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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9342511" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And that's great--for those people. A game should be designed in such a way that its mechanics actually reward the play-experiences the game intends to evoke.Hence why, for example, OD&D armor is such a great design concept within its incentive structure. Armor is heavy, but protective. Weight and carrying capacity control how much treasure you can easily recover. The treasure you recover controls how quickly you advance (because XP = GP). That means heavy armor is a defense boost tied to an XP penalty. Genuinely really clever design.Likewise, the modern DCC "funnel" adventures are really great design. They look at the incentive structure present, and recognize that that incentive structure is incompatible with the lifestyles of many current-day players. People who love the game, but can't justify playing it, because it involves an enormous time commitment (many weeks of adventures before you get one character that survives to higher levels.) Funnels fix that, by, in effect, running half a dozen (or a dozen or whatever) simultaneous greenhorn scrubs who mostly die like punks per player. Each is so simple it's not hard to run them all at once, and you get all of the benefit of "you strove hard and failed a lot and wrested victory from the jaws of defeat," without spending 3-6 months on it. (The one loss, of course, is that these things can't mature with time since you aren't taking time, few to no "swearing to avenge my brother" arcs etc., but I think most people into this style are quite comfortable with that, barely even considering it a loss.)Good game design rewards players for playing the game the way it's intended--giving them an inherent reason to want to play that way, because it's actually fun to do so. In truly ideal game design, EVERY element works that way, all of the time, for everyone. Obviously, that ideal is not practically achievable. But just because we can't achieve it, doesn't mean we should stop striving to do better at it. Hence: do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, in either sense. Do not discard valid options just because they aren't perfect, and do not scoff at meaningful improvement just because perfection isn't possible.</blockquote>

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