In a brief aside on Anyway today Vincent Baker said: “Being an rpg designer doesn’t mean writing game texts – that’s what being an rpg writer means. Being an rpg designer means designing a system: it means arranging a group’s interactions so that they can agree to what happens in play.”
This is an excellent way of looking at what I want to talk about today, so thanks to Vincent for his timely post. Specifically, I want to talk about the fact that, depending on the goals you have for play, some jobs are better handled by an RPG designer and some are better handled by an RPG writer.
For some goals in play, you want to shape the interactions of the player directly. You want to use mechanics to force interaction into specific patterns. You can use this to generate unexpected emergent behavior in the groups who play the game, and you can use it to get groups to tell stories of a sort that they probably would not tell on their own. You can make people face narrative issues they would not in their normal social interactions.
Shaping the interactions directly by designing systems of interaction can lead participants to discovery. Behaviors can emerge under the rules you impose from outside that can result in surprisingly interesting and unexpected outcomes for the participants. For instance, if you sit down and play Breaking the Ice straight out of the book, you may not realize just how play will look. The rules do not spell out the social implications of the odd sort of GM fiat set up by leaving the guide in compete control of when dice are awarded. But some play of Breaking the Ice reveals that the structure of the game encourages some amazingly cool collaborative interactions.
But sometimes your goals are better met through other means than shaping the social interactions of the players. When you develop the structures of play directly, you impact the content of play indirectly. The invese also holds: when you do things to impact the content of play directly, you influence the structure of play indirectly. (This distinction is something that I plan to cover a bit more in depth next week.)
One of the most common, and easiest, ways to influence the content of play is through “advice” or “guideline” sections. For instance, in Dogs in the Vineyard, Vincent Baker has a section titled “GMing Conflicts” (pp 76-78) in which he has such advice as “you should push for small stakes” and “you should always follow your group’s lead”. These are not limits on the structure of the game itself; they are guidelines, advice for making play look more like what Vincent intends Dogs play to look like.
There are a number of reasons to use advice instead of rules. Most of these reasons are tied up with the fact that advice is “fuzzier” than rules are. This means that advice tends to be taken in idiosyncratic ways. What counts as “small stakes”? Depends on the group. What counts as 2d4? Well, that’s a mechanical thing. Advice is also easier to develop. Not necessarily easier to present (at some point I hope to write a bit on writing pegagogy), writing is hard work and conveying fuzzy ideas is often more difficult than conveying concrete ones, but advice is easier to develop.
When I work on a game, I use two rubrics to decide whether a given feature of play should be produced with rules or with advice: 1) How much time and effort will it take to develop rules that generate this behavior (implicit in this question is: can I even develop such rules at my current skill level)? 2) How important to my vision of play is it that play always looks like this?
If the importance of an element is high, and I feel as if I can generate rules to bring out that element, then I will proceed to do so. If I realize that an element is something that I only want to see in play sometimes, or something that would be nice but not vital, then I tend to work on advice. And every so often, when I try to figure out how to make rules that enforce a certain element, I realize that it will take a lot of time and effort to do, and the element just is not worth it.
I am looking for two major lines of feedback on this post, though I am as always willing to discuss pretty much anything: 1) What are some other advantages of rules over advice and advice over rules? 2) How do you, personally, decide which elements of play need rules and which ones need advice?
Next week: why “freeform” play rocks my socks.
I must admit, I don’t tend to distinguish between rules and guidelines precisely. I view the matter as being more of a spectrum. And the range include more than just from flexible and fuzzy to specific and concrete. I’ve found that the range from covert to overt is also relevent. For example, in Dogs, the GM advice is not only kept in that mode because it needs to be flexible, but because it needs to be less available to the players than to the GM. The dynamics of the game are impaired if the players focus too much on the GM’s guidelines.
So I try to factor all of these different matters in when I design. However, I also enjoy designing with a sole focus on emergent behavior, without interpreting that behavior in the game text. Several of my game chef entries were of this type, and I found it very interesting how people responded to them in ways that revealed as much about the reviewer as the game.
Mendel,
What do you mean by “the dynamics of the game are impaired if the players focus too much on the GM’s guidelines”? I think I disagree with you, but I’m not sure…
Thomas
Thomas,
Among other things, if the players focus too much on the GM advice to escalate, they may disengage from the present conflict, because they know the next one will likely be worse. It’s not that they won’t spend the game resources, it’s that they won’t spend their emotional resources on that conflict.
But that’s not a significant risk, because they are GM guidelines, there is a deniability to them, i.e. the GM need not follow them. And they are not strongly associated with the rules of play, making them less accessible to the players, even if they have GMed.
I disagree.
From the perspective of the designer rules and guidelines are structurally the same thing, since you cannot enforce the rules you present to other players. You can only make suggestions – i.e. guidelines.
Only the group playing the game can make up rules. A rule in RPG is a technique, which the group has agreed to use in certain circumstances. Of course a designer can present certain techniques as rules hoping the group will adopt them en bloc, but it still remains advice.
Stefan,
This is a really good point, and one I should have covered a bit more in depth.
Basically, you’re right, but the presentation of something as a rule as opposed to that same thing as a guideline is important. Calling it a rule vs. calling it a guideline matters in the real world. This is because people use the game-object (book, pdf, whatever) as a reference, and give it some amount of authority.
When you design and present something as a rule, you get a different response from readers and players than when you design and present something as guideline.
Right?
Thomas
Thomas,
no, I guess this depends more on exactly how you present your rules.
Many designers do not explain, why they recommend certain rules. The main difference is therefore to leave the reader ignorant of the designer’s intentions, such that the reader has hardly any choice but to adopt whatever he gets. (At least at first, until he finds out, what each part does.)
If you actually add to every rule, exactly why you included it, the difference in response becomes minimal.
Stefan
Stefan,
Interesting. Very interesting. I think I still disagree with you, but I definitely need more time to think this over before snapping off a response.
Thomas