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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5206837" data-attributes="member: 58197">Edited to add: Since this seems to be causing some confusion, the analogy I'm trying to draw is "Each chess piece equals a spell or ability possessed by a PC," not "Each chess piece equals a PC." Although feel free to run with the latter if you see something interesting there!So, I was musing on game design and balancing character options and stuff like that, and drawing analogies to other types of games, and I got to thinking about chess. And I found myself asking:When you're playing chess, why don't you move your queen every turn?Each turn of chess, you get to take exactly one action. You have a number of options available for that action; you could move a pawn, or a knight, or a bishop, or a rook, or your queen, or your king. Out of those options, the queen is indisputably the most powerful. So why (aside from the initial pawn move required to open her up) would you ever move any other piece?That's not a request for explanation of the basics of chess, incidentally. I play chess and I would certainly never, in practice, attempt to play a game moving only my queen. What I'm getting at is, what's the underlying principle of game design that makes pawns and knights and bishops viable in a game that also contains the queen?So far, I have come up with four answers:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">What each option can accomplish is not static, but depends on the state of play. If there's an enemy piece that you want to capture, it's quite possible that, in this particular game on this particular turn, the queen is not in position to capture it but a pawn is.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Exercising a given option affects your ability to exercise that option in the future. If you're playing aggressively with your queen, there's a good chance your opponent will trap her and take her off the board.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Exercising different options in combination is better than repeating the same option over and over. The queen is powerful, but not as powerful as several lesser pieces working in concert.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The threat to exercise a given option can affect the game as much as actually exercising it. A well-placed queen can tremendously constrain an opponent's maneuvers, simply because there are so many ways she can punish the opponent for making the wrong move. In many cases, moving her out of that position and sacrificing that implied threat is not as beneficial as keeping her where she is.</li> </ol>What do you think? Have I missed anything? And how would you go about applying these principles to RPG design? D&D has historically made some use of #1 (AoE effects are more or less powerful depending on the position of the monsters) and #2 (Vancian spellcasting, 4E's daily and encounter powers), but I haven't seen much of #3 or #4.</blockquote>

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