juan wrote:
Janet Cobb via agora-discussion [2023-06-26 13:08]:
"Why should this be in the rules?" is a valid question. Putting
something in the rules means that everybody has to pay attention to it,
lest it change out from under them to actually do something, and that
people (like me) have rule-mandated obligations to track it.
We have contracts for things that only people who are interested want to
pay attention to.
That is not the point. Drafts are for gauging interest. And this draft
clearly is demonstrating a mechanic, not a complete game. Judge it for
what it's worth.
If it turns out nobody likes it, I'll abandon it. The problem, for me,
is the tone.
Imagine showing someone a recipe for a nice and refreshing juice, to
see what they think, and they responding “but this is not a complete
meal. I'm hungry”.
I think that's a misleading analogy. It would be more like offering to
sell an obscure cooking utensil to someone, without any information on
what types of cuisine it's typically used for, whether they like any of
those, or whether it will fit awkwardly in their kitchen cabinet.
Any process that eventually plugs into a well-established game mechanic
is off to a good start, because it's easy to identify why those game
mechanics are well-established: winning = bragging rights, extra votes =
more influence over how the rules are changed, and so on. Even if the
process is initially wonky, it /can/ be fixed via followup proposals
(if the players don't get too fed up with it first). In contrast,
floating game mechanics often seem to follow a pattern of "get adopted,
no one ever gets around to building a use case for them, eventually they
get repealed without having been used for anything".
