Quote from: Itachi;849970Speed of play is always important, no matter your design goal. Lets say we have two games A and B aiming to the same overall playstyle and goals. If game A does everything that B does but also manage to be faster at it, then game A will be better.

No. It will be faster.

No everyone wants a faster paced game regardless of what else it does. For some players, a slower game allows more time to consider their next action, to think of something interesting for their character to see, or even to jot down some notes and quotes while other players are resolving actions. You may not want any of that, but that doesn't mean that no one does.

If creating characters is fun it doesn't need to be fast. I don't get this "I want chargen to be fast so I can start playing" thing. I want chargen to be fun because I am already playing.

Likewise for combat, encounters, puzzles and trap and I the rest of it. Rpgs aren't supposed to be a race to see who can get to the end quickest. Its all about the journey.

Quote from: Itachi;849970Speed of play is always important, no matter your design goal. Lets say we have two games A and B aiming to the same overall playstyle and goals. If game A does everything that B does but also manage to be faster at it, then game A will be better.

No.

That is your OPINION.

Real life getting in the way is certainly the most common game-ending reason I have encountered.  Second most common is character creation that takes too damn long.

Quote from: Old One Eye;850038Real life getting in the way is certainly the most common game-ending reason I have encountered.  Second most common is character creation that takes too damn long.

Same here. Which incidentally is why I feel every game should have a character generation app!

Quote from: The Butcher;850090Same here. Which incidentally is why I feel every game should have a character generation app!

Agree with the inclusion of the App. I was going to add something about how I wondered whether the technology produces the effect of players creating characters without understanding much of the system, but then I remembered most of my players enjoy the game fine without being system masters, so who cares?:-)

Quote from: jibbajibba;849992If creating characters is fun it doesn't need to be fast. I don't get this "I want chargen to be fast so I can start playing" thing.

  I think it makes more sense as part of an overall playstyle that also emphasizes lethality and risk. In games like that, you want fast chargen so players can get back into the action.

Quote from: The Butcher;850090Same here. Which incidentally is why I feel every game should have a character generation app!

Or, alternately -- and preferably! -- a GM who shepherds players through the process, instead of sitting back on his fat ass munching Doritos.

Quote from: jibbajibba;849992If creating characters is fun it doesn't need to be fast. I don't get this "I want chargen to be fast so I can start playing" thing. I want chargen to be fun because I am already playing.

Likewise for combat, encounters, puzzles and trap and I the rest of it. Rpgs aren't supposed to be a race to see who can get to the end quickest. Its all about the journey.

Which parts of the journey are most interesting is a question to which different people have different answers. Moreover, the same people can have different answers at different times.

Gygax put "getting on with the adventure" ahead of detailed character generation and combat resolution in OD&D, but went the other way with Dangerous Journeys (which also included a less detailed subset of the full Mythus system).

A modular, extensible approach can make it easy to tailor the mix to the preferences of a given group. This means taking the simplest form as a "baseline" assumption, whereas the tendency has been to take a more elaborate set of rules as the starting point.

Quote from: Ravenswing;850104Or, alternately -- and preferably! -- a GM who shepherds players through the process, instead of sitting back on his fat ass munching Doritos.

With 1st ed. Chivalry & Sorcery, I'd say automation is preferable because so much of the process is the kind of drudgery that doesn't really require a person to do it. Some of the few choices might not actually be choices for the character in question, and some folks might wish to generate those probabilistically as well (tables of the sort being common artifacts in the early years of FRP).

C&S 2nd ed. went to a points-budget system, explicitly turning more things into player choices. That still left a fair bit of dry calculation, the leaving of which to a computer program could make character generation faster and for most people more interesting.

With D&D 4E, I was glad to pass up the design work by letting people who enjoyed it more do it for me. It was nice to have questions asked at a high level (as opposed to the mechanical level). A computer program could be written to allow people to go lower when they want to, otherwise accepting selections on the basis of such questions.

The problem of course is that texts are copyrighted, so there are limits to how much one can copy to use in a published program without permission.

Quote from: Itachi;849970Speed of play is always important, no matter your design goal. Lets say we have two games A and B aiming to the same overall playstyle and goals. If game A does everything that B does but also manage to be faster at it, then game A will be better.

And this closes the issue, really: AD&D (1e and 2e) are considered the worst D&D editions simply because it reaches it's design goals in a manner way more inefficient than any other edition.

"Same overall playstyle and goals" presumably already includes a shared opinion as to the proper priorities of how to spend time. That makes your claim basically meaningless.

FASTEST GAME POSSIBLE (first approximation):
1) Toss coin.
2) Heads = you win.
3) Tails = you lose.

That rule set is also about as brief and easy to understand as you'll find.

But is it really optimal? Evidently not, since hardly anyone actually prefers it.

Many beholders happen to see beauty in the same things. We can design for that demographic without condemning dissenters as "wrong."

If such condemnation is the aim of calling something "objectively better," then it serves only to foster unpleasantness.

On the other hand, it could be shorthand for "objectively a closer fit to the specified criteria." That's obviously not what people mean when they're fiercely claiming supremacy for a criterion itself, however.

Quote from: Itachi;849970Speed of play is always important, no matter your design goal. Lets say we have two games A and B aiming to the same overall playstyle and goals. If game A does everything that B does but also manage to be faster at it, then game A will be better.

And this closes the issue, really: AD&D (1e and 2e) are considered the worst D&D editions simply because it reaches it's design goals in a manner way more inefficient than any other edition.

This is really fucking stupid. AD&D is a faster and lighter system than 3.x and 4E. You're nuts.

Quote from: Phillip;850121"Same overall playstyle and goals" presumably already includes a shared opinion as to the proper priorities of how to spend time. That makes your claim basically meaningless.

FASTEST GAME POSSIBLE (first approximation):
1) Toss coin.
2) Heads = you win.
3) Tails = you lose.

That rule set is also about as brief and easy to understand as you'll find.

rolling a dice is faster than a coin toss.

Quote from: Ulairi;850128This is really fucking stupid.

You said it. I'd say it was the dumbest thing I've heard online today, but I was just reading a story about Frank Missler...