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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9033335" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm not so sure. Having designed a few games and interacted with some game design people, including some university faculty in that field, my observation is that successful games are a lot like successful businesses. They are established and built upon a CONCEPTUAL framework that is oriented towards WHAT, and then perhaps secondarily a particular HOW. That is, and here I'm making an educated guess, Monopoly was designed around the core concept of building up and developing assets in a competitive milieu of limited funding and uncertain but calculable cost/benefit ratios. Yes, the author undoubtedly also had details in mind, like the board representing Atlantic City and such from the start, but that's secondary to the core idea of buying property, development, and (mis)fortune all interacting. Likewise IME of creating businesses: Its not actually the individual technical ideas that generally have all that much weight in terms of convincing people to fund you and whatnot. Its all about your ability to orient your activities in the direction of achieving the fundamental goals, and ability to analyze your assumptions, assets, and strategy with that in mind. This is what I saw instantly in terms of 4e as a game, the authors clearly were able to look at every element purely in the light of &quot;this is a game, how do we make it work well&quot; as opposed to being mired in some bog of preconceived notions and artificial constraints about how it 'must work'. I see the same thing in PbtA and FitD game design. I don't see it so much with 5e, although I do think there's a good deal of pragmatism at work in how it is designed. It's just that most of that involves &quot;what can we get our existing customer base to accept?&quot; rather than what really makes an excellent game in and of itself.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 9033335, member: 82106"] I'm not so sure. Having designed a few games and interacted with some game design people, including some university faculty in that field, my observation is that successful games are a lot like successful businesses. They are established and built upon a CONCEPTUAL framework that is oriented towards WHAT, and then perhaps secondarily a particular HOW. That is, and here I'm making an educated guess, Monopoly was designed around the core concept of building up and developing assets in a competitive milieu of limited funding and uncertain but calculable cost/benefit ratios. Yes, the author undoubtedly also had details in mind, like the board representing Atlantic City and such from the start, but that's secondary to the core idea of buying property, development, and (mis)fortune all interacting. Likewise IME of creating businesses: Its not actually the individual technical ideas that generally have all that much weight in terms of convincing people to fund you and whatnot. Its all about your ability to orient your activities in the direction of achieving the fundamental goals, and ability to analyze your assumptions, assets, and strategy with that in mind. This is what I saw instantly in terms of 4e as a game, the authors clearly were able to look at every element purely in the light of "this is a game, how do we make it work well" as opposed to being mired in some bog of preconceived notions and artificial constraints about how it 'must work'. I see the same thing in PbtA and FitD game design. I don't see it so much with 5e, although I do think there's a good deal of pragmatism at work in how it is designed. It's just that most of that involves "what can we get our existing customer base to accept?" rather than what really makes an excellent game in and of itself. [/QUOTE]

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