Design by Exception (or not)
Over a decade ago I posted about "exceoton based design" ( here and here ). Quick tl:dr... I didn' like it the and I still don't like it. I've thought about it plenty of times in the time since then, but the big games in the hobby (Dungeons and Dragons, and Pathfinder) still base themselves on it. Oe of the key differences between minimaliust game designs and maximalist game designs seems to be the idea of wther a general game rule can be applied to everything, or whether you need specific rules to cover specific situations. There's definitely a continuum between the extremes... do you write a one page system like " Honey Heist " or " Lasers and Feelings ", where a single mechanism of play defines all actions regardless of how well those actions might fit the mechanisms?...do you write a sequence of books each with a few hundred pages in them (There's a few of these, and entre business models based on the " supplement treadmill ...