For those who don't know me
Around here, that seems... unlikely.
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This is hard to phrase as a question (and we partially covered this when we talked at Salute) but I'll just put it out there and you might be able to find some way to respond to it.
Two of the rules that detractors of the game describe as "bad" or "unnecessarily complicated" are the randomness of the action mechanic and the level of detail in the injury system. Personally though, I find both to be some of the best mechanics in the game.
To me, the action mechanic is broadly similar to what you get in many RPGs. Most RPGs tend to slice things up so a turn is how long it takes a character to do about two "things" - two moves, a move and an attack, that kind of thing. It means characters can't do too much before anyone can respond. And Inquisitor's action mechanic does much the same - an average Speed 4 character will do about two actions per turn.
However, the problem with a completely predictable two actions per turn mechanic is that it means that a player
knows a character can make it across the street before the sniper gets to shoot again, or he
knows he definitely can't draw his pistol and shoot the two men in front of him before they react. That leads players and characters to act unlike people would in real life. The randomness Inquisitor adds in its action mechanic means that players can't make those unrealistic predictions about how much their characters can do with their turns. Sometimes they will be punished for making assumptions, sometimes they will be rewarded for taking risks. To me, that's far more interesting.
I also assume that part of the reason this choice was made was because of the Player-vs-Player (or PvP) nature of the game. Unlike the Player-vs-Environment (or PvE for short) of a traditional roleplaying game, where a team of players takes on a GM antagonist, the system is not about "beating the game"
That same PvP approach presumably drove the injury mechanics. In a PvE RPG, you want the players to be able to weather a few hits in a fight and don't want to be doing a load of bookkeeping for each individual goblin - hence, a basic hit point mechanic is generally the go-to choice (with few, if any, penalties before the character runs out of HP and passes out).
In PvP play though, the players want to feel like their hits are doing something. In something like Warhammer 40,000, this feedback comes from killing off squad members, reducing the enemy's fighting capacity, even if the unit as a whole is still active. But with players generally having four or fewer characters in an Inquisitor game, eliminating characters wholesale is clearly not fun or fair for the opposing player.
For me, the level of detail in the injury mechanics - allowing characters to be penalised but not out - seems to be key to making Inquisitor viable as a game, and (presumably) deliberate.
Sorry about phrasing that as a wall of my assumptions about what you were thinking, but I spent ages trying to phrase it as a question and just had to give up.
I'd be interested to hear if that reasoning is broadly correct and (if you can remember) what process lead you to making those choices - were they just obvious choices, or did these mechanics only show up through playtesting and refinement?
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This is possibly one you can't answer for tactful reasons, but was there any area in which you felt your creative control of the game was overridden? Aspects that someone else (be it another member of the studio, a GW executive, etc) insisted were included?
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What are your thoughts on how the game's grown out of what was originally envisioned, especially after the decline of Fanatic and the Specialist Games? (Although that's not a question I thought of, that's something the TheNephew suggested).
