The goal of a fantasy world is that it contain enough material in it that players can conceive of things to do with an evening's adventuring that doesn't include any time spent stabbing skeletons right in the face. That means that there should be established social orders that players can interact with directly as well as positions of power that characters can achieve in-game. It means that the world should e interactive enough that a character's actions can have predictable effects elsewhere such that players can work in order to generate specific outcomes. In short: the goal of a fantasy world is for it to work as little like Everquest as possible, full stop.
Now, the goal of a game system is to facilitate playing the game. This means that it actually has to achieve a set of specific criteria:
- Diversity & Balance Different characters need to “feel” different one from another and they also need to not feel small in the pants while doing so. Whether a system is class based, skill based, or hybrid there should be a number of separately effective ways to play different kinds of characters and a reason for people to play different kinds of characters.
- Tactical Depth The input of individual players needs to be real and it needs to matter. If a player's character contributes to the tactical minigame just as well with the player himself giving some standing orders and then wandering off to play Smash Bros. in adventure mode, the game has failed at its duty. Characters need to be presented with dynamic choices continuously through the combat portion of the game, even when it is not their turn. The statement “come and get me when it's my turn” kills the action dead just as well as the statement “have my character shoot something” does. Player skill, player engagement needs to make a real difference in the game's outcome during battles.
- World Alteration Players need to have access to proactive world changing effects. That is, every character should have some thing that they can do with every resource that is available in the game (even if that thing is “sell it for a different resource that they can use”). Time, Gold, Power Crystals, whatever it is that player characters receive in order to spend on making the world a better place or filling it with Nubian dancing girls or whatever should be something that is of some obvious and real use to all characters.
- Team Playing Whatever you want to call it, different player characters should bring different abilities to the table. The team should receive a benefit from the interworkings of different characters and their different abilities to make a better whole. D&D 4th edition calls this concept “roles” and despite the incredibly stupid way this was handled something kind of like that needs to be done. But not just for combat, for everything. Players need to be doing different things across the board in order to have synergy between characters.
So what does that mean? It means that there should be lots of different characters available to play who function differently both in and out of combat. It means that the world should be defined for the game, and that the world should have available things to do both to it and for it. It means that different kinds of characters should synergize one with another. The idea of having a “universal” game system that is plug and play for hundreds of different worlds is in some ways appealing, but it's really 1985. It doesn't really work out. Even Champions really only works in a Superhero setting, a setting which is actually extremely well defined whether you like it or not.
Playability
“Pawn from Queen Knight Three to Queen Bishop Four.”
One of the key elements of playing a game is having the ability to actually do so. This means that anything which is too complex or obscure just can't happen at all.
Limiting Die Rolls
Resolving an arrow shot could involve a wind direction and strength chart roll, a targeting test, a dodge roll, a damage test, an armor soak, a wound recovery check, a morale test, and probably some other stuff. But you wouldn't want to play that game because you'd never remember it all anyway. More rolls makes the game more random, it makes the game potentially deeper, and it makes the game definitely more time intensive to learn and play. Personally I think you lose more than you gain after your second roll. That gives you the ability to differentiate between accurate attacks and big attacks, it allows you to engage attacker and defender, and it doesn't require more of you than is barely necessary for that.
Movement Abstraction
Everything in the universe is in a constant state of flux. This makes any positional system in a game inherently problematic. A character's location is nominally fixed at various points in the game, but in the actual story these freeze frames of location never actually occur. Various methods have been attempted to handle this discrepancy, but the big one is that squares can't be used.
Why not? Sure, squares can make for an entertaining tactical minigame and work well enough in their place, but that place is not on Instant Message services, a place where this game will assuredly find itself time and again. This means that a positional system that can be described in the body of an AIM chat message is what has to be used. Which brings us back to the idea of a “distance number” between characters. The idea is that the statement “How far am I from character X?” can be answered with a simple scalar in a text format much more easily than it can as a vector. So long as we just keep track of raw distances between things rather than attempt to keep things in coordinate format, we can keep everything running in text format.
-Username17