zircher wrote: ↑Tue Dec 01, 2020 10:56 am
Talvieno wrote: ↑Fri Nov 27, 2020 3:50 pm
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5. Distribute half-finished corebook to a handful of players, old and new, so they can give their impressions AND so we can playtest and decide what needs altered for balance
6. Fix what needs altered for balance (even if it means ripping some systems out)
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Just a thought, don't be a slave to balance. A perfectly balanced game can suck the fun out of character diversity. I've seen a few games that were full on meh due to that.
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TAZ
In general, balancing the utility of options is a nice high-level game design metric for maximizing the number of "interesting choices."
But that said, "don't be a slave to balance" is also good advice. Everything perfectly balanced risks turning into mush, where no choice matters because every option has been made as good as another.
This is where I like Warren Spector's point that he doesn't think "choice" in itself is interesting -- what matter are the
consequences of choices. So a better rubric for engaging game design than maximizing or balancing player choice is actually "consequentiality": making choices matter.
Which is where unbalance comes into play. Giving a character low Intelligence in the first two Fallout games, for example, made some things considerably harder, or even impossible, but it made a 100% perceptible difference in how one experienced the full game. Finding a Jedi holocron in Star Wars Galaxies led to building characters who could (and did) murder literally every single NPC in an Imperial-aligned town. Underpowered, overpowered -- other concerns aside, you can't say these weren't consequential choices.
In general, I suspect the best design is to have most of the game-mechanical options generally in balance, but with some carefully handcrafted oddball choices that are both consequential
and (in most cases) well-signposted. "You can totally go with an Endurance of 1, but this character is likely to be killed by harsh language. Are you sure this is what you want?"
Writing a corebook for REKT lately.
hi Talv, hope you are doing good!
