Quote Originally Posted by Chainsaw Hobbit View Post
Do you get a polished, high-production-value, heavily-play-tested game for free, or an independently developed, low-production-value, less-polished game for money?
You can make a polished, high-production-value, heavily-play-tested, and independently developed game. You just need better organization than you had in these threads and in this project (still following it, albeit from a distance).

You guys started out trying to go in a half-dozen directions, gave a lot of free reign, and didn't even stop to hammer out core system decisions. There was a lot of "we're doing THIS differently!" without a lot of "this is WHY we're doing this differently, this is HOW we're doing this differently, and THIS is how that will change X, Y, and Z." You have broad-reaching goals, and less information on how you would implement such things. The implementation is the more important part.

As such, when I look over your Magic Sword document, I see...basically 4e, with a new hat. It's not a new system yet, because you didn't set out goals to make it a new system. It's probably not even out of WotC's gaming license territory, although I can't make that call, not being a professional and all (plus forum rules and so forth). It seems like 4e homebrew...like a 3.5 fix that just sits on top of the races, and maybe gives the fighter a new set of abilities. It's still 3.5, just with a slightly tweaked racial system. You were aiming for the Pathfinder of 4e, which is a MUCH larger project.

*****

The long and short of it is that you're designing a system. And you skipped squares 1-10 or something like that. It doesn't look like you ever got people together, buckled down, and said "we like X, Y, and Z from the core 4e rules. We need to change A, B, and C. This is the best way to change A, B, and C. Now let's write rules around changes to A, B, and C, and implement those across our design."

Some people put some effort into that, yes...but it wasn't taken as much to heart as it should have been. You guys jumped to far into the meat of the system without having a solid framework to hang it on, and jumped to quickly into adventure supplements, art, marketing, funding, and all that jazz.

Systems are designed from the ground up, and you glossed over the construction stages. It seems you assumed that the core of 4e works...and that may or may not be true. But you need to start system design from the very basics, and you need to hammer them into a fluid, functional system before you can add more on top of that.

I'm not sure you should give up on the project, if you want a 4e-esque system to continue to be supported. You just need to really work on your organization, design, and, yes, the team you choose to make these things work. How many of you actually have experience with system design? How many think they know the rules and balance of 4e enough to dissect it and pull out what works and what doesn't? You need people like that. Crowd-sourcing design is fine...but you have to make sure you can turn it INTO something.

-The Djinn