I'll expand on what I said earlier. IMHO its like this: some things are better for speed, and worse for detail, or better for character diversity but worse for balance, or need more math but are less realistic. A few - a very few - options are just generally awful, although it should be said that even then, its often not by much -  the quality of an actual game session is more influenced by the quality of the GM and the players than by the quality of the rules involve, and people can get their noses way out of joint by something that at worst, wastes a few seconds of table time. Generally its rare you get a system that does something well without tradeoffs somewhere else and so its difficult to say any one game is *the* best because different people fundamentally put different values on speed or realism or depth of tactical value, and are willing to pay different prices for those in terms of extra math, table lookups, or additional rules. Its when someone insists there's only one possible priority that you can conclude someone is a jackass - whether that's realism or balance or whatever.

Now usually accusations of objectively bad is from people who have significant unexamined assumptions - in days of yore it was usually the realism enthusiasts, whereas currently its mostly people who don't like rules lite games ('magical tea party') or (often the same people) who like high-powered games as an axiom and insist that fighters need super-special magic powers to keep up with the equally super-powered wizards...but the counter-argument against this - nothing is bad and its all subjective preference - is exactly as wrong and leads nowhere good. In between this and the system doesn't matter arguments in the main forum it looks like we've finally reached the point where general consensus is that a random page out of a Tom Clancy novel wrapped around a dog turd is as valid a game system as anything else, and signal-to-noise here finally hits zero. I could try and explain how deadEarth proves objectively bad systems exist with its rule using a 200d6 (100 rolls of paired 2d6) that could be replaced with a half-dozen d100 rolls on a table, or attempt to go and explain what's good/bad about d100s in that thread and annoy the RQ people, or attempt to help untangle the horrible mess where Pemerton has managing to set up the traditional false equivalence between "System Matters" and "GNS Matters"  but what's the use. At this point the forum just has the game design equivalent of terminal cancer. :mad:

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;731630I'll expand on what I said earlier. IMHO its like this: some things are better for speed, and worse for detail, or better for character diversity but worse for balance, or need more math but are less realistic. A few - a very few - options are just generally awful, although it should be said that even then, its often not by much -  the quality of an actual game session is more influenced by the quality of the GM and the players than by the quality of the rules involve, and people can get their noses way out of joint by something that at worst, wastes a few seconds of table time. Generally its rare you get a system that does something well without tradeoffs somewhere else and so its difficult to say any one game is *the* best because different people fundamentally put different values on speed or realism or depth of tactical value, and are willing to pay different prices for those in terms of extra math, table lookups, or additional rules. Its when someone insists there's only one possible priority that you can conclude someone is a jackass - whether that's realism or balance or whatever.

Now usually accusations of objectively bad is from people who have significant unexamined assumptions - in days of yore it was usually the realism enthusiasts, whereas currently its mostly people who don't like rules lite games ('magical tea party') or (often the same people) who like high-powered games as an axiom and insist that fighters need super-special magic powers to keep up with the equally super-powered wizards...but the counter-argument against this - nothing is bad and its all subjective preference - is exactly as wrong and leads nowhere good. In between this and the system doesn't matter arguments in the main forum it looks like we've finally reached the point where general consensus is that a random page out of a Tom Clancy novel wrapped around a dog turd is as valid a game system as anything else, and signal-to-noise here finally hits zero. I could try and explain how deadEarth proves objectively bad systems exist with its rule using a 200d6 (100 rolls of paired 2d6) that could be replaced with a half-dozen d100 rolls on a table, or attempt to go and explain what's good/bad about d100s in that thread and annoy the RQ people, or attempt to help untangle the horrible mess where Pemerton has managing to set up the traditional false equivalence between "System Matters" and "GNS Matters"  but what's the use. At this point the forum just has the game design equivalent of terminal cancer. :mad:

Hah, I thought I was the only one who had a slight problem with an argument that grants Fatal absolution . In a way, the Tyranny of Fun has two sides now. That said, there are really a few works that are truly horrible - most of the time we should really discuss whether the mechanic couldn't have been handled more elegantly, implying at worst it's clunky.

Then again - I find it best to just cultivate one's garden when it comes to discussing and creating stuff. That's the use .