Going full blog mode: observations from two Discord rants

One of the brilliant, witty, and no doubt handsome members of the Fistoverse had an observation about Shadowrun to share with the Discord:

"Shadowrun's set up for lots of good stories, but is a real ballache to run"

 

And as is typical when a comment catches my eye, I couldn't shut up for a for minutes. I share my bloviation with you all, for what scrapes of insight it possesses:

"Speaking as an elfgame maker; it is SUPER hard to get the broth right

Like you want everything to be this efficient little clock, but anytime you put two systems near each other they flip out start devouring each other like those Japanese fighting fish

God help you if you want to have an elegant core system AND distinguish weapon types AND have tactically meaningful combat. There's a reason most armory style supplements are just walls of minute variations of a handful of weapon types

So I feel for the system crafters. It's easy to fuck up and near impossible to get right

God DAMMIT that was more fun and elegant than anything I just spent four hours writing"

 

But our insightful and gorgeous Discordian had further observations, which enticed me to continue this particular tyrade:

"Main books need to be an evocative treatise on the setting and feel, on top of being a functional technical document

The eternal tragedy of the hobby is that TTRPG's don't make enough money to fund the extended playtesting that most need"

 

To which, I blunderingly replied:

"More than that; conceptually, there's a disconnect between what we would expect to be strategically viable in a fantastic universe versus what is ACTUALLY strategically viable in a fantastic universe

So you have games like Exalted where what we want, aka anime hero big sword magic blade beam, is markedly less viable than "guy who picked up the crimson bow and can kill you from another dimension"

The reality is that, as a designer, you're NEVER certain if a new option ruins the anticipated setting. That's the tactical infinity for you; man cannot stand against the infinite

So you have a disconnect between option-hungry players, and designers who only have a small library of options they're more or less certain result in the game as they sold it

My solution was to make the setting an inconstant nightmare, so you can't possibly make that worse by discovering where the setting breaks because too late, bitch! Already broken!

But you'll note, that IS a copout

I can't hope to run a test on every permutations of every idea I have, in every likely circumstance that I could anticipate (which would, at any rate, be only the barest fraction of what it would actually be exposed to in real world play)

So designers are left with, at best, a remarkably robust core and the hope that their latest wiggle from the mean isn't one deviation too far

That's just the nature of the beast

Wow I am in blog mode today what the hell"

Blog mode indeed, past Joel. Blog. Mode. Indeed.