Quote from: BedrockBrendan;716397This can't be stressed enough. You can think things through, crunch the numbers and work out all kinds of scenarios in your head, but it isn't until you play the game regularly that you start to understand the full implications of all the ideas and mechanics, and how they work when when the rubber hits the road. It also changes things tremendously. I have started out with ideas i thought were great, or thought ought to go a particular direction, only to have that fall apart or take a sharp left hand turn when Played them out.

Agreed. And Time is such a precious commodity.

Quote from: RPGPundit;716920Of course a game won't be perfect; more importantly, you will never be 100% satisfied with it.

That's a big part of what makes a good game designer: he won't be TRYING to be perfect.
The guys who try to be perfect? They're the ones who either never get something published at all, or who make those utterly shit games full of insane byzantine rules.

RPGPundit

Striving too diligently for perfection in game design can be a problem I think. I missed this post when you first made, but if I catch the meaning correctly, I think it is something a lot of people have learned the hard way in the past few years. If you whittle down mechanics too much, in order to attain some ideal of design (whether that be balance, perfect simulation of reality, etc) you can ruin it in the process. I saw this first hand when we were working on our most recent game and trying to refine the spells. In a couple of cases we sanded spells down to perfect spheres that were just not fun in play so we had to backtrack a bit. We reached a stage where it dawned on us that many of the rough edges actually added to play. The trick was to know which ones to file down and which to leave in place.

The Perfect can be the enemy of The Good.

Quote from: RPGPundit;716920The guys who try to be perfect? They're the ones who either never get something published at all, or who make those utterly shit games full of insane byzantine rules.

Ahem...

Quote from: Omnifray;717458Ahem...

Was that "ahem" some kid of admission?

Keeping things simple seems to work for me, I can jot down a dice system then apply a setting to the system, I like to keep my modifiers to a minimum as to keep things moving while playing, if I can work those modifiers into a dice roll all the better, huge complex charts only slow down the action in the game, but I'm not a professional game designer, I do all this crap for my personal fun, does it work? Yes people have enjoyed my fast made games on the fly, did sci Fi, westerns, and fantasy with a couple of six side dice, a pencil, and some paper, it helps if you can draw like I can of course, blowing smoke up my own blip! Done a lot of these fast paced game designs in the US Army on my off time in the field, don't have access to RPG stuff, so I create on the fly.

Quote from: RPGPundit;716920The guys who try to be perfect? They're the ones who either never get something published at all, or who make those utterly shit games full of insane byzantine rules.

I'll +1 this.  If you can - you should stick to the KISS rule.  (and not the one about facial makeup and waggling your tongue to music)

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;964968I'll +1 this.  If you can - you should stick to the KISS rule.  (and not the one about facial makeup and waggling your tongue to music)

Why do we have to choose just one KISS rule? They are not incompatible.

Quote from: Dumarest;965061Why do we have to choose just one KISS rule? They are not incompatible.

If Kiss followed the KISS rule - would they bother with all of the make-up?