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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7778336" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is a laudably ambitious goal which many have tried before but so far failed.  Good luck to you in your endeavors, but I have certain suspicions about this goal that make me believe that it is unobtainable, at least in the sense that prior designers have imagined.The catch with this sort of flexibility is that you aren't actually creating the rules of a game, you are just creating the metarules of a game.  That is to say, you have only told the GM running the game how he might go about creating the rules for the game using what is essentially a rule set generator, and not actually told him what the game rules are to be.  This means that your system actually takes what is normally considered part of the games rules and makes it part of the games preparation to play.  That is to say, you've given a set of templates for creating minigames, but you are leaving it up to the GM to actually implement these minigames in an appropriate fun creating way.   And while that is true of all RPGs to a large extent, your system makes that even more true, in that both the encounter must be designed and the rules for handling that encounter designed.And here is the problem.  In doing so, you are not solving a problem a GM normally has.  You are adding to the burdens a GM faces a new problem - not only must the GM create a narrative and a conflict, but now they must also decide what system to use to during play, and what sort of game system to create to represent the game which is used to resolve a particular problem.   The risk you have by having an abstract resolution system which can map to many wildly different particular challenges is that in practice the GM will tend to leave the system abstract and so not compelling for that challenge, or else adopt the wrong approach to running the scene. What I've found of these systems in the past is that they don't really provide the would be GM with well designed and compelling examples of play.  For example, to pick on my current favorite whipping post, consider the disparity to be found in the imagination that went into creating the mechanics of the 'Mouse Guard' RPG, compared to the imagination that went into creating the examples of play.  The only examples of play are drawn from episodes in the 'Mouse Gaurd' comics, but are typically short and are not really convincing - that is, they don't convince me that they were play tested and created compelling narratives.  Rather, they strike me as adaptations of a story into mechanical form, but it's not clear to me that the when the handle is cranked, stories come back out the other side.  In fact, based on my experience with them, they probably don't.  Nowhere in all the attention to detail is there any sign someone created a long form imaginative story with this rules set and then upon playing through it and refining it, transmitted that experience and lessons learned out to new GMs.  Anyone looking for a published campaign for 'Mouse Gaurd' will come up empty handed.There is some reason to wonder whether a rules generator is actually telling a GM anything that they don't already intuit even if they haven't formally written it down.  A lot of games define simple mechanics but not processes of play, leading to tables adapting those mechanics or more or less complex combinations when faced with situations not well covered by the rules.  Granularity in the resolution of something based on the interest people have in the thing isn't actually novel.   The handwave is already a part of pretty much everyone's tool set.My advice would be to focus in a concrete manner on the sort of conflicts you consider core to your game, and make sure that you have a defined high resolution minigame specific to that conflict provided as a template for the process of play in that sort of conflict which is actually fun to game.   The same rules for fisticuffs aren't going to apply to seduction or aerial dogfighting or oratory and rhetoric or evading a gauntlet of traps or what have you, because the concrete fictional states in those conflicts don't correspond to each other.  And if your minigame does not aid in the imagining the fictional states, then it will get in the way of imagining the fictional states.</blockquote>

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