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BioWare Forums  Forum Archives Old Dragon Age Forums Dragon Age (Old) Why reinvent the wheel, world-wise? View Post
Dragon Age (Old)
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David Gaider
Lead Writer
Joined: 17 Oct 2001
From: Edmonton, AB
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 Posted: Tuesday, 29 June 2004 01:55AM
Quote: Posted 06/29/04 01:44:13 (GMT) by Gromnir
Is it in fact more time consuming and resource draining to create a new rule system from scratch than it is to try and implement an existing pnp rule into a playable computer game?
Mmmm... you end up focusing your efforts on different things. You end up doing a lot more tweaking and testing, but are also free to change what doesn't work, and you end up spending a LOT less time figuring out how to implement something that needs a human mind to adjudicate but perhaps MORE time coming up with something that works acceptably in the first place but that still fits into our world and does what we want it to with gameplay.
I don't know how much time we save vs. how much time we expected to save, but it's certainly less frustrating work and a lot more fun. 
And with regards to how much the rules system fettered the world creation and so forth... not as much as you might think. Occasionally someone would come to me with some rules issue that didn't fit into the world story and I would go "bleerrgggh" and James would waggle his finger at me for not reading the rules doc closely enough, but then we would haggle it out and come up with a compromise that was sometimes more exciting than I had anticipated. One of the classes was like that. It wasn't in the world and I was told to fit it in... and after hashing it back and forth for a while, suddenly this class became very exciting. It was a rather cool process. The biggest argument we had was how to retain the fun of playing a magic-using class vs. the restrictions placed on magic vis a vis the setting, and when we finally settled on it in the end it actually was a better story mechanism than I had hoped for.
The ability to just go in and make far-reaching changes when they are called for is a power that is not to be underestimated. I am not used to working like that (go figure) and whenever the possibility of doing so comes up it is a bit of a surprise (oh, yeah... I guess we CAN do that...) and has so far worked out positively.
More details to come, I guess.
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Zevran: "Hello my stocky little friend!"
Oghren: "Huh. You got small breasts for a gal."
Zevran: "Ah. This is where we begin the typical dwarven/elven rivalry, is it?"
Oghren: "Nahhh."
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