Perfection is unattainable.  Your system will have warts.  It will be flawed.  Make it as good as it gets, playtest the hell out of it, and don't sweat the little stuff.

Oh, and you can't please everyone.

Perfection is attainable. But it will be my perfection and may certainly not be your perfection or that guy over there's perfection.

And for some, an ever evolving game is perfection. One that they just keep adding new stuff to.

Depends on one's definition of perfection. Perfect for everyone? Of course not. Perfect for me? Yeah, I achieved that. Although admittedly it took 10 years.

Designing a game is as much about coming up with bright, neat ideas as it is about knowing which ideas to include and which to discard. Sometimes you have to discard your best and favourite ideas because they do not fit with the rest. That is very hard, but necessary.

This leads directly to the next point, you need a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how you want your game to play and you need to hold on to that vision for as long as it takes you to write the thing. This is what will guide your decisions on what to discard and include.

And finally, coming up with a game that you can run for your group and you are happy with is just half the battle. Writing it all up properly in a way that might make sense a third party is as big a challenge and a lot less fun.

Quote from: Soylent Green;715994This leads directly to the next point, you need a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how you want your game to play and you need to hold on to that vision for as long as it takes you to write the thing. This is what will guide your decisions on what to discard and include.

RPGs are kind of unique though in the sense that you can have a clear vision of "anything goes" in the form of sandboxes. One of their charms is that you won't know how the game will play out.

Quote from: The Traveller;716014RPGs are kind of unique though in the sense that you can have a clear vision of "anything goes" in the form of sandboxes. One of their charms is that you won't know how the game will play out.

I think from a design point of view even with a sandbox orientated system you still need a clear vision of what you want to achieve. You are probably aiming for a physics simulation mechanics rather genre reinforcing ones but even then you will at some what level of abstraction you want whether you want to keep a consistent level of abstraction throughout the system or make a judgement call that some kind of activities are more interesting and important in your game than other and go into a higher level of detail for those specific areas.

Either there are lot of choices and decisions to be made at every level and it is very easy to lose track of what trying to achieve.

I think that's what's implied in SYSTEM.

The opposite is a roller-coaster game design where every path is clear.

You cannot achieve perfection. Whatever you make will have flaws; you will not achieve all that you set out to do.

My view is that you should aim for perfection anyway. If you aim for perfection, and you put in the kind of work that requires, you might end up with 'pretty good'. If you just say fuck it, perfection is impossible, I'm just aiming for 'pretty good', you will probably end up with 'not good enough'.

Quote from: soviet;716380You cannot achieve perfection. Whatever you make will have flaws; you will not achieve all that you set out to do.

My view is that you should aim for perfection anyway. If you aim for perfection, and you put in the kind of work that requires, you might end up with 'pretty good'. If you just say fuck it, perfection is impossible, I'm just aiming for 'pretty good', you will probably end up with 'not good enough'.

I agree with this. Always aim for the best. My only caution is, you can reach a point with this where you second guess yourself too much or slow to a crawl because nothing seems good enough. Be careful about getting into that mindset (there is a fine line between optimistic goal setting with realistic self crtiticism, and pessemistic defeatism). Aim high, try to stay positive and be honest in your assessment of your system and writing.

I found the best way of writing RPG products is to write enough to start playing. Play often and play for a long stretch of time. Revise constantly in light of your experience and the feedback you get. Then when changes stop being as fast, write that up as your final version with copious notes on why things work the way they do.

The downside of this method that takes a fair amount of time to complete. And you need to keep notes.

The reason I think this work best for RPGs is because unlike a book or movies the result is not consumed but experienced in a session of play. Thus the only way to tell whether you have a good design and that wrote what needed to be written is to actually play.

It is going to be perfect? Of course not but it will have virtue of having worked for some people in some circumstances.

I think as long as you have an awareness of the flaws your ok. I have a hacked version of seventh sea I enjoy and can list off the top 2-3 flaws of the system but I know them and either take it into account or just tell players, "Hey don't do X, You'll break the system" . My Players mostly listen. Had one player who didn't and when he broke it he realized it made his character boring and surprisingly enough switched to another and has since never tried again.

To fix the issues would make the system way to complicated in actual use. I can live with the flaws as long as I know the why and where of them.

Quote from: estar;716386I found the best way of writing RPG products is to write enough to start playing. Play often and play for a long stretch of time. Revise constantly in light of your experience and the feedback you get. Then when changes stop being as fast, write that up as your final version with copious notes on why things work the way they do.

ces.

This 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.

Yeah, that's why playtesting is so important, because it's not just about figuring out whether what you've written works mathematically, it's also about identifying things that seem to be missing, or things that seem to be redundant.  One of the most fun sub mechanics in Other Worlds came about from this kind of playstorming, we had a roll where the player failed an important roll without ceremony and it seemed like such an anticlimax that we stopped play and said, OK, we need a way that you can raise the stakes and get some kind of reroll.

There's a similar technique that some pro players use in playtesting for a Magic the Gathering tournament. If you're not sure what your 60th card should be, just have it as a blank that you can proxy as one of several things. Play and play until you notice a pattern about what you keep proxying it as - removal, a creature, another land, whatever. That's what your 60th card should be.

Of 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

Quote from: Archangel Fascist;715945Perfection is unattainable.  Your system will have warts.  It will be flawed.  Make it as good as it gets, playtest the hell out of it, and don't sweat the little stuff.

Oh, and you can't please everyone.

That is sound advice in my experience.