http://kallistipress.com/blog/?p=101

Hooray!

Someone has finally said something that has been lurking in the back of my mind for a long, long time.

A game design doesn't have to be focused to be good.

Yeah, it kind of goes against what the Forge has been teaching for years.

That being said, for an indie designer, making a good unfocused design might very well be too much work for one person to do.

...Focus is, by nature, a selective process...

Yeah, but most of this lack of focus is non-reflective. That is, it's unfocused because "all the other big-selling games have strength and dex ratings, combat rounds and weapon speeds, so we need to have that too".

I do overall agree with the essay overall, though. I'm kind of more oriented towards focused games, but I don't snobbily deny folks that go for unfocused games. But I still prefer unfocused games that still do something new and cool. Like FATE, or HeroQuest, etc.

-Andy

I agree with both of you.

I'm definitely keeping this in mind as I work on Violence, Sex, Family, Money, God, Art.

I look forward to that thread, Andy, because I have no idea what you're talking about. :D

Ah. I suspect it's got stealth rules. ;)

Isn't this sort of like what Vincent mention a while ago, about that fruitful "space" in the game flow that's not covered by mechanics? Like morality / faith in Dogs. The mechanics don't get in the way of judging the moral standing of your character - there's a lack of "saving throw vs apostasy" rolls and such - but there's DWM driving in lots of other pieces. So perhaps that's part of a sweet spot between the two?

What Brand said.

Also, the monolith as an alternative to the void amuses me. Mostly because I imagine monkeys freaking out in front of it.

Joshua AC

They will help the game. They will help the game by giving a set of rules for things that do get used, but that aren't all that important.

Vampire, pretty traditionally, fits this bill for groups that don't play it as a hack fest. Those folks do use the backgrounds and humanity rules and even the combat rules and all the other stuff -- it just isn't what is important to them. It acts as a front-loaded mutually agreed upon system for the finiky but unimportant rules stuff that (due to Sim think, I think) need to be there but aren't central to play.

(Although I do find it interesting that Green Ronin and some other companies are starting to do setting material without game stats -- setting books that are just setting, with multiple secondary books containing stats in different systems for said setting. I wonder how that's going to work out for them....)

Joshua ACN, I really think you're missing the point of DWDM.

A DWDM game has a wide variety of mechanics, some of which will be used and some of which won't. DWDM design doesn't try to point you at what matters, it assumes you already know.

Vaxalon wrote:

DWDM game has a wide variety of mechanics, some of which will be used and some of which won't. DWDM design doesn't try to point you at what matters, it assumes you already know.

Well, I'm still not really following this one. I can see this for the case of a "toolkit" approach like Fudge. I think, though, that other broad games like Primetime Adventures, Universalis, and The Pool fall in with this.

In contrast, there are games which give direction. I mean, if I pick up Toon and if I pick up Pendragon, I'll get different games. The same applies to My Life With Master and Dogs in the Vineyard. These games will have different centers, in contrast to DWDM which apparently simply helps you to get at whatever center that you had already decided on.

Joshua BR: What about older games like Toon, Pendragon, Tunnels and Trolls, and so forth?

I'll agree with Vax that Toon is probably an early Design What Matters design, with perhaps less-efficient implimentation.

I'd think Pendragon is at best grasping for Design What Matters, in that it does have some real sense of what kind of game it <em>wants</em> you to play, but I don't know if the system really gets you there. Much like Brand's depiction of the Storyteller games, which sell you on the idea in the setting text and GM advice, but don't offer systemic support and guidance to acheive it -- if you can hit the target on your own, you're good, but if you can't, the game is not going to help you.

TnT I seriously have no idea on. For a long time I thought the title was a funny joke; it's only recently that I found out it's a real game and not just a play on D&D.

Hey Brand:

(Although I do find it interesting that Green Ronin and some other companies are starting to do setting material without game stats -- setting books that are just setting, with multiple secondary books containing stats in different systems for said setting. I wonder how that's going to work out for them....)

Tell me more- What's coming out in this format?

-Andy

JB: Yes, I read it first, but my ideas on same didn't realy crystalize until I saw the comment thread here.


(which was why I commented here rather than there...aside from just preferring forums to stand alone blogs for threads)

I'm mostly interested in the theory because it doesn't tie me down to designing a System That Matters, which I find extraordinarily limiting.

It doesn't penalize me for asking the question, "Why am I including X design element?"

I can design my game, and identify the parts that are there to
enhance the gaming aspect
smooth over nonessentials that can't really be "gamed" with

The only example I can think of right now are the combat rules and the alignment rules for ADnD. ADnD was made for combat. That's the whole point. Armor, hit points, weapon speeds, blah blah. You're supposed to spend time fighting, and doing so with some intricacy.

There's role playing too, but the only thing to support that is alignments -- a general guideline for your characters morality and temperament. There's no "game" around alignments. They're just a few on/off switches that gloss over an incredible amount of complexity and subjective interpretation.

There's probably a lot of fuzzy thinking in this post. I apologize. I got a lot going on here, but I wanted to toss in my two bits.

Imagine you want to make people notice your front yard as they're driving by.

You have two ways to do it.

You can hire a landscaper to build a work of art in your yard, or you can hire a gang of ruffians to destroy everyone else's. Either way... the focus is on your yard.

Here is another one, the other way around:

You want people to drive safely, in the middle of the roadway, right?

So, you could paint a sign on the pavement, every few miles, saying "Drive safely in the middle of the road, like so".

Or, you could post little signs every few miles, over the road and on the edges, that say things like "Don't drive faster than this", "Don't drive in this lane, not even a little", "Don't drive on the shoulder", "Don't turn around in the roadway", and so on...

I think one of the reasons that DWM is considered a better design philosophy than DWDM is that it's so much easier.

Okay, "Rumble" just said the first thing that really clicked for me in this whole discussion:

"ADnD was made for combat. That's the whole point. Armor, hit points, weapon speeds, blah blah....There's no "game" around alignments. They're just a few on/off switches that gloss over an incredible amount of complexity and subjective interpretation."

So perhaps:

D&D Combat is "there are lots of rules about this, because you're going to do it a lot."
D&D Alignments are "we don't want you to waste time agonizing over moral dilemmas or killing monsters and taking their stuff is really the right thing to do, but this isn't a game about being crazed homicidal maniacs, either, you're supposed to feel like heroes; so we're going to give you an easy set of 'good guy' vs. 'bad guy' markers so you can get on with the killin'."

As opposed to <Dogs in the Vineyard>, where the tactical details of how you win the combat most effectively are so unimportant they're basically "make up whatever," but the Escalation and Fallout rules point you directly to what level of harm you are prepared to risk and inflict.

Right. That's pretty much the DWM design philosophy in a nutshell.

Dungeons and Dragons will cast a long shadow on roleplaying for many years to come.

I retain my skepticism until the time that I play one such game that, when the rules are followed, works.

John,

I think it most often is bad design as well. However, it can also be seen as designing to the skill sets "most" RPGers have. Most D&D influenced gamers I've seen are actually pretty good at doing lots of their story-generation stuff themselves, even though they do it at an unacknowledged level. (That level brings them lots of problems when they play certain Nar games with strong story control elements, because they can't "just do it" the way they always have.)

If those folks want games that let them use their own systems to handle those things, then desigining games that leave free space for those systems is a good thing.

The reason I think it normally becomes "bad design" is because most designers of this type of game don't know that they're doing that, or at best don't know exactly why or how they're doing it. They have vauge ideas about "the system getting out of the way" but are often unclear about what the system is, what it should do, and why it should get out of the way. More understanding of group dynamics and the way people use game material can probably help with that.

Of course, one could argue that we've already seen that starting. Josh and Ben have argued, for example, that PTA is DWDM -- and Josh has said the Pool and (possibly) HeroQuest are as well. In those games there is not a lot in the game that drives you towards anything specific. They'll all push you towards conflicts, and all of them give you a method of structuring the game via those conflicts and have systems that act (in different ways) as conflict structuring and resolution mechanics. So for those games what "matters" is "having a way to structure the game and resolve conflicts in a way that allows for all conflicts to be given equal weight and game focus." All of those games are designe for that, very strongly. However, because they aren't designed for one single thing (like judgement in Dogs, trust in Moutain Witch) they don't fit into the narrow-band definition of DWM.

Which leads me to speculate we have different levels of "what matters" going on. Dogs is a very DWM game because it pushes the whole thing at you in one kit. You will be a Dog. You will go into towns full of sin. You will judge the sin. Everything in the game is setup to do that, to push that, to yank and pull and push and make you ask the questions the game has on it's back cover text. Very, very specific and very designed to do what matters. Heroquest, otoh, just has you set up to be fantastic heroes in a world that is dying/changing between ages. What part of the world, what the setup of your game, what stakes you'll be fighting for, and all that is all up to your group. You decided that by what abilities you take and what contests you push. But (big but) the games mechanics are set up very strongly to push for a structured conflict in wich any answer can be a valid way of dealing with the world, and in which your actions must change the world.

So is it really a design for what doesn't matter? Heroquest will push your play, it will force things to move around its resolution system. Ditto the Pool. OTOH, Blue Rose (for example) will not have a similar effect upon play. Blue Rose has romantic fantasy at its heart, but very few rules that push for romantic fantasy in structure or color. Blue Rose doesn't structure play the way Heroquest, the Pool, and PTA do. It just sits there waiting for you to use it to run combat, determine sorcery power levels, and maybe do a Diplomacy roll or three -- while you structure the narrative, figure out the player's conflicts without flags, and use your players not-in-the-book system to make it work or not.

So, I think we've got to figure out how "focused" and "not focused" fit into "what matters" and "what doesn't matter" -- becuase it isn't a one to one correlation and I think the cross over is screwing up our stance.

John

I strongly object to classifying DWDM as bad design.

Over the Edge is completely given over to DWDM.

Nothing matters in OtE except for the solitary truth of your own character, as you, the player, conceived and wrote it.* There are no mechanics to guide how important your important person is, how cagey you (have to) play your secret, or even a consistent way to describe or compare two different characters with traits that manifest in very similar ways.

And for all that, I think you'll be hard pressed to find many people whose first reaction towards OtE is "bad game design."

*Notwithstanding GM approval, of course.

I'm taking advantage of Story Games' openness to pointless jokey posts to just say how tickled I am by the phrase "get your Goldmoon on." If you're interested, Brand, I had lots to say about the impact of Dragonlance on AD&D in this Forge thread from way back in 'ought-three.

Rob,

Cool post. It pretty much fits with my memories of the time, and of Dragonlance.

John Kim,

I don't like GURPS. I have mixed feelings about Blue Rose. Blue Rose I think is actually a well designed DWDM game, I just happen to not like it as much because these days I want games that DWM, or at least design to give game structure.

However, I have lots of friends that LOVE Blue Rose and LOVE GURPS, and so I'm trying to talk from their experiences and the things they've told me about why they like those systems. I have a hard time with games that are both not focused and not designed to what matters (so GURPS is in my "right out" list) -- and so my pull for the one side is pulling for a team I'm not on, I guess.

OTOH, I'm still not real sure about Heroquest, the Pool, OTE, or PTA being "DWDM" -- they all feel DWM to me. Very much so. Just with the M on the structure of system rather than the details of setting and color.

EDIT: Probably part of my problem with the discussion is that it's drifted a lot from my initial thoughts on the matter. A few months ago on RPG.net (and a month or so ago here) I talked about games that give you a system that structures your play for a particular result vs. games that do not because they assume that you will structure your own play with your non-mechanical lumpley-system elements. Under that definition the Pool, for example, is clearly sturctured (it tells you how to play in a real way) while Blue Rose isn't. Josh, however, has taken that a different direction and I'm not always sure we're on the same page anymore.

Design What Doesn't Matter doesn't work by you reading the book and following the rules in the book and no others. Design What Doesn't Matter works by you sitting down with your friends and using your social contract level rules for determining What Matters and letting the published material handle What Doesn't Matter.

Why the crap are you writing these rules? Why aren't you just writing evocative setting?

If it doesn't matter if you can use the copy machine, why are you writing rules for it?

How do you decide what to write rules for?

My skepticism is bolstered by every post on this thread.

No one's answered this question: why am I bothering to roll dice for something I don't care about?

Your social contract rules, if written down, would make a decent game text. So, assuming that they're good rules, you can play a good game with them. I agree.As a designer, you're leaving out the good part there, since if you wrote down good social contract rules, you'd have a good rule text. But that's not the purpose of this here Gedankenexperiment

So you're saying to use your socially agreed system of rules — whatever the written text says — to do things that don't matter, that don't have consequence to your perspective, your story, right?

So why do you have those rules at all?

Or are you saying to have lots of different sets of rules that you can choose from for a given setting? Cuz I can totally get behind that.

But the idea of bothering with rules for things that I explicitly don't care about, so that I can use my relationships with my friends for the stuff I do? No.

Several people here are saying that this "philosophy" of design is hard to instantiate.

Rise to that challenge. Put your money where your mouth is. Show that this isn't a straw man for "System Doesn't Matter" by writing a system that makes this work. If you can't trust my group to have a functional social contract, you can't trust any. So let's see this down on the table.

Design What Doesn't Matter doesn't work by you reading the book and following the rules in the book and no others.

That's not an excuse. Give me rules I would want to use for the game with a setting compelling enough to care about it and I'll play!

Because they're in a sim head space where they want things to feel real. Vermisilitude is important to lots of folks, and they go about getting it by a sort of dice-regulated naturalism that seems odd and akward to you and me -- but that seems fully natural to them.

This is a valid goal for any RPG rule system I got no beef with it. I think Dogs is actually really good at it. We're talking about techniques here, though, not goals. We're talking about writing down the processes that are effective so that others can use them.

Representation of the environment is a concern I have with a lot of rule systems. I totally follow that some rules should help you approach consensus about the nature of your fictional environment.

(This has nothing to do with sim.)

As for your other examples, "inhabiting a character" is really "inhabiting a character you're interested in." There's something you like about that guy that makes you want to be him in a story. That's confronting theme.

Hangin' out with your friends, yeah, that's pure social contract stuff. I understand what you're talking about there. But I think that, if social contract rules were the way to make meaningful, controversial stuff happen, Robert wouldn't have written his Rules.

Part of my objection to this is that it's not saying anything new. It's the same argument that so many make all the time: The Rules Should Get Out Of The Way. It's an argument against innovation by calling the non-design that's so common in our medium "Design What Doesn't Matter".

You will never find that game because you do not play that way.

So... this game can't be designed, bought, or played by me? You can understand my skepticism.

I bet I've played as many RPGs as you, man. A lot of homebrews, FUDGE, GURPS, Warhammer, Cyberpunk, and other bits. We used our social contracts to make stuff work in all those games. I know how it works. I've GMed for and played with people I loved and trusted, and with those I didn't. I found them to be uniformly weaker experiences than rules that drive conflict.

Can other people like other techniques? Sure! But you're proposing that this is a design decision to not give people rules for working stuff out. Players can ignore rules all they like. That's their prerogative, with whatever results they come up with. But we're talking about design here. There's a difference between minimalism and underdesign, and I think you're confusing one with the other.

Frek.

Ah. The last few posts, and particularly John's, have helped me identify my position.

I'm puzzled at why people are equating DWDM with bad design.

RPGs constrained to DWM restrict my area/scope of play. I might as well be playing a board game. I like board games, so this isn't a bad thing, in and of itself. But most often I can't play a purely DWM game at all unless I understand the rules, and if I don't understand the rules well, I may in fact be at a disadvantage, manifested as incompetence or awkwardness. Rules are required, and facilitate a specifiy method of play.

On the other hand, RPGs constrained to DWDM leave me with the full range of possibilities. If I just want to sit down and play, I can. The other players will pick up the slack, and facilitate my play. I can focus on what really matters to me, and probably even other's enjoyment of the game. The mechanics exist precisely to handle non-essentials that must somehow be resolved. Rules are a necessary evil here.

If everyone is doing what they care about, and everyone is having a good time, does it really matter whether or not they have to use a rule to effect what they care about?

How about answering this question:

Is there a style of play that can only be achieved by playing a DWDM game?

There seems to be a rule that Joshuas cannot agree in this thread, since I disagree with both JBR and JN.

Unfortuantely, I don't have that much time/energy to address this, but I'll try.

First, I'm left after the later discussion not knowing what DWDM is supposed to be.

My first comments were on the idea of it being a concept of designing systems for resolving things that needed to be dealt with, but which were not the expected focus of the game.

However, later venn diagrams seem to point more to "present a basic design, then fall back on the social contract or systems people come up with in play to handle the rest of play".

Are these the same things?

That said...

JBR: I have a strong preference for what you refer to as DWDM games; in general, light task resolution systems in the confines of a social game with a strong GM working within a strong social contract works for me, while most of our experiments with Forge style nar games were noble failures (tried: Polaris (sort of), Capes, PTA, Sorceror (Success! But Sorceror is closer to OTE than most, and we were fighting the system all the way)). By contrast, most of our other games are built around the OTE resolution system, and work well, with few if any growing pains.

But I'm not convinced that you're adequately expressed your point -- nor that DWDM is quite the right description thereof. I'm half convinced that this is because while DWM is a good description, DWDM isn't. Maybe it should be DDWM instead?

Let's take OTE vs D&D. D&D has never really worked for us. We're currently playing in a too-large D&D game which is fun-ish, but it doesn't really fulfil my need to roleplay (nor Lisa's) any more than a DWM game does. To a large degree, this is because D&D is very good at driving play to what it does well, providing reward systems that support it, and rules systems that focus play around it. In many ways, D&D is the big daddy of DWM games, and I think the literature supports this (see how Ron talks about D&D regarding reward systems).

OTE, on the other hand, has more or less always worked for us, and brilliantly. We dropped the extra rules that were added to make it publishable (hit points, psi pools, etc) early, but the system does what it's designed for very well: it handles the things we don't want to without interfering with anything else.

Now, this said, naturally, our play in OTE (keeping in mind that we've used the system for fantasy, for James H. Schmitz style SF, for Cthulhupunk, and even to play OTE) is very different than our play in PTA, or even Sorceror. Sometimes we end up with characters resolving inner conflicts and making decisions that shake the fate of the world. Sometimes we end up playing out a minor mystery or having a "session" which consists of characters planning out a wedding. Sometimes things stall, or act wierdly -- we had a mystery take three times as long as it probably should have because we couldn't figure out where things should go, and I occasionally end driting away for a while as two players spend an hour or two talking about things that don't interest me. But then we talk about things and put them back on course, and, well, it's still all good.

One point that seems to show up here is that when we sit down to play, we don't know what will matter. And you know what? That's pretty cool. I know people talk about how DWM design can push people into places they wouldn't normally go (and it can), but it can also keep people in one place rather than letting them move about more freely. This is why I'm beginning to think that DDWM is much better than DWDM is -- it's not that you're designing what doesn't matter so much that you're designing things that are expected to want to be handled by the non-social system, and that rather than using this as a method of determining what matters in the game, you're avoiding predetermining same. It might be that what matters is who your Most Important Person (a required OTE character determination, if one with no mechanical result) is. Or it might not...but it's play that will determine what matters, rather than the book-system.

Another is that we don't rely on the rules to avoid having issues, but we acknowledge that like any other relationship, there will be issues, and that like any other relationship, we'll work the issues out socially...and that in general, such issues are managable.

A third is this seems to tie in some ways into what I discuss in http://community.livejournal.com/labcats/7670.html ("RPGs and Martial Arts") -- that like a decent MA system, a properly designed game (for me, anyway) should be able to be internalized (even if that's "eventually internalized"), so that you can have the system be a matter of trained behaviors which don't hit the concious interface while they're being used. You can't properly fight while you're paying attention to the rules of the contest, or planning out your next three actions, or deciding on what line your attack will be in. Instead, all of these things have to be so well trained that they're internalized -- so you can get on with the business of fighting. Are RPGs any different? If so, why?

(Note that there are a couple of quick questions to be answered here: Are RPGs any different from conversations (and why)? Are RPGs any different from martial arts (and why)?)

Um. For miscelania:

Yeah, I was saying that Pendragon doesn't have gun rules because guns are not expected to appear in the game. It doesn't need rules for this because the rule -- implied or stated -- is that "there are no guns". This is different from D&D3 not having persuasion rules (and IIRC, not letting Bluff and Diplomacy) for people trying to persuade PCs -- because it's not that the rule is "people will never try to persuade PCs" but that "A PC will never be pursuaded unless the player decides the PC is persuaded."

Leaving DDWM aside for that moment, I'd like to talk about DWDM, or what I pulled out of that concept -- the idea of designing with negative space. This is, I think, a different concept than DDWM (if one that isn't entirely unrelated), but I'm not entirely sure how it works or how to address it.

Yes -- I expanded it above (I understand reluctance to read a long post). Another useful back formation is "Don't Determine What Matters". The point being that you're not designing stuff that doesn't matter; you're designing -some- stuff that matters...but not attempting to determine What Matters via the design process.

Is there a style of play that can only be achieved by playing a DWDM game?

That's a sort of unfair question (but only sort of), and I can only answer it by twisting the question slightly. It's sort of unfair because it assumes the "find target, hit target" design philosophy of DWM and then asks if DWDM can do the same, which it pretty explicitly doesn't do.

There isn't "a" style of play out there that only DWDM can do, but there are groups of players out there for whom DWDM products fit their needs. These are groups that already know what they want out of the game experience -- they know how their characters interact, how their stories progress, how many combat scenes to balance against the talking scenes. What they need from a published book is rules for how superpowers work, or how swordfights work, or an engaging setting/situation to put their characters in. Once they have this stuff, they can then incorporate it into their normal, habitual, and practiced means of play. What they are looking for in a product is not instructions, but support; they don't want Adobe Photoshop (they already have a graphics program), they want a package of stock photos or a couple plug-ins.

Does that make any sense whatsoever? It's Monday.

Assuming you're not using the Forge version of "functional", yes, exactly.

JoshuaACN: Should I be offended, confused, or indifferent? I've opted for forthcoming. :)

You wrote: "Rumble, what focused-design games have you played? Or is this a hypothetical concern? This is a concern for designers, not players."

1) I've got a few games under my belt that I'd call focused design. Whether anyone agrees that they are such is another question: octaNe (player/GM), Donjon (GM), Otherkind (GM), Dead of Night (GM), Jenga-Dread (player). There's probably a few more, but those are the ones that pop into my head at the moment. I wish it were more, but I haven't had a lot of opportunity to RP lately, and I'm in the process of writing my second game, so I'm actually actively avoiding playing/reading other RPGs.

Dead of Night is my first published game (from Steampower Publishing). It's a traditional game with enough twists that players can easily segue into non-traditional gaming without realizing it.

2) I think the concern you're referring to is my comment on everyone doing what they care about, but I wasn't sure. Assuming that was what you were referring to, it is indeed a genuine concern, not a hypothetical one.

3) Lastly, what is the "this" in your third sentence? You lost me there. Are you referring to the same concern, or the overarching topic of DWM vs. DWDM (plus DDWM, now)?

Either way, I think I can safely answer that the *process* of design is a designer issue only if you use that particular process, but design itself is always a player issue because the players must deal with the results/consequences of the design process. To clarify: there's more than one design process. For a particular designer, only the design process is only significant if that is the design process you use. But regardless of your design process, you must always keep your players in mind. I suppose you could design for just yourself, but there's very little point.

Now, I don't know if I'm taking DWDM where JoshuaBR intended it to go, but I don't think DDWM is the same thing as DWDM.

When I think Design with a capital D, I think rules, not setting/fluff.

It's VERY easy to design rules that matter. The hard part is your epiphany in the design process. You're defining your workspace and drawing the bounding box, trapping your audience in the game you've designed. (How's that for loaded language? 8-D)

It's pretty easy to not design rules that matter. The hard part is relinquishing control over that aspect of "your" game, and turning that control over to your audience. You spec the game to your audience, but they get to draw the bounding box. \

It's pretty easy to design setting that doesn't matter. Unless you completely intertwine the system with the setting so that the system cannot be used without the setting, and the setting simply won't fully function without the sum of its parts, players can drop setting bits as they see fit, exactly because they don't matter. Computer games fall firmly into this category of design -- especially those damnable Zork-type games, where I'm Punching Wall and it can't find Wall even though Wall is in the description text. Those old Central Casting books are a great example of this as well.

I'm thinking that it's pretty hard to design rules that really don't matter. In essence, you mustn't think of the white horse. Once you design a rule, players tend to focus on it -- after all, you provided the rule. Once they focus on it, there's the danger that they will (want to) make it matter. Perhaps that means that Design that Doesn't Matter is purely in the eye of the beholder, but I'm not sure I believe that.
DWDM requires a different sort of epihany than DWM. Instead of, "Wow, this rule perfectly accomplishes what I want to do," you receive a revelation of "Wow, this is perfectly useless, but it's so very cool! I'll enjoy it when I can." Kinda like a lava lamp. :) With DWDM, you spec the game to your audience, and then when they need to resolve something that is not the focus of the game, they don't have to spend time figuring out how.

I apologize for this example coming out of left field, but it's late, and this is the best I can do:
Cell phone construction and marketing is purely a matter of poor DWDM. The only things that really matter about a cell phone are whether it will dial numbers, maintain a solid connection, and support phone-related contact data. It's a phone, after all. But they pile on feature after irrelevant feature until the basic functions of a phone takes a back seat to form factor, cameras, mp3 players, and so on. On my last attempt to upgrade phones, I ended up with a model which had no option to turn off the camera! The damn thing kept taking pictures of the inside of my pocket.

Good DWDM would give me a great basic phone that I would simply take for granted. At my leisure then, I'd be able to enjoy the extras as the need/opportunity arose.

I'm still thinking about my game collection to see if I have a better example of DWDM than the alignments from ADnD and the OtE system.

Doesn't that Cell Phone analogy just point out the ways that DWM is superior, in the general, tabula rasa, case?

If you want a good Cell Phone, for people who actually want a Cell Phone, that is what you design - a portable communications device and its user interface.
The idea is that the team that pours all of its energy into making a better phone will make a better phone than the (equally capable) team that splits its energy between the phone and a camera.

But people who actually want a portable camera? They'll get the second phone, anyway...

It sure seems to me that any and all DWDM (or DDWM) is *really* "only" game supplement material - just that in most cases the game it is attempting to supplement is a unique individual creation used by a single little group of people.

Of course, you can expect that most of these "unique games" that players have constructed for themselves over the years do indeed fall into discernable categories that one can then focus a DWDM product on.

So, yes, DWDM is attempting to avoid the constraints that DWM cherishes, but the *why* of that comes about because DWDM is aimed *only* at people who already know how to play, who already have a way to play.

Does that help clarify things that have been said any?

GURPS is very much toolkit design. The books are full of optional rules, things that can be bolted on or stripped off of what is, at its core, a very light system. GURPS Lite is what, eight pages? It just happens to give you a fair bit of instruction as to when and how to bolt the pieces together, more than any other game of its type. Perhaps the fact that it does the toolkit SO well, distinguishes it significantly from other toolkit games that simply can't measure up, that it is hard to lump together with them.

Is Champions/Hero System a toolkit game? I'd say that it shares a lot in common with GURPS.