Roleplaying games are an odd beast, aren’t they? Explaining one of them to someone who has no idea what one is is quite complex, because you’re both explaining telling a story & playing a game at the same time.
This dichotomy between the two things has always stood as the central crux of various different subcultures in our hobby. The difference between where storytelling ends and game begins is often a personal choice, one that can often vary only a hair’s breadth between individuals.
One group can find that a system like PBTA feels like it’s freeing them to roleplaying inside a very focused structure. Another group can find that it forces their social roleplaying down cul-de-sacs of repetitive behaviours. Some find games with too much crunch to be counterproductive to imagination. To others, it makes each part of the world considered and immersive. Some treat rules as godly text to not be subverted, to others they’re a guideline from which to hang the story.
There are so many schools of thought on rules, so it’s often worth looking at a mechanic and thinking, ‘Why does this exist?’. What purpose does the rule serve? When we’re hacking games to make them our own, this is especially important. We find that just getting rid of something small can have a huge impact. So let’s look at some reason rules exist.
Universal Consistency
The first reason we might have a framework of rules is quite simple. If we’re playing a storytelling, we need to establish who can invent what and how. RPGs are managed differently from other stories, many people are contributing. We need to all be working from the same starting sheet.
A ruleset creates a framework for the baseline reality of that story. We all know what is reasonable to expect in a game. Is it ok for people to be tossing buildings around? Or do the rules show that this is impossible? When I want to talk someone into something, how complex is it? Will that be something I need to be thinking about in great detail? Is there magic? How far does this reality bend?
I think we can all agree how fundamental an idea this is. If we were to invent a roleplaying game without a consistent ruleset, players would be full of anxiety. Players need to know that if they repeat the same action in two sessions, it’s going to follow the same rules. As much as I’d find it hilarious to run a game where the game consistently told the players that they did it wrong last time and need to learn a new way to do the same thing, I don’t think there’s much market for Gaslighting The RPG.
It’s important to remember this standard when we hack, ignore or invent on tops of existing rules. Consistency must be maintained. You can wild with as many tables as you want as long as which table you roll on is always the same for the same action.
Management Of Agency
Some rules are about who is talking and moving the action forward at any given time. A good example of this is how a lot of games manage moments like combat and such that require action to suddenly zoom in and go second by second. Another totally different example is a PBTA game system where sometimes narrative control is handed to the play for an extended time, and they can just invent what happens now. Both sets of rules say ‘this player is deciding what happens now for a set amount of time’. Then, the GM dictates the fallout of those actions and so on.
It’s important for smooth play to consider this. Often, players will all want to act, so having a ‘it’s your go now’ option is really useful. We’ve seen lots of different implementations of this over many years, and if we were to have no rules for who has narrative control, we’re essentially just freeform improv acting at that point. It’s why some LARP games are accused of not really being games but theatre.
If we’re reinventing, we have to at least be aware of agency. Knowing who is in charge of what part of a mechanic, when decisions are made by a player and when they have to let someone else tell them what is happening. Messing with this dynamic can create some interesting gameplay spaces, but is often the hardest to grasp for people new to ideas if they are used to a standardised D&D-like balance of agency.
Thematic Driver
A game often has a theme & mood that it is going for. Vampire wants us to think about the price of humanity and loss of control, Masks wants us to be trapped inside teenage identity crisis, Shadowrun wants us to feel like veterans of small unit tactics with a granular knowledge of chosen weaponry, Walking Dead wants us to live in a world of complex relationships with deadly cost. Each game has mechanics that reinforce what the game is talking about. This rule exists as a sort of meta-lever to make players come back to the central themes of the game. Actions loop back to this.
If we take out a thematic driver rule, the game will keep running, but it will feel very different. Vampire without any morality mechanics isn’t really Vampire. So when we take one out, we have to be doing so with intent. Know what we want to alter or change.
In fact, when we talk about hacking games, a lot of the time, this is really the level we’re operating at. Look at the D&D’s Theros supplement for a very simple version of this. The game’s mood has been shifted because of the simple extra rules added. Characters track devoted we are to god in a mechanical way, getting bonuses for acting more in line with that God. It’s a simple change added to a ruleset that means we end up feeling our relationship with the divine has changed in-game. Small changes can have a sweeping effect.
We’ve now looked at three types of rules, why they might feature and our considerations for hacking games. Next time we’re going to look at four more types of rules – rules of balance, meta-rules, generator rules and have-to-be rules. By then, we should be completely equipped to look at a ruleset and know if it might be for us and where we can push it into new forms.
Creative Commons credit: Talisa, The Curse and The Walker by JakubJagoda. You can commission Jakub on reasonable terms.
