TFT Game Design Issues

[tbeard1999]

This post was triggered by a reply I made in another thread.

Because we're all givers, we've very generously given Steve Jackson our advice on all the things in TFT that he needs to address. I'm sure he'll find some way to show his gratitude to us for such selflessness :D

However, we should bear in mind that time is a limited resource. Mr. Jackson, like all game designers, has a finite amount of time and energy to devote to this project. My guess is that he'll devote far more time and energy than can be economically justified, but the point remains.

A serious challenge for game designers is that good rules for typical cases very often don't work so well for extreme cases. (In the law, we say "hard cases make bad law").

The old Space Gamer feature "Murphy's Rules" highlighted this issue. And tellingly, many of the games mentioned were generally considered to be very good games.

Anyhow, the reverse is often true as well - rules that handle extreme and unlikely cases often work poorly for typical cases.

There's also a related problem - "writing rules by anecdote". We ran into that a lot on A Fistful of TOWs. The problem is that anecdotes are largely unverifiable and usually contradictory with other anecdotes. Our solution was to simply exclude anecdotes and require credible, written evidence before changing or adding a rule. And in general, we designed for typical cases. We also focused the most design energy on the most important (as we saw it) parts of the game - the combat system in FFT's case. Everything else was ruthlessly abstracted. The less important, the more the abstraction generally.

My point is that we can provide the most serious benefit by identifying the genuinely serious problems with TFT. Trivial or low probability issues just create background noise, though they are often fun to cuss and discuss. Besides, many of these issues (like absurdly high attributes) can easily be solved by a good GM, if he finds it a problem.

I don't mean to criticize any of the discussions here. But I, for one, will try to assess the importance of TFT changes that I suggest and state that in my post.

Just remember - every rules change will probably be evaluated and playtested. This takes time. We shouldn't expect Mr. Jackson to simply take our word that a particular rule change or new rule works great. So every change or new rule probably pushes back the day we get the new TFT.