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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 2948504" data-attributes="member: 30001">I still have the same sort of question though.  What good is writing good poetry if good poetry doesn't mean that people like it?  My guess is that your answer would be that there is a correlation between good poetry and poetry that is enjoyed by the majority, but I'm not sure if that's what you mean.  I think music theory at some point in history would have considered Jazz to be noise.  In fact there were classical rules about scales and stuff that are not followed by modern composition.  AFAIK any sort of musical theory was created after the fact, after a set of norms had already been established in practice.  And as a famous musician once said:  "there is a fine line between clever and stupid."  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Although I absolutely respect the spirit in which you are describing this.  Especially the part where you say you study a wide variety of works to improve your own.  However, I would be concerned that a universal rating system would impose a kind of orthodoxy on creativity that I don't think is good for the hobby.  I think it would cause people to self-censor according to some theories that may or may not be able to anticipate all possible products that would be enjoyed by the majority.Such a thing already goes on with 3E, which to some extent has defined design principles that I think are a bad idea.  But people treat these design principles as objective truths.I absolutely agree with this statement inspite of the fact that it might be for different reasons.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I think I'm clear on the point that what you like as an individual is not a criteria for well-designed.  I'm less clear on whether what the "majority" likes is connected to good design.Good design, for example, could be defined to mean that every adventure module has a map.  Someone might come along and design a module that everyone likes with no map.  Then you might study the module and find some other property that makes it good, thereby being tempted to create a rule saying "a well-designed module has a map unless condition X applies".  Your rule would only stand as long as no one discovered yet another condition that allowed a module to not have a map.So while I agree with your remarks point by point in most places, I think the one place we might be disagreeing is that you can define any of this stuff a priori.  The only thing one knows at this point, IMO, is what modules people generally like, but that's always a backward-looking approach.So how did "we" gain the authority that a Romantic apparently does not have?  I guess it just comes back to what I was saying before - I can't figure out what the object criteria really are.  The history of music, novels, etc. seems to bear this out.  "Good" English in 1500 AD is not "good" english in 2006.  Well-written is probably not the same either.  Even objective measurements and rules are built on a foundation of subjective taste - even if that's the subjective taste of the majority.  The majority could be a useful "jury" for judging these things, but the majority has a tendency to change it's mind.  People considered master classical composers in modern times caused riots in France (I'm thinking of at least one Russian dude) when they first performed their stuff.  If I follow you, perhaps an example is saying that one can judge a module "bad" by old school standards, if, by definition, all old school modules must have a map and the module in question has no map.Those are the two levels of subjectivity.  I agree with the idea that the community could use some standardized language to describe module concepts.  For example, I'm not really sure what you mean by "de-linearized" and it would help in a discussion to have a rigorous definition.  Even if "de-linearized" is well-defined though, I still see the following two layers of subjectivity:1.  Is "de-linearized" a bad thing or good thing for modules?2.  To what degree is the module "de-linearized"?If "old school" design philosophy says de-linearized is bad, then at least we can save time in debating #1.  And perhaps some consensus would develop over time that would allow us to reasonably predict what the majority of old-school people at this time would say about #2.  However, I would not call that process objective, although it might be useful, especially for folks that look to buy "old school" modules because of what the consensus of like-minded persons tells them they will find.</blockquote>

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