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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9248906" data-attributes="member: 4937">Wow.  This one could generate multiple essays and I don't have the time.  Very brief stream of consciousness here:Character Generation - Class based is superior to point buy in most cases because it forces breadth on the character's being created, but classes should be "soft" in that within each class there is enough variety that you could have a party with every PC of the same class and not have a lot of overlap.  Character Burners are fine provided they give sufficient choice over the character creation process.  Randomization is fine as long as all resulting characters are interesting to play and you aren't just forcing a player to go through the ritual of making multiple characters before they have one that they want to play.  The important thing is to give players choice within a system that constrains them to making characters that aren't Johnny One Trick hammers that treat all problems as nails.   Despite restrictions created by the class system, the character generation system should reasonably provide for the creation of every character that could inhabit the shared reality, with the only limits on the player's imagination being how far that character has advanced in his skill or resources.Character Advancement - Ideally, characters should get better at what they actually do.  Levels or perks or skill increases however are all fine depending on what you are going for, but again, the leveling process should be constrained so that players are encouraged to gain broadly rather than focus on one specialization.  Wounds - Hit points are the superior model for tracking wounds in almost all cases, but it's also usually necessary to be able to inflict long term statuses on the player to represent hinderances.  Hinderances should be removable or minor, or both, irrespective of whether that is realistic because in a social game being put out of play sucks.  Exactly what statuses you need depends on the system and how much granularity you are going for in game.  A light game might have all hinderances represented by blanket increases in difficulty whereas a heavy game might have tailored hinderances that represent specific wounds, ailments, poisons, etc.Fortunes - Linear fortunes from a single dice are superior to dice pools in almost all cases because the math is more intuitive and less likely to go wrong.  Regardless of whether you use dice pools or linear modifiers to represent skill you also need adjustable target difficulties to represent the degree of difficulty of a test.  There should always be a point where a skilled character becomes reliable at doing what was once hard or even impossible for a less skilled character.  Critical success or critical failure or partial success should never be assumed as a universally applicable outcome of a task.  For the most part that does not help a game, but to the extent that it does it should be applied judiciously to those tests where such outcomes can be defined in a rigorous manner and are reasonable to test being tried.  Fortune resolution should involve as few of steps as are necessary to achieve the intended result.  Skills - A skill system should be:1) Space spanning - Does everything that a character would try to do have an obvious choice of a skill that would cover it? This is pretty obvious. Players should be able to tell from the skill list what sort of things they'll be called on to do, and whatever the players attempt should have some sort of skill that covers it.2) Discrete - Does each skill represent a truly separate area of skill? Skills should not overlap, nor should a skill be built around something that can also be covered by a combination of other skills such that a person who has all the skills we would expect going into doing X find themselves unable to do X because it has its own skill. For example, if 'Knowledge of the Law' is a skill and 'Bargaining' is a skill and 'Oration' are skills, then Lawyering probably shouldn't be a skill. Lawyering should probably in such a situation be a 'Feat' or 'Trait', ei "Gain a bonus to skill use when you use them in in a professional legal situation." and not a replacement for the discrete skills themselves.3) Independent - This is like discrete but is the additional test that advancing each skill is not connected to another one so that it makes sense that you could advance one without advancing any of the rest. For example, I very much dislike it when a system has a completely separate skill for using clubs, hammers, and maces as weapons. It doesn't feel to me sensible that I could get very good at using a baseball bat as weapon in combat and advancing that skill would not make me more comfortable with a mace than a person who had never held a swung bludgeoning weapon of any sort.4) Balanced - Does each skill represent a reasonably broad area of knowledge that is likely to be a reoccurring test for the character?  It's better to assume that broad knowledge exists even when that's barely reasonable than to silo off skills like "Use Parachute" and "Botany" and "Foward Observer" that might rarely be tests in your game.  This of course depends on the intended gameplay.  "Latin" might be perfectly reasonable in one game, "Dead Languages" in another, and just "Languages" in a third depending on how much testing speaking dead languages is part of the game.  If your game is intended to be generic, then the skills should err on the side of being broad, and have perks to specialize and rules for dealing with when an character uses an unfamiliar tool.   The more generic your system is, the fewer skills it should probably have.5) Immersive - Skills are not actually completely congruent and interchangeable.  Depending on how you select for skills some of them will be more pass/fail and some of them will be more degree of success.  Some of them will be highly random and unpredictable and some of them will have much more predictable and reliable results constrained to a smaller range.  Do not blindly assume you can have a single fortune mechanic represent all skills.  This brings me to the last principle:Modularity: An RPG is actually a collection of minigames.  It's not possible to design an elegant system that covers all possible minigames.  Wherever one system fails at a minigame, it should leave room for a different perhaps even completely different resolution system.   For example you may decide that turn based combat simplifies the tactical skirmish minigame that is important to your intended gameplay, and that's fine but as soon as you do that then you have to consider how to handle a situation like a chase seen that needs you to simulate continuous motion.  It's OK to have two completely different ways of tracking movement available in the toolbox for the GM if that would be simpler and more elegant in play than having one convoluted impulse or fractional movement system for simulating continuous simultaneous movement.  Likewise, you don't need to treat artillery as just a bigger weapon.  Characters can dodge character scale and non-characters scale weapons by completely different means and that's OK.  The trick is in figuring out how to be elegant in both cases.  However it is not acceptable to imply some intended minigame - say combat on the high seas in a Pirate RPG - and not actually have a fun and elegant minigame for doing that that is succeeds in all the other design principles I've mentioned.  If you have important minigames missing from your base game, that should be a priority in future rules expansions.There is no such thing as Rules Light: A rules light system is just a system that intends to fail or at best intends only to succeed as a casual game suitable for one shots or even just playing once.  A game can either intend to be rules moderate or rules heavy, but if it is rules light it's just a rules moderate game that is trying to get its toe in the market.</blockquote>

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