| A straw man argument is when I claim you are stating something that you are not, and then attack this position that you don’t hold. So my examples of poor rules on SJ part, is certainly not a straw man argument, since I am discussing rules which he actually wrote. In my pbem campaign, one of the players asked me to change one of their talents. I said, sure, there will be a TIME penalty. (No experience lost, just it would take a couple more weeks to switch.) So I have a counter example of your claim that no one will want to switch their studies. Somewhat remarkably this example happened in the last two months (since this is a fairly rare occurrence). If you are saying that I claim that the silly rule about the excessive penalty is “a game-ending mistake” then YOU are making a straw man argument, since I never said that. What I claimed was it was a silly rule. Somewhat poetically, I speculated if he was drunk or hungover when he wrote that rule. It just makes no sense to me. Losing 20 experience points would be enough of a penalty to discourage casual swapping of studies. What in the world was he thinking when he decided that the proper penalty would be 1,000 experience OR MORE?!? I think that he suggested that if you do something totally out of character (e.g. murder someone if you are a good person) that you should lose 10 experience. But swapping talents is 100 times worse? (Or more???) It just does not make sense to me. I am a professional game designer and I claimed that some of Steve’s rules seemed very poor and said that I could find examples. You asked for examples and I gave two. Steve has made other mistakes. In OGRE he made Heavy Tanks cost twice what they should and made GEV’s too mobile. In GURPS, he made it so complex that it went from a big part of the RPG’s in the local game stores to non-existent. (Are there some people who like GURPS? Of course. Has GURPS market share dropped significantly in the last 15 years. Yes. If you think this drop has happened for some other reason, I would be curious what you think the reason(s) are.) *** I reread the whole blunderbuss thread just now, and SJ never said he was going to fix the Arquebus being the most accurate missile weapon in the game. Almost all of his comments were on the blunderbuss. The one sentence in which he talked about the Arquebus, sounded like he did not intend to change it. So I think it is likely that if you need long range, accurate missile fire in the new TFT, then the arquebus will remain your go-to weapon. *** Is Steve a good game designer? As I said before, I think he makes a high percentage of correct decisions, so yes. Tho I am actually far more impressed with his business skills. But if someone were to argue that there is no point in discussing or criticizing his designs until after they are locked in and published, because he is so good. Well that argument would carry little weight with me. (I am not claiming that this is your exact position, but one of your statements was in the direction of that ballpark. Which is what prompted my comment about SJ design is not flawless.) Further, arguing that his design is poor, is not ‘policing’ how other people play. Discussing his game design is not ‘enforcing’, my style of play on other people. However, when Neil say that you have to play his way or he will throw you in prison, your argument will be much stronger. ;-D *** The arguments about the fast healing spell he suggested has generated ideas in the SJG forum about damage to fST conversions, and the point that if we have fast healing, we need to generated more rules to support that style of play. e.g. what happens if someone is stunned by taking 5 points of damage and then is combat healed for 2 points. Is he still stunned? I think that there is a good chance that SJ would have missed that point if it was not brought up in the forums but now the question will be answered in the new TFT rules. So I can argue that a clear good has come from this debate. Warm regards, Rick.
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