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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5984649" data-attributes="member: 54877">For me, elegance in design is covering the most relevant ground with the least amount of fuss.&nbsp; If the problem space is simple enough, the simple solution is neither elegant nor inelegant, but merely appropriately simple. Whereas something that is going to cover a set of ground, no matter what, is more likely to be servicable than elegant.&nbsp; It's not even trying for elegance.&nbsp; Until you unite both coverage and smoothness as twin goals, elegance is irrelevant.&nbsp;For example, in Red Box D&amp;D, the classes, strictly speaking from archetypes, don't even raise the question of elegance.&nbsp; They don't easily cover all the characters that anyone would want play, but don't pretend to, either.&nbsp; But if you look at it from the perspective of &quot;get people into the game quickly with a few varied choices,&quot; then the simple set of classes that work together is quite elegant.&nbsp;You can see the flipside of this in Hero System (and GURPS to a slightly lesser extent).&nbsp; There is nothing terribly elegant about character generation in Hero.&nbsp; It intends to cover everything, and does a pretty good job of it.&nbsp; It's gotten more consistent as it goes, making it easier to intuit and remember, but this is is only &quot;elegant&quot; in the way that, say, an electrical specification can be consistent.&nbsp; However, in play, with a little bit of experience, Hero can be very elegant (within the limits of that great coverage of area).&nbsp; Nor is this limited to older games.&nbsp; Burning Wheel is a giant kludge in char gen (but getting better), yet mostly elegant in play.&nbsp;I find that a lot of games that people call &quot;elegant&quot; actually just don't do certain things and/or roll them up into GM fiat.&nbsp; Systems that are coarse grained are often this way, when pushed outside their coverage limits.&nbsp; Toon is a striking exception, managing to fully cover playing much of the early to mid cartoon characters with the minimum of fuss.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5984649, member: 54877"] For me, elegance [I]in design[/I] is covering the most relevant ground with the least amount of fuss. If the problem space is simple enough, the simple solution is neither elegant nor inelegant, but merely appropriately simple. Whereas something that is going to cover a set of ground, no matter what, is more likely to be servicable than elegant. It's not even trying for elegance. Until you unite both coverage and smoothness as twin goals, elegance is irrelevant. For example, in Red Box D&D, the classes, strictly speaking from archetypes, don't even raise the question of elegance. They don't easily cover all the characters that anyone would want play, but don't pretend to, either. But if you look at it from the perspective of "get people into the game quickly with a few varied choices," then the simple set of classes that work together is quite elegant. You can see the flipside of this in Hero System (and GURPS to a slightly lesser extent). There is nothing terribly elegant about character generation in Hero. It intends to cover everything, and does a pretty good job of it. It's gotten more consistent as it goes, making it easier to intuit and remember, but this is is only "elegant" in the way that, say, an electrical specification can be consistent. However, in play, with a little bit of experience, Hero can be very elegant (within the limits of that great coverage of area). Nor is this limited to older games. Burning Wheel is a giant kludge in char gen (but getting better), yet mostly elegant in play. I find that a lot of games that people call "elegant" actually just don't do certain things and/or roll them up into GM fiat. Systems that are coarse grained are often this way, when pushed outside their coverage limits. Toon is a striking exception, managing to fully cover playing much of the early to mid cartoon characters with the minimum of fuss. [/QUOTE]

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