Home Forums General Game Design Consistent and/or Intuitive modifiers – How important? Reply To: Consistent and/or Intuitive modifiers – How important?

#12722
Avatar photoSpurious
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Consistent modifiers is key for me. If I can accurately guess what the rule for something might be without having to check, that’s a good thing because it means that I’ve managed to understand the designer’s intent and don’t need to stop the game for checking. Inconsistent mechanisms, make that difficult and need more rote memorization and referencing of the book. But I understand that they’re needed in places, I would not want vehicles taking damage to work on the same system as infantry for an example but I’d much rather they referenced the same basic mechanics in things like moral, quality, rolling to shoot and so on.

Though I understand this can vary quite a bit. I mean, take something like Force on Force and most of the time you’re dealing with roll a 4+ on X amount of Y dice type and modifiers typically add a dice to either side of an opposed dice roll. But sometimes it is a subtraction. And other times it does modifier the target number. It works but it’s yet more bits to remember and check and quickly clutters up trying to work through what should be a nice and simple system.