Introduction to Forge Theory #2

Good Rules, Bad Rules; Foreshadowing "A culture of designers"


I assume everyone reading this has played, sometime in the past, a table-top RPG. In fact, my basic assumption is that everyone reading this is, in fact, a table-top RPG hobbyist of some form or another. If you aren't, this is about to seem really strange.

In my lecture tour around Finland, I asked the following questions, and asked for a show of hands in response:

1) Who here has ever played a table-top role-playing game?
2) Who here has ever GMed a table-top role-playing game?
3) Who here has ever, during the course of play, changed a rule, ignored a rule, or added a rule to their game?
4) Who here has ever attempted to design their own role-playing game, regardless of how far along you got in the process?

I am hands up for all four, but you all already knew that. The shocking thing is that everyone but everyone is hands up for #1 and #3. Everyone. Only exceptions were people who'd never played RPGs before, or people who'd only played one session or so.

Now, this is a pretty limited sample. It is about 100 Finns who chose to came to an RPG Theory lecture. We can imagine that it represents the hard-core of the Finnish hobbyists. But, I imagine a survey of the American hobbyists would result in the same thing, and I imagine that most of you reading this are nodding your heads.

We, as RPG players, ignore our rules.

Guys, this is wierd. Most people, well, play games more or less by the rules. If I'm playing Chess with you, I don't suddenly say "Hey, I think it would be really cool if my pawn moved three spaces this turn, like a knight, but without the jumping. How about it?" If I said something like that, you'd be well within your rights to sock me one, or at least refuse to keep playing the game. It is inappropriate and rude.

Even when we play games that are commonly houseruled, like Monopoly, the rules are traditionally passed down and certainly are not changed during play to make the game "more fun."

But, when we play RPGs, we think nothing of changing or ignoring the rules for no other reason than whim or the opinions of one empowered player.

I have a hunch about this. I have a hunch that the reason why we do this is because, frankly, if we didn't our games wouldn't be very satisfying. I mean, right? We change the rules so that we can get more satisfaction from playing our games. Or, more often, we change the rules so that we can get *any* satisfaction from playing our games.

Most RPG rules are, simply, bad rules.

Now, before you take me to task for just bashing, I have a very specific definition of what I mean when I say "bad rules" and also when I say "good rules." It is thus:

• If a rule makes your play less satisfying with its presence, it is a bad rule.
  
• If a rule makes your play more satisfying with its presence, it is a good rule.
  
• And, yes, Mr. Anal Retentive, there's another case: If a rule doesn't make your play any more or less satisfying, I would say it is probably a bad rule, simply because it is making things more complicated for no good reason.
  

You can see that "good rule" and "bad rule" are quite subjective based on your play group and your own play styles. But, I think it is pretty safe to say that there are rules, in fact there are quite a lot of rules, that are bad rules for pretty much anyone. Further, we can imagine that there are some groups of rules which will "be good" together -- if we want a particular type of satisfaction from our game, a certain set of rules will work better than other rules.

Now, you're a role-playing gamer, and you've grown up as a game designer yourself, modifying the bad rules in your books into good rules for your own play. In fact, if you're anything like me, you've probably become pretty distrustful of rules in general. You're probably going "Ben, come on, good rules? Rules just get in the way of role-playing."

To which I say -- "Do the rules of poker 'just get in the way' of gambling? Do the rules of chess 'just get in the way' of strategy?"

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we talk too much more about good rules and bad rules, we need to talk about what rules are.

And for that, gentle readers, you will have to wait for the next section.