Game mechanics design process

Mechanics design philosophy
When I started working on the mechanics for PARPG, I did not have a really clear idea of what they should be. Many cRPG games (it seems to me) just rip their mechanics directly from a Pen-and-Paper (PnP) game, or use highly derivative rules. They may add a little detailey "chrome" to take advantage of the computer, but with a few alterations they could be played as PnP mechanics. This was sort of what I thought I was going to do - pick and choose mechanics from my favorite PnP games and fit them to my vision of the PARPG setting. For the record, I am most "inspired" by the following PnP systems: GURPS, Hero (Champions), Aftermath!, RuneQuest/Call of Cthulhu.

Then a funny thing happened. The seeds of this were planted when I read Design Patterns of Successful RPGs. This is a generalized description of all types of PnP RPGs - including the "simulationist" ones credited above. All (?) Computer RPGs are essentially simulationist - as opposed to more "story telling games. I was basically "reconciling" the mechanics of the above games when I realized that the various details and abstractions made in these games ARE NOT NECESSARILY RELEVANT to a game played on the computer.  For example, some games use d6, some d20, some tables, etc. etc.  The computer doesn't care - it's all (eventually) Op codes.  But real people do care about how many dice they roll, and how much effort it takes to resolve things in real time.  But a computer can do 1000's of chained "die rolls" and table look ups PER SECOND.  The 'human interface use cases' between computer RPGs and PnP games essentially do not overlap at all!

So then I got general. What do players (and their avatars, the PCs... and NPCs) DO in the game. And I started working backwords... and this set of linked pages is where I am so far. The key design feature of these mechanics is that they will be (at first) general - but tunable as to game "difficulty" or "cinematic level". This allows us to define game mechanics and then "balance" them post-facto.