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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6843825" data-attributes="member: 4937">A lot of people tend to blame experiences on system when they really should be looking harder at the table.  I often don't get the king of game from D&D I want either, but it has nothing to do with the system.  And changing to a system that slapped a sticker on itself proclaiming that experience was on the inside, wouldn't help any.  Quite often the problem is that you are at a table where no one else has quite the same priorities and aesthetics of play as you have, or they aren't even aware a different aesthetic of play is available.   Then you change to a different table with different players playing a different system with different goals and different social contracts, and you do get what you want.It would be a mistake to think that's primarily about system.There was a point in my career as a GM when I thought GURPS terribly unrealistic, and was infatuated with the GULLIVER house rules.Maybe, but I think we are reaching the end of that.  Right now we are seeing a rather pointless proliferation in systems as solutions.  It's not that you can't refine systems or that systems have no impact on play, but we are overestimating how important system is to play.  People don't naturally have built in probabilities and statistics algorithms.  Their intuitions for things regarding probabilities are not to be trusted in the slightest.  I wouldn't say "bell curve" systems are impossible, but they don't do what most people think that they do.  One very classic problem you see in "bell curve" designs is that they undermine their own intentions by making the black swans even more important.That would be my opinion.  What are you trying to achieve with a "bell curve" distribution?I'm taking this a bit further than the usual claim here.  I'm actually saying "one way to play isn't good for anything", much less right for something.  I'm beginning to see the desire for unified systems - another facet of GURPS-like design - as being a part of the problem.  People come up with this one elegant mechanic, and then they want to make everything work under it.I think we all are, and I think everyone has gotten better at analyzing what a rule actually does separate from what a rule is intended to do.  Back in the day it was enough to say, "Well, this rule is intended to make X more realistic; therefore it is good."  Now we are getting a bit better at figuring out what a rule does other than create a process.   That being said, the tendency to proclaim how obviously superior your game is because everything in it uses the same process, shows we haven't come as far on that front as we could.  We not only still see games that want to have the same mental model for travel, evasion, social interaction, combat, problem solving, and every and any other thing that can occur, but increasingly seeing that taken for granted as the right way to do things.  And just as when I started questioning realism as a cure all only when I really tried hard to implement it in a system seemingly capable of it, so too exposure to unified mechanics make me wonder just how well that really works.  I'm not only increasingly unconvinced one system is best for everyone, or for every genera.  I'm wondering if one system is enough for any game.That's certainly the heart of it.  But I'm not even sure I could put my finger down on the 'playstyle' I wanted.  So often what I see systems saying that are proclaiming how enabling they are of a playstyle is, "You'll need to forgo everything else you've loved and enjoyed about RPGs."   I can't even describe my playstyle.  All I can say is, "All those times I've had the most fun.  I want it to be like that all the time and not just some of the time."I think that works really well for a board game design.  But it takes a good two hours to sit down to play an RPG before the game really gets going, by which time I'm already done with a board game (or usually, want to be done with it).  The more I've thought about that lately and why that could be, the more I'm sure that it's an illusion or a misconception that when I play an RPG I'm playing the same game the whole time.It's not that part of the interface that I think is the real limiting factor.  We don't need to address the problem of how much effort it takes to use the play side of the interface.  It's the creation side of the interface that is the real challenge.  The problem is replacing the GMs and players imagination with something equally powerful and easy to operate.</blockquote>

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