This sounds like a personal hell to me.
I mean, it might work if your group is all kind of on the same wavelength to begin with. But if that’s the case, you could also easily start with a system you like and go from there instead of reinventing all the wheels.
A lot of people have only really played D&D and its close relatives. I like to describe that in this metaphor: Imagine someone who has only every seen the lord of the rings movies. They’ve watched them over and over, both cinematic and directors cuts. They know all the lore and all the minutia. And then they sit down to write their own movie. Maybe a sci-fi space mystery to change things up. And this movie? it has horses. Because movies always have horses, don’t they? They’re in like every movie. So when the detective is stuck in the burning theater, his buddy should ride in on a horse and save him.
So I 0%, maybe even some negative percent, want to have to sell a group on “RPGs don’t actually need six attributes” or “you don’t need to have separate rolls for to-hit and damage” for the first time in their lives.
Secondly, most people are bad at design. Sorry. It kind of follows from sturgeon’s law (“90% of everything is crap”). Most people don’t set out to make crap, but it happens anyway. Most people firing from the hip are just not going to make good systems. Especially if, as above, they’ve only ever really played one kind of game. So, no, I don’t want to deal with the guy who’s like “On a natural 1 you should drop your sword” who doesn’t realize that, because fighter types make a lot more attack rolls, they’re going to drop their swords way more often than you’d expect of the archetype. I am reminded of an unhappy time in an old, bad, D&D game where I fruitlessly tried to explain effective HP to the wizard. (Since D&D 5e stops counting damage at 0, there are some weird interactions between initiative, healing, and damage.)
Third, even if you avoid all of that, even if you have a group with a deep and wide knowledge of game design, you’re going to end up with an inelegant mess. Why does intimidating someone mean a simultaneous roll-off of increasingly large dice, but bluffing someone means drawing poker hands? Because those rules were added on different sessions, and Mike was really into poker and convinced people it would be cool. Wrestling someone you flip coins, but knife fighting you roll d4s. Sword fights use this complicated table Joe insisted would be fun, but magic is just a roll off. No thank you.
I’d rather just play Fate, which is already pretty loose about how to interpret conflict and consequences.
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Ah yes. I believe the term for that is “fantasy heartbreaker”. Fascinating history, really.
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Given that almost no games other than D&D, Vampire (and perhaps other WoD games), and *maybe* Call of Cthulhu made it into general public awareness, and that indeed many people didn’t (and still don’t!) recognize that there is an actual category of analog games called “RPGs”, it’s not so weird in context.
I’ll note that the 90s is also when the fight over the term “RPG” between CRPGs and TTRPGs really started causing our hobby problems.
A couple years ago at a bar I was talking to a guy, and he mentioned he’d started playing DND. I went, “oh cool. Which edition?”
He said, “what?”. He didn’t know there were other editions. He didn’t know there were other RPGs. I think about this a lot and try to remember a lot of people aren’t really deep in the hobby. They show up once a week to play a game with their friends, and that’s about where it stops. Which is fine. Totally valid way to spend your leisure time. But very different than where I went.
Well there’s d&d and advanced d&d… At least that’s how I remember it.
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Not everyone “in our hobby” is actually deep into it like us, nor do non-D&D games have multi-million-dollar marketing machines so people outside of the inner circle actually understand that these games exist. And remember, this was before it was common knowledge that EVERYTHING has a community online. They might well have honestly thought that if it’s not advertised, it doesn’t exist, and therefore their game was totally the first competition for D&D EVAR (when it absolutely wasn’t).
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I think you missed the point of the blog. It’s not “A guy makes a game” it’s “a group of friends make stuff up and a game is carved out of it”
Which yeah I can understand not everyone likes that. You need some imagination, the willingness to try new things and generally be down for some chaos. For the rest of us it sounds like a fun way to just fool around with friends.
As I said, it sounds like my personal hell. I do not believe the average person is good at making up rules, and thus many bad outcomes are more likely.
If the other people are proposing bad rules, it’s probably some combination of
- Play with the bad rule and am annoyed
- Try to convince them to change the rule, and that’s not fun
- Don’t realize it’s a bad rule until it has unwanted consequences
I really don’t want the game to grind to a halt because we realized mid session that the interaction of rules is making Bob super effective, and now we need to untangle this in a way that Bob won’t feel attacked and Alice won’t feel useless.
If I just wanted to fool around with some friends, and we wanted to do an RPG, Fate is right there. It even encourages you to build on top of it.
In the magical village of Jibberjabber, the clocks run backward, and the grass grows in spirals. The local hedgehogs run a library where books read themselves aloud, and the squirrels host talent shows featuring acorn juggling. Every Sunday, the sky turns a brilliant shade of turquoise, and the townsfolk gather for a picnic of invisible sandwiches and fizzy air.
This has nothing to do with builds. Fate, the game I said I’d play, doesn’t really have builds.
This is all about not wanting to have to spend a lot of time arguing with people, or playing a game I don’t like. Those are the two most likely outcomes. People will propose bad rules, and we either argue or I suck it up. There are so many common ideas in RPGs that I really don’t enjoy, but are popular nonetheless. I don’t want to stop the game and argue that “save or die” kind of sucks, and if we kill Alex’s character now like that a. they’re probably going to be unhappy just look at their face and b. what are they going to do the rest of the night?
(Or I’ll propose rules that won’t achieve the desired goals very well, because I’m also not such a good designer I can nail things on the first try)
Maybe with some hypothetical spherical frictionless group of players that are all on the same page about rules and design it would be fun. But that doesn’t seem to exist in the real world. We live in a world where people go “Let’s use D&D for a game of political intrigue! Wait, why does the fighter barely have anything to do and gets bad results on every check he does make? Why weren’t they scared when the antagonist pulled a knife on them??”
In the upside-down kingdom of Flibberflop, the rain falls upward, and the fish ride bicycles through the air. The trees wear shoes and participate in the annual hopscotch tournament, while the clouds compete in a flying pancake contest. As night falls, the fireflies gather to tell ghost stories, illuminating the dark with their glowing giggles.
…yeah so if you’re the kind of player who argues and fights at the table. Maybe stick to structured games with clearly defined rules.
You ignored the “or play a game I don’t like” part. That is what this process is extremely likely to create. Go look at the blog post again. Go look at those rules.
Furthermore, the process described in the blog post is
When a rule is needed, everyone at the table quickly discusses what the gameplay should feel like and what rule(s) would support that. If a majority of players agree on the rule (voting is necessary only if there is dissent)
Arguing is built right into the process! Someone proposes a rule, and you talk about it. And you know what I don’t want to do? Discuss the merits of rules mid-session. Especially large systems like “how does magic work?” or “can you change someone’s mind?”. That sounds awful. It’s one thing to do a quick “Do you think Alex can climb a ladder with this ‘Broken Arm’ consequence?” discussion in Fate. It’s a whole other thing to invent aspects whole cloth, and then try to integrate them with whatever else people came up with this week.
Or, if I pass on discussing why (for example) dropping your sword on a low roll is going to have weird effects, then I end up playing a game with rules I don’t like. Why would I want that? What don’t you get about this? Do I need to make you a flow chart?
System doesnt know how to handle something | |-- Propose a new rule |- is the rule good? --> yes --> oh that is surprising. carry on | no | discuss <-- the void of wasted time | | - were they convinced? --> yes --> go back to 'propose a new rule' | |-- no --> keep discussing? -- yes --> well this sucks |-- no --> give up --------^Ironically, the game I mentioned as an example of what I do like (Fate) is very light weight. But not so light weight that it doesn’t exist, and I have to deal with Brian trying to introduce hit locations mid session, again.
You seem to be imagining this like perfectly spherical frictionless group of players that are all super chill, on the same page about everything, and happy to just do whatever. I’m imagining what has been more typical in my experience, which is not that.
Again…this isn’t your scenario. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re conflating taking game systems and adding other mechanics to it and just goofing around and making it up as you go.
The blog post is about building a game system! Look at all the weird rules they made up! This whole blog post is about taking game systems (ie: rules people know from other games) and smushing them together! Anyone doing this process is going to start with some baseline system(s) in their head. Even if it’s just “let’s rock paper scissors for it” or “flip a coin”. It is in fact taking game game systems and adding other mechanics to it.
They certainly had fun, but as I said that sounds like my personal hell.
It’s okay to say “I need a game with explicit structure and rules”. That’s fine too, but maybe don’t argue with your players though.
Arguing is built into the process described into the blog post. Unless you’re splitting hairs and saying “argue” isn’t the same as “discuss”.
The point of having the system before you play is just letting everyone know what to expect on the G part of RPG so they can focus on the R and the P. It kills all momentum to stop and ask, ‘so what system do we want to use’ in the middle of the game. No system is perfect, but it cuts out a lot of work to just pick one and roll with it, homebrewing over the few holes that show up.
This actually a pretty interesting take.
I see how it can work with experienced players ready for some experimental game, but indeed it’s not something I’ll do on another context for the following reason.
I don’t know whey some people seems to strongly decorrelate the system from the rest of the game. The mechanic is a component of the game theme and mood and a good pairing Setting/System is important. To be cliché you’re not going to use D&D to play Chtulhu unless you want to do a dungeon crawling agaisnt Mi-go
Many players don’t have a feeling about which game mechanic they can come with
This kind of discussion works if you have a lot of time. If you’re young and plan to play until dawn no matter what, sure it’s fine. for a busy and married adult needing to have dinner with their SO and who plans to take the last train home to come back, you don’t want to loose time with these less important questions
