position that you don’t hold. So my examples of poor
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.
My counter-arguments are a good deal less silly than your strawman examples were to begin with. And as far as the 1000 XP go, he clearly intended to punish indecisive players. None of the players I ever played with did the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" thing; "Blue! No, wait, Green!" Is the punishment excessive? YMMV, but I don't see it as a game-ending "mistake" on Steve's part. As for his comment he was going to change these things -- just look at the Blunderbuss thread.
Wrote what?
I can give some examples of Steve Jackson rules which are terrible.
I wondered, was he drunk or hungover when he wrote this?
Rick
Different strokes for different folks.
But why is it so unacceptable to allow a healing spell to be created for the game by the designer (which, given SJ's reputation for carefully thinking his way through things, will be well-balanced in the context of the rest of the game) and then, if you feel so strongly about denying it to your players, simply saying that the spell doesn't exist in your world? You can have it your way, and other people can have it theirs. Rather than "policing" how other people play, why can't we just say; "Okay, no big deal, it doesn't work that way in my world because mana can't interact with living tissue in a non-confrontational way -- it can blow you up, but it can't put the pieces back together again."
As the GM, you can make your world any way you want, but why try to enforce YOUR rules on anyone else?