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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9798129" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, at some level it is always seat of the pants arbitrary.  There is always going to be some subjectiveness to it when you allow designers to free form any sort of design that they can imagine.  There is no way to give firm guidelines to infinite variety.  But there is still value I think to what you are doing, and I think that value comes up when you look at otherwise successful game systems that where I think were destroyed by a failure to do what you are doing here and giving highly easy to understand guidelines that other designers could use to come reasonably close to what you as lead designer would have done themselves.  (Particularly if you had a lot of clear examples without mistakes or lack of explanation.)  Gygax for his part was basically the sole designer of AD&D at this point.  And it sort of worked for the TSR early days.  As TSR grew the lack of design guidelines would get to be worse and worse of a problem, not just with XP or what not, but in general.  But the situation that I think is most relevant is WEG's Star Wars D6 system where as best as I can tell content creation was farmed out to different writers with zero mechanical guidelines and no editorial oversight.  The result is that the system as a whole is completely incoherent with respect to creatures, equipment, vehicles and so forth because every designer adhered only to their own ideas and intuition with no input from any other designer that I can and so none of the numbers work together in any fashion.  In the case of for example Powered Armor, three different designers each came up with their own completely different ways of modelling it using three completely different minigames.  And WEG published all three of them with no editorial oversight.  That's a vastly worse situation than exists in Appendix E where Gygax didn't "show his work" when he assigned all the numbers (sometimes making errors even in his own calculations).</blockquote>

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