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It's 7:35 PM on a Wednesday (here) so I guess it's time for another game design thread!
Time to talk about designing rules vs. designing for your game culture for RPGs.
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Time to talk about designing rules vs. designing for your game culture for RPGs.
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Rules are, of course, an important part of design - they set many of the boundaries and expectations of your game. Folks read the rules and they now know what you are supposed to do, what you aren't allowed to do, and how you pursue your victories (and failures!).
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But different players come to games with different approaches. Some like the computational aspects of dealing with many interlocking rules. Others prefer the social time with friends aspect, or the chance to portray a character that is someone else, or mystery, or scares.
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The kicker is, there's always someone who wants the game to be more complicated. Feedback from this side of the aisle usually comes in the forms "This rule is broken because I can use it to..." or "How would I do this thing that the rules don't cover..."
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This is kind of a trick. It's a presupposition - it carries the assumption that the problem lies in the rules. Sometimes it does: A rule that is supposed to do one thing, but does something else, is a problem, and it needs to be fixed. (See also "perverse incentives.")
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But sometimes the problem isn't the rules. The problem might be that the game is supposed to be about X but people are trying to extend the game to do Y - "why is there no rule about Y?" Well, because that's not what the game is supposed to be about.
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The problem might be that someone is not participating in the game in good faith. "I can use rule X to do this horrible thing that wrecks the game for everyone." Well, then maybe don't do that?
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Games aren't perfect simulations of reality - they can't be, because we'd be so bogged down in minutiae that we would not be able to play them. So most rules are really heuristics - guides that are supposed to work for you MOST of the time.
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Thing is, that means you have to participate with people who are also playing the game in good faith - recognizing that the heuristic is a best guess, an estimate to give you something that will handle most of your cases.
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Your other players are supposed to be good sports, not trying to find that one tiny special exception that allows them to make the entire game model collapse so that they can wreck it for their personal amusement at the expense of everyone else.
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Veterans of the old Vampire live-action game scene will recall a time in the '90s when Vampire games had scores of people - sometimes hundreds - but now many local venues struggle to get two dozen folks to come to a game. This was a culture shift.
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Vampire shifted markedly over decades from being a game space where people could come because they liked dark Gothic stories, or liked dressing up, or liked pretending to be vampires, or liked just hanging out with their friends after dark...
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... to a game space where if you did not master all of the rules of the game, your character was DEAD, likely at the hands of another player. And you didn't get to play.
And for people who weren't there for that, this was no fun. So they left.
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And for people who weren't there for that, this was no fun. So they left.
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Shadowrun went through a similar shift: It's always been a complex game. After its change of ownership to Catalyst, the 4th edition tried to streamline things a bit, but subsequent editions have continued to add complexities.
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Out of a big bucket of players, some fraction says "This should have more detailed, more complex rules." Each time rules are added, people who aren't part of that group drop away, meaning that the voices of those who remain behind become that much louder.
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Eventually your entire player base is super-heavyweight rules people, looking for loopholes and clarifications and extreme detail. This is an easy road to take as a designer: You can always sell a new book of rules.
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D&D has tried to avert this in 5th edition by making its ruleset as simple as possible, and by re-using existing rules structures whenever they can. But it also sometimes falls into the trap of saying "You can just do whatever you want"...
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... and that's an unsatisfying answer if you just paid $60 for a book of ostensibly new rules that were supposed to be tested and analyzed by professionals.
So it's just as important to manage the culture of the game that you create. Your choice of rules...
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So it's just as important to manage the culture of the game that you create. Your choice of rules...
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... go hand-in-hand with your explanation for why they exist, what your game is about, and what people should be doing with it. Your explanations about whether your game is competitive or cooperative matter, and you should up up front with them.
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Alongside this, a rule or system can be good, but not right for your game. A game isn't always made better just because of the addition of a rule. Often it's made better by encouraging dialog between participants about what they really want.
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So that's worth thinking about in your games - what purpose does this rule serve? How can I get that across to the players? And how can I encourage the players to use those rules for an entertaining, engaging, shared experience?
~Fin~
~Fin~
