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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7974380" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>Yeah but I think more often good design from good basic principles makes the best recipes. The triumphs of design in 3E-4E-5E weren't formed by trial and error, but taking a fundamentally different approach to game design, a far more forensic one, and one which values simplicity (which a lot of the designs evident in the full Princecon document do not - and the people at the time realized this, I note).</p><p></p><p>This is part of the big change in game design from the 1990s to the 2000s (albeit 3E is in large part more like a 1990s design, but not entirely). </p><p></p><p>In the 1970s, designed seemed to be almost entirely "seat of the pants", with surprisingly little math or holistic consideration of the effects of things, and people just Rube Goldberg-ing systems together to produce results, and happily jamming further, inconsistent systems in there if it helped them, in the short term, get a result that they aesthetically enjoyed.</p><p></p><p>In the 1980s, there were attempts at more rigorous and reasoned systems, but there was much thought given to simulating certain things happening, and how to do that, and very little thought given to how certain systems promote certain styles of play, reward certain approaches, and penalize others (often going against the stated goals of the game - yeah I'm looking at you HERO/Champions, which has the mechanics of a particularly po-faced squad-combat game when trying to simulate wild superheroics). And some 1970s stuff continued. 2E was very much a mish-mash of rationalization of various degrees, and strange retained systems that made little sense.</p><p></p><p>In the 1990s, systems tended to be designed with more of an eye for the gameplay that they promoted, and for all its problems, the World of Darkness and associated games really pushed this idea forwards. Generic systems which didn't necessarily emulate genres well continued to be popular, but started to make concessions to those genres, to add sub-systems which emulated genres, and some games really focused all their efforts on ensuring mechanics and lore were in alignment to produce a game that played like what it described (I tend to remember Feng Shui as the first game I saw which clearly managed this on purpose).</p><p></p><p>In the 2000s, we saw a new kind of mechanical rigour, one derived from a decade of things like MtG, where even as some games were a total mechanical disaster (White Wolf's Scion, for example), others far more rationalized mechanics, and started taking a real step back and saying "Why have we been taking this approach? What's our goal? Is this a better way to do it?". It was no longer good enough to have mechanics which theoretically supported a specific genre or style of play, the needed to actually do it.</p><p></p><p>Anyway, I've gone on too long, but I'm really saying it's not trial and error that made stuff better in the sense of people just trying things until they worked, but rather people stepping back and thinking about how to make things work in a far more rational, holistic, and less haphazard manner.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 7974380, member: 18"] Yeah but I think more often good design from good basic principles makes the best recipes. The triumphs of design in 3E-4E-5E weren't formed by trial and error, but taking a fundamentally different approach to game design, a far more forensic one, and one which values simplicity (which a lot of the designs evident in the full Princecon document do not - and the people at the time realized this, I note). This is part of the big change in game design from the 1990s to the 2000s (albeit 3E is in large part more like a 1990s design, but not entirely). In the 1970s, designed seemed to be almost entirely "seat of the pants", with surprisingly little math or holistic consideration of the effects of things, and people just Rube Goldberg-ing systems together to produce results, and happily jamming further, inconsistent systems in there if it helped them, in the short term, get a result that they aesthetically enjoyed. In the 1980s, there were attempts at more rigorous and reasoned systems, but there was much thought given to simulating certain things happening, and how to do that, and very little thought given to how certain systems promote certain styles of play, reward certain approaches, and penalize others (often going against the stated goals of the game - yeah I'm looking at you HERO/Champions, which has the mechanics of a particularly po-faced squad-combat game when trying to simulate wild superheroics). And some 1970s stuff continued. 2E was very much a mish-mash of rationalization of various degrees, and strange retained systems that made little sense. In the 1990s, systems tended to be designed with more of an eye for the gameplay that they promoted, and for all its problems, the World of Darkness and associated games really pushed this idea forwards. Generic systems which didn't necessarily emulate genres well continued to be popular, but started to make concessions to those genres, to add sub-systems which emulated genres, and some games really focused all their efforts on ensuring mechanics and lore were in alignment to produce a game that played like what it described (I tend to remember Feng Shui as the first game I saw which clearly managed this on purpose). In the 2000s, we saw a new kind of mechanical rigour, one derived from a decade of things like MtG, where even as some games were a total mechanical disaster (White Wolf's Scion, for example), others far more rationalized mechanics, and started taking a real step back and saying "Why have we been taking this approach? What's our goal? Is this a better way to do it?". It was no longer good enough to have mechanics which theoretically supported a specific genre or style of play, the needed to actually do it. Anyway, I've gone on too long, but I'm really saying it's not trial and error that made stuff better in the sense of people just trying things until they worked, but rather people stepping back and thinking about how to make things work in a far more rational, holistic, and less haphazard manner. [/QUOTE]
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