink by printing it.

Having rules for fighting with inferior weapons does not mean that a character should be just as good at fighting with inferior weapons — unless we’re designing something like a Streetfighter video game, with no meaningful connection to anything outside the game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Remember when I said "strictly worse"? What you described is not strictly worse. So it's not relevant to anything I said.

Again, if you think I'm going to make assumptions as to what you will define as "strictly worse" I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. I've absolutely seen people who would consider an extremely valuable in very limited circumstances ability "strictly worse".

 

[soviet]

Depending on its priorities, "should" is a perfectly appropriate phrase. Game rules don't exist in a vacuum; they have purposes they're going to share, and if a quasi-realistic combat system is one of them, likely your decision to make wrestling as effective as gun or sword use is a design failure.

That's a big IF though. Some posts in this thread have assumed it must be the case, and they are wrong.

 

[mmadsen]

'In which case they had made a flawed decision about what served their priorities in the first place. In that case, for example, there were presumable less problems with offloading most of the simulation on the officers involved than would be true in most recreational games.

The point is that they did what comes naturally to almost all game designers. When they wanted more realism, they added more rules. But that doesn’t work nearly as well at the table as it feels like it’s going to work back at your desk.

 

[A_Carrington]

Having rules for fighting with inferior weapons does not mean that a character should be just as good at fighting with inferior weapons — unless we’re designing something like a Streetfighter video game, with no meaningful connection to anything outside the game.

Why did you put inferior weapons in the game?

 

[soviet]

Anyone producing a game for other people should base it on shared understanding of the topic, either realistic or following unrealistic but established genre conventions.

Nope, they can do what they like.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Having rules for fighting with inferior weapons does not mean that a character should be just as good at fighting with inferior weapons — unless we’re designing something like a Streetfighter video game, with no meaningful connection to anything outside the game.

There can be some perverse design issues if you, say, have fighting techniques that are purchased separately (in whatever way a game system does so), where some of the techniques are only relevant with weapons that are mostly inferior. Unless your system is set up so that acquiring such techiques is pretty painless, the technique (and the mechanics supporting it) can be generally a waste of space.

Occasionally this can not be a design error so much as there to represent campaign settings where the more effective weapons do not exist, or other conditions level the playing field in some fashion, but that's often not what's happened, but the design of the system hasn't throught through the implications of whether there's actually a point in supporting the inferior fighting style at least with the style of acquisition the game system uses.