Design Philosophy Issues

From: <deaconblue3_at_...>
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 13:02:57 -0500

One and all,
        As the discussion of the Chaos lists has progressed, I think
we're not all on the same page in terms of design philosophy. Is the
purpose here to generate a set of rules based solely on the GW figures,
or to design rules that reflect the setting? Personally, I believe in
letting the fluff determine some aspects of the rules (mainly army
lists). This way we keep the rules firmly grounded in the setting, and
provides natural breaks on some of the more outlandish ideas and lists.
By simply allowing whatever, we move well outside of the stated setting,
and pull a GW, where we end up contradicting ourselves just to get that
"really cool super awesome army list" in there. It falls into the same
trap GW does, where the army list du jour is the tops, and the next one
has to top that. This is a mistake IMO.
        As I missed most of the IG/SM discussion, I'm sure I would have
said this earlier, but that's that, and I'm here now. We must all be on
the same page in terms of the purpose of doing all this. NetEpic has
evolved since it was first formed. The original intent was to
"correct/fix" issues with SM2/TL and make it work. We have moved well
beyond that now. And that is all fine and good, we just need to all be
working towards the same goal, on a similar conceptual basis, otherwise
this won't work.
        Based on some of the discussions so far, I do see more of a need
for the historical (and in some cases hysterical) lists. You want to
field 4000 pts of World Eaters? Fine, it's a Heresy era battle and
here's your list to choose from. Trying to include every possibility
into one set of rules and one army book is too much, and confuses things
too greatly. The core books should reflect the current situation in the
41st millennium, and nothing else. Leave the rest to separate books and
lists. We're trying to be too accommodating and too generalized in the
work so far. We have lost much of the focus and concepts that made this
such a great project initially.
        I'm not saying that many of the ideas for army lists are bad, or
wrong. Far from it. I just think that we need to focus more closely on
the "here and now" of the 41st millennium, rather than try to integrate
everything into one set of rules. IMO we need to break some things down
more, and push some aspects of the lists into different books, so as not
to bog down, clutter the lists, or open the doors to abuse. If we do
this, everyone should be accommodated fairly, and "accurately."

Josh R
"No matter where you go, there you are." B.Bonzai
Received on Wed Nov 20 2002 - 18:02:57 UTC