Things were a bit slow here for a few days so I went far down the page and read some of the threads from 2006.  Besides some familiar names (Cyberzombie and Colonel Hardisson and wow, you've been here a long time SHARK) I saw some really interesting stuff that I'd enjoy discussing.  Also, some folks posted things on the internet that are WRONG and THIS MUST NOT STAND!!! (joking)  What are the policies and community sentiments here on necroing ancient threads?

I got the Pandemic board game for Christmas, and some of the playing pieces are little cubes of transparent plastic in bright colors, about 8 mm on a side.  It occurred to me that these might be useful for my game as counters.  Rather than writing a number on a scrap of paper, I could just have a pile of blocks.  I like the idea because I find that numbers are detrimental to my immersion, and I can quickly judge how I'm doing on health, frex, by looking at the pile.  On the other hand, if I take a lot of damage, it might be tedious to count out 23 tiny cubes.

Has anyone had any experience with using physical counters for things like health, mana, and fatigue?  If so, how did you like it, and were there any tricks to make it work better?

The topic of focused vs mashup games came up in another thread, and I'm really interested to hear what people think about their comparative virtues in game, setting, story or literature.  Just to take an example from (kinda) literature, Batman comics are focused:  investigative, non-superpowered, noir, relatively mundane crimes, and based in one city.  Justice League is a mashup, grouping Batman with, among others, Superman, who has a vastly different philosophy, power level, theme, activities, and group of enemies.

I prefer focus.  You can get more depth in the fiction and the rules if you're only talking about one thing, and you don't have to think up contrived reasons why, frex, Superman doesn't squash the Joker like a bug.  Balancing characters who have very different power levels in fiction via game mechanics or gameplay methods is difficult, and I'd rather not have to do it.  And making a game that does Batman's noir together with Superman's sunny universe is nigh impossible.

I see the virtues of mashups as being the ability to have a variety of gaming experiences without changing rules and letting players with different preferences in setting/genre/whatever play together.

I'm okay with limited mashups, such werewolves vs vampires, where you explore what happens when two genres intersect.  But in something like Avengers, where there might be 10 different characters from disparate genres, the number of "what if this meets this" issues explode and there's not time or space to do justice to any of them.  Dresden Files is sometimes cited as an example of major mashups well done (and I'd agree that it's done as well as it probably can be) but I'd argue that it's good fiction because Butcher is such a good writer, and would probably be better with more focus.

So what do y'all think?

So many criteria to judge RPG's are subjective that I got to wonder if there were any actual objective criteria for an RPG to be good.  I came up with a few so far

1)  The game must be fun for the target audience

2)  The rules are no more complicated than they have to be to accomplish their purpose.

3)  The rules are clearly written and well organized.

Are there any others?  Or shoot down the ones above if you like.