I almost understand what she's saying

[quarrel]

All of these thought exercises are pretty much just that. Some…have had some practical benefit, but not in an easy to describe way.

I should mention as a food-for-thought item that while two methods for creating a complex free-form [superhero MMORPG] power system were mentioned above — fixed resource knapsacking and complexity theory-based emergent systems — that's not the current methodology I'm most interested in at the moment. I'm currently considering a line of thought that uses cryptography as its launch point, specifically the zero-knowledge proof analog to obscuring simpler foundations of more complex systems, so that simple but provably balanced systems can be used to generate more interesting ones.