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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9503602" data-attributes="member: 7040941">I think Harmony is an unnecessary jargon term that in actuality is just describing an already existing thing, that being integration. In video game land, that issue is best exemplified in the modern trend of tacking on RPG-like progression systems that very obviously are only there to inflate playtime, and isn't there because the game was designed with progression being part of the fun. Such games tend to reveal this if you can cheat your way out of engaging with it, at which point the game suddenly is a lot more fun and stays that way until its actual unique content is exhausted. Cheating in games with integrated progression doesn't work like that; skipping to the end often means you lose out on the fun after the initial excitement of unlocks fades. Its the difference between unlocking everything in Far Cry 3 and now you have a huge sandbox to be a bad ass in, and using cheated in Rare Candys to jack up your Pokemon starter such that you're no longer engaging with all the fun parts of the game. Going back to RPGs, integration as an issue is mostly rooted in games typically called "crunchy" to some degree, and in particular those that were designed to be modular. Such games aren't designed with an integrated gameplay loop in mind, so entire systems if they aren't especially fun on their own become easy to drop or, if they aren't fun or are poorly designed, get in the way of whatever the actual gameplay loop is. Exploration and Survival mechanics in 5e for example, are pretty much vestigial and this has been an ongoing problem since WOTC took over, where these poorly designed aspects of previous editions, rather than fixed, are simply deemphasized if not eliminated entirely with subsequent editions. Ergo, attempts in 5e to use them more often and not just results in disruption, and the prevailing trend is to question why they should be used, and the game doesn't provide any real justification to that end. They're not integrated, so if they aren't fun, they're superflous. Integration is something I've been harping about for a while, and is pretty core to how my own games have developed over time. The issue with integration, though, tends to be that its hard to have design discussions about a game that emphasizes full integration of all of its elements with each other, because you can't talk about individual systems out of context. One only needs to read one of my design posts where it was vitally important that I cover the context needed to see why; its a lot to read and internalize from a design POV. That doesn't mean the game has to be understood to that level just to be played, but it does mean most people just don't bother reading it because they're lazy and don't want to chew on things that long, no matter what is done to make it accessible. (And one only needs to look at earlier posts of mine where I didn't provide that context and kept getting chewed out, to see the catch-22 that has lead me to consider the online RPG Design space as completely moronic and a waste of time and energy, despite the fact I still try to get more eyeballs on things than I can get in real life)</blockquote>

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