Missing the point. Yes, you can have some abilities that interact with each other. That's not the problem. The problem is all the abilities that have to interact, but you're not sure how.RandomCasualty2 wrote:EBD interaction is done through tags, like M:tG works. And it still allows interaction, so long as your tagging system is good enough.Manxome wrote:
EBD rules just end up simpler because you never bother to define how abilities X and Y interact, and you don't notice that omission on a casual reading. Centralized design can choose to ignore those sorts of interactions and be just as simple, it's just that the flaw is now easier to discover.
You can have stuff like "an attack with the weapon keyword automatically misses".
You end up with "double damage" and "+2 damage" and you're not sure whether you deal 2x+2 or 2(x+2) or whether you only get to apply one (and if so, whether you choose the min, the max, or by some other method).
Or you end up with "convert slashing damage to fire" and "convert slashing damage to ice" and you're not sure whether to apply attacker's choice, defender's choice, neither, half of each, full damage of both, a single damage packet flagged as both "fire" and "ice," etc.
Or you get "convert slashing damage to fire" and "convert fire damage to ice" and you don't have the slightest idea whether you can take the transitive closure or not.
Or player A has "nullify all opponent's red powers (blue)" and player B has "nullify one of opponent's blue powers (red)" and you don't know which gets priority.
With a centralized design, it's much easier to write these powers in such a way that you can use both of them in the same fight and still know how it's all supposed to work out, and if it's still written ambiguously, it's easier to see the ambiguity.
And all of this was a secondary point to my primary argument, which was that you can still have centralized design and quick reference without bloat by copying only the relevant details of the general rule into the specific monster's description. If just the relevant portions are still longer than they would be if you had written an EBD rule, then that means that the generalized rule is actually more powerful and you would lose actual game functionality by going to EBD, so you're not actually looking at equivalent cases.
Therefore, quick reference is not an advantage of EBD, it's an advantage of writing your rulebook to use duplication isntead of symbolic links. You have the option to do that every bit as well with centralized design as with EBD design, but unlike with EBD, you also have the option not to.
Even if I was wrong about everything else in my post, that point still stands, and nothing you have said would change that. The rest of it was just explaining why someone would plausibly make the mistake of looking at non-equivalent cases.
