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Lanrak wrote:


However, you can not just grab the bits you think are best from a selection of games and make 'the best game eva!'

This idea is similar to the 'make the perfect face', by taking the best features of the best looking people and putting them together on one face.

The features that stand out only do so because the rest support them and they all work together as a whole.

Thanks for the info. I'll be skimming through KOW next so I'll pay particular attention to the morale section as you've noted.

Absolutely agree about the above, never my intent to mash this stuff together. Just want pointers to good elements of games so I can analyse them (unable to find the time to properly read through all the decent rule sets out there, let alone play the games themselves.

Some elements I have taken strong influences from, such as the A.R.O. system in Infinity. But more often reading through other games mechanics it can trigger ideas...even if it's just me me shakng my head and saying "that's definately not the way I want to handle things."

The bests element of game design is to have an exciting world behind your system and a clear and consistent rules set.

The first means that people will take notice of your product and will come back because the setting excites them, the second is professional, you sell people instructions to play a game at the very least in must be written in a clear way that creates no misunderstandings (well as little as it can really) and does not contradict itself a few pages later.

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

you sell people instructions to play a game at the very least in must be written in a clear way that creates no misunderstandings (well as little as it can really) and does not contradict itself a few pages later.

Which can be a lot harder than it sounds.

 Easy E wrote:

 PsychoticStorm wrote:

you sell people instructions to play a game at the very least in must be written in a clear way that creates no misunderstandings (well as little as it can really) and does not contradict itself a few pages later.

Which can be a lot harder than it sounds.

I think it's almost inevitable that a larger ruleset creates confusion and contradiction. The more pieces there are, the more chances for something to go wrong.

Depends its writers discipline from there on, take Infinity N3 for example a great care was used to label everything into categories.

N3 does have the advantage of a couple editions of FAQs and Errata and play convention behind it.

Yes and it still has FAQ, but as an example of a clear, colour coded, tagged and well indexed rulebook its quite good.