The Forge philosophy of roleplaying game design resembles philosophies of board, card, and (traditional) video game design. That is, the product is designed to be played as-written. All rules-changes are intended to be front-loaded as a design consideration rather than a play consideration (rules variants, video game mods, etc.).
This is a very workable model. It has resulted in some extremely tightly designed and very fun games. However, as we are constantly reminded, gaming is really all about actual play. And it turns out that designing games isn’t the only way to impact actual play.
It’s not like this is all that revolutionary: I know people who own libraries devoted to improving their chess and/or go play, and there’s always Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering (by Robin Laws).
But let us consider another potential model: the model of hobby crafts. While there are many publications that are simply step-by-step instructions for hobby crafts, they tend to be written in a slightly different tone. It is not expected that readers will duplicate your steps precisely because it is assumed that their needs are at least slightly different from the writer’s. Thus it is expected that the reader will take your instructions, and tweak them to get what they want out of them.
Further, there are many publications in hobby crafting that are focused purely on techniques. Articles about a cool new material, or about a neat way of accomplishing useful effects, or a cheap solution to a complex problem are extremely common.
I’m not advocating that we give up our games model of publishing roleplaying stuff, but I am suggesting that we consider interesting new ways of publishing. Just because we have traditionally worked within the game design paradigm doesn’t mean that there aren’t other really cool things we could be doing.
Tags: Publishing, Snippet-post, Theory
Intersting thoughts. I think the way “most people” play roleplaying games (at least “traditional” ones) got quite a bit of hobby crafting in it. And even board games are often tweaked by the players in respons to the likings of the play group.
Jonas,
I very much agree with the first point. I think that a significant amount of functional (everyone is having fun) play that takes place outside the Forge paradigm has lots of craft as part of play. Tweaking rules to fit the needs of the moment.
While I also think that, to some degree, people tweak board games, I don’t think it happens often in play. Sure there are house rules, but I find that they’re rarer, less flexible, and almost never implemented mid-game. Is that pretty much your experience?
Thomas
The only times I’ve seen mid-game tweaks is when a situation arises that the rules don’t cover.