Quote from: The Traveller;716533Whoa, just spotted this thread now. Absolutely awesome! This is pretty much exactly what I had in mind with "Rules as Tools", and it illustrates the difference in mechanics between what you're doing BSJ and what I'd normally do.

Most enlightening, for example I don't derive hit points from attributes so there's no connection there for me, and I'd normally start out with the core mechanic (as a baseline physics engine) and build everything from there, so it wouldn't be dependent on anything.

Fascinating, but I think people might be taking this as a complete guide to designing a game, which it wasn't meant to be, at least as originally put forward. It's more like a blueprint of the mechanics, so a designer can see at a glance which cogs and gears fit together, and how. This is purely mechanical.

 
Actually drawing it out like this turned out to be a big help - helped me find one spot where I was trying to make gears turn in opposite directions simultaneously. Part of my issue was trying to pick the best core mechanic, based off various goals in all sorts of weird places through the system. I'll maybe start some sort of thread on my new project soon.

When I drew it I was trying to do a map for any RPG, though it probably does show a few of my mechanical idiosyncracies (wanting effect measurements when many RPGs don't have any real system for these, liking systems where damage comes straight off CON).

You might be right in having attribute scale depend on core mechanic rather than vice-versa, to explain when I did it was thinking about (for instance) how games likely to be massive in scale probably shouldn't use dice pools. Most core mechanics could be fitted to most attribute scales via changing how modifiers are calculated though.