Original Post
What sort of design process do you go through when you make an rpg (not necessarily a crpg, although that is what I am most interested in)? I'm not really talking about the story and content creation, but the actual design of the game mechanics / rule systems. So far I see two general approaches... top-down vs bottom-up. The top-down approach is this: imagine how you want your actors to interact with the world. What sort of activities will they participate in? You go from this set of activities and decide what is necessary to model performance in each... you try to get down to a set of atomic attributes that are sufficiently diverse to account for all the activities in your game. For some, this could just be strength, agility, intelligence. Other games, for example, those having more complicated social interactions, would need other attributes to be a part of the model (personality, for example). The disadvantage of this is that the very core mechanics of your game (attributes, for example) are never set in stone until you exhaustively investigate all possible interactions. The bottom-up approach is to start from a set of attributes and explore what possible features there are. You don't have a particular style of interaction in mind, rather you just have a basic model and through experiment you figure out what you can do with it. This is a process of growth, and you have the benefit of solid feedback all along the way. But what you don't necessarily have is a single unifying theme that would be comparable to what you would get with the top-down approach. On any given project, it is probably in your best interest to use both of these approaches concurrently, and try to converge on some solution. But I think that this sort of game design is fundamentally difficult, because there is this hierarchy of complexity, where at the root you have the very core elements of the game and at the leaves you have all the possible interactions. Change the root and your leaves may all be broken; change the leaves and your root may not be sufficient to match your vision. These are just the opinions of somebody without much experience, so feel free to disagree. And I'm interested in hearing about any aspect of the design process, not just this top/bottom dichotomy that I mentioned.