I've got this thing, a relationship to certain roleplaying games, that I call the unkept promise. It's a good thing—fuel for my creative drive—but on the surface of it, it might seem like a bad thing.

It's what the art, text, & marketing promise me but the rules fail to deliver.

There's a lot to dig into here. For instance, rules don't exist in a vacuum. The art, text, marketing, what-have-you, all play a role in what a game delivers.

This is very much true in other mediums. Check out old Atari box art vs. the actual game. That art is 100% part of a that game experience, even if it isn't reflected in the game play.

Same with the rock albums of old.

Also, this is a personal promise that that the game is making to me, and no one involved in the creation of the game need be aware of it (though, very often they are).

And the unkeeping of that promise is also very personal. The game may absolutely deliver on that same promise to someone else, but not fulfill it for me.

And importantly, it has to be a promise of something I want, that I can almost taste, that brings me back to try to wring it out of the game time and again.

There are a lot of games I play that keep their promise and a lot of games that don't. And I can absolutely enjoy both for what they are.

An unkept promise doesn't mean a game is bad, or even not for me. It means something, either accidentally or on purpose, has hooked me.

And I've got to either play that game until it delivers (and it won't) or design a game that will.

But when I try to design a game to fulfill the promise, I keep going back to the rules that didn't in the first place. Which is never directly fruitful, but it's like I have to exorcise my nostalgia for the game that made the original promise.

A few years ago, I was playing a game with an unkept promise and my friends and I sailed so close to keeping that promise!

I could see it! But I also could see that we couldn't get there from here. Not with these rules. And that was thrilling!

Because maybe I could find the rules.

So here are three things that I've found have worked for me in the search for these rules. They might be helpful to you as well. Who knows?

1. Sunder the Promise from the Original Rules!

While I'm making the game to fulfill the promise, I'm often tempted to go back and hack the game that didn't. This is not a bad urge—I tend learn something from it—but I need to be careful about it. I can't mix the two.

Hacking the original game won't fulfill the promise, but it might help me see why it won't. So if I want to hack the original, I set aside the game I'm working on, and go see how I can bend and twist those original rules in isolation.

But if I try to hack the original rules into the new game, I'll be sad.

2. Drink from the Source!

If someone approached me with a dumpster full of cash & said, "Eppy, I want you to make me a game that feels like the original Star Wars trilogy," I'd block Wookieepedia and go watch Seven Samurai, Dam Busters, Casablanca, and Flash Gordon serials.

The game that's inspiring you is absolutely inspired by something else. Usually many something elses. Seek that out and see what that stirs within you.

3. Write the Game that Writes the Sourcebook!

So many games that share unkept promises with me have a glorious array of sourcebooks bursting with juicy, toothsome material that never finds its way to the table.

Gorgeous chunks of evocative fiction & tantalizing plot elided by missed rolls or ignored by rules made busy elsewhere or victims of their own completeness.

If you read these bits and think, "Yeah, I want that in my game," pause and consider if what you really meant was, "Yeah, I want folks to come up with stuff like this in my game." Because those are two different designs.

Anyway, I'm working on just such a game right now and I realized I was keeping these to myself, which helps no one, so I thought I'd share.

P.S. One of the fun parts of designing to fulfill the unkept promise is all that time you get to spend with the sourcebooks making that promise.

(On an odd note, my favorite time to work on unkept promises is while traveling in a light rain. I don't know if this is related to time I spent reading #ttrpg books in the 80s while on the way to or from visiting relatives, or just something about the nature of rain & movement.)

Warning: I'm in the middle of just such a project & I'm going to keep coming back to this thread as things occur to me.

Up-thread, I said "Sunder the Promise from the Original Rules" & then I talk about how hacking the original rules—while often fruitful—generally doesn't keep the promise. So I take pains not to draw my work on the hack into the project I hope will fulfill the promise.

However…

…there's a sort of baby/bathwater situation here. There are things—sometimes from rules, sometimes from the culture of play, sometimes from some murky ground between—in the original that can point right at the promise even as the rest of the game tends to pull it away.

Now my experience here, I will admit, might not be normal.

When I work on a project like this, I often come at it from an angle where if I just pluck a rule from the original game, tweak it a bit, and drop it into my new one, it will die of lonesomeness.

Nothing around it will look like it, will know how to talk to it, or be equipped to nourish it.

I just don't have the heart to do that to a rule, especially not a rule that's been pointing me towards the promise.

But I can listen to that rule, see what it's up to, and see what ways I reflect that in my new design.

And I'm using the term "rule" really loosely here.

In fact, the "rule" I was thinking about this morning that inspired this addendum to the thread is actually a confluence of many rules & hints in the game fiction that all point to and reward specific PC behavior.

(PC as in Player Character, not Politically Correct, in case anyone anywhere says that anymore.)