What are the rules for?

[Micah Sweet]

Why can't a game make up its own genre and tropes?

It can, but it might be a hard sell if it has no relation to the real world.

 

[Micah Sweet]

"Games should have bespoke mechanical coverage for everything that can possibly come up" is, again, a very narrow and reductive take on what RPGs can be.

It's what I want out of RPGs, and I work very hard to make it as much like that as I can in my games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There are many many games where none of these things matter.

And I have no interest in them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You said that all games where the weight of a warhorse might come up, need to have bespoke lists of horse weights and a specific system of how to adjudicate them.

You've done the thing that drives me crazy when someone references me: left out the fact I said "with any frequency. I do, indeed think if that's the case then the rules need to address it in some depths. I also made it clear I don't think that's true with any but a specialized subset of possible games.

If you're going to take me to task, please do not clip out qualifications I make; they're usually there for a reason.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Great! Why is this not allowed?

"Allowed" is a pretty broad term here. I don't notice I have any way to not "allow" it in design. That doesn't require me to think its any kind of good design for anything but an extremely small subset of purposes.

 

[soviet]

"Allowed" is a pretty broad term here. I don't notice I have any way to not "allow" it in design. That doesn't require me to think its any kind of good design for anything but an extremely small subset of purposes.

When you say X should, or must, be the approach, you also say that Y should, or must, not.

 

[Thomas Shey]

When you say X should, or must, be the approach, you also say that Y should, or must, not.

"Shouldn't" and "aren't allowed to be" are not synonyms from where I sit.

 

[soviet]

And I have no interest in them.

What!???! Since when???

 

[soviet]

It's what I want out of RPGs, and I work very hard to make it as much like that as I can in my games.

You said in the other thread you don't think play is a priority and that RPGs are designed just to be read.

 

[Pedantic]

So everyone clearly has incompatible design goals in mind here. This is all just churn where arguing about effective implementation of design goals is avoiding arguing about the design goals themselves.

A single attack stat is fine if you don't care about player decision making around attacks. It's bad if you want players to make decisions about different approaches strategically. It could go either way tactically, depending on how the rest of your action system works. A single stat is great if you don't want the player to have to decide between weapons, and very bad if you want them to make decisions upfront that constrain/inform their later combat tactics.

The only thing less useful than Micah reminding us of his incredible well understood perspective is pretending we all have the same commonplaces about what the games are designed for. We don't, and it's more practical to just jump to the goal the mechanic is supposed to achieve, instead of arguing it fails to achieve some goal it was never proposed to answer for.