Nathan Dowdell (lead rules developer for Modiphius’ Star Trek) made a distinction on rpg.net between necessary and desirable house rules —

• Necessary rules fix problems with the game. He needs to make the game playable and enjoyable for him. Making these is a pain; making these is work.
• Desirable rules take a good game and make it better. They extend the game, adding new options or adding detail in areas he’s interested in. Making these is fun; it’s a leisure activity.

I see an analogy here to the distinction between “fat” and “skinny” games — fat games have extensive library content, while skinny games just have the rules. Fat is easy to cull, easy to add; skin is not. Changing skin is hard work. Change the skin wrong, and all the fat falls out, and stains the carpet.

My previous post has attracted some discussion on /r/rpg, Story Games, and rpg.net. Some commenters have asked for the definitions I am using. So:

Definitions

System

A set of parts that interact so as to give rise to some kind of interesting higher level behaviour, with a configuration that is somewhat stable over time. E.g. a car is a system – it’s made from parts that interact so as to exhibit movement behaviour. It can be stable over many years, if maintained.

A key property of systems is that they self-regulate to some degree — they keep their key properties/state variables within tolerable levels. E.g the engine of a car regulates its temperature, speeds of key moving parts, timing of the pistons. Stability over time usually depends on this self-regulation.

(The easiest models of self-regulation to understand are the thermostat and the steam governor)

Complication — there are no systems:

Continue reading “Some meanings of some terms” →

Status: messy. There is a valuable idea here, but it is awkwardly expressed. The examples are relevant, but mediocre.

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A friend comes up to you, careworn and unkempt. She says “I’m tired of my Pathfinder campaign. The fights take too long, the prep is too arduous, the players just follow my lead, and I’m bored of fantasy as a genre.”

“No problem” you say, “I have a remedy for you”. You pull Apocalypse World from your battered messenger bag. “Play this instead. It will solve your problems.”

“Oh!” she says, smiling for the first time in seven months as she leafs through the pages, “I think this what I’m looking for”.

You ride off on your low-seat BMX, pleased to have given her the new game system she needs.

But you should not be so self-satisfied. You did not give her a new game system; you merely gave her a tool to help her intervene in her group’s social system. She should not be smiling. Her work has only just begun.

When you intervene in a social system, your goal is to change behaviour

Continue reading “A Ruleset is an Intervention Tool” →

Let me weaken my earlier position on OSR design:

The OSR is clear that that (1) is indeed the norm – the assumption is that every OSR GM is hacking a lot. And not just minor details – lots of people are radically changing core classes, skill systems, initiative order (see the comments on Troika’s here in Patrick Stuart’s comparions of British OSR games), …

We can split up my intent with (4) to get:
4a — A good game scene produces dozens or hundreds of small composable game chunks – e.g. classes, abilities, spells, monsters, all ready for GMs to put quickly into their games, even though said games aren’t all using a common rule base.
4b — In this scene, the norm is that changes and new material, especially those, are presented in a form that’s easy for others to make concise new documents with.

The OSR is strong at (4a), partly because RnR tells the GM that they need to be actively maintaining key game properties, live, all the time. Many things (in particular verisimiltude, as in your example, and handling time) are thus the clearly responsibility of the GM. GMs thus know that they can’t rely on their source documents (especially when they’re making a collage from two games and five blogs) to guide play in those respects.

The OSR is weaker at (4b), because printed books and PDFs are still the primary form of game artefacts. There are some nice things to fork-and-edit (e.g. the ACKS SRD in Markdown in a Git repository), but they’re the exception, not the rule (and I don’t know if there is much activity around that ACKS version – there seem to be no active forks).

The “weakest at 4b” has two effects I can see:
* Composing rules to make “my version” is messy – copy-pasting, thinking about formatting.
* When I do compose-and-change, it’s not obvious how to feed changes back in a form that others can use.

I suspect that it also reduces the number of minor tweaks and fixes that are published in an accessible form – things too small for a blog post, that might make it into a forum comment, but most likely will just hang around in someone’s house rules.

The OSR is also weak at (not listed), in that its heavily focussed on OD&D and close derivatives. Although I have enjoyed D&D, and my current game is on a LotFP base, I don’t have very much affection for the D&D rules, nor that many of the prominent play assumptions. I am looking for something different.