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Do You Use Your RPG Rules as Written?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7379494" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Making good rules and particularly rules that prove functional and useful in play is not easy. Not only do the pros play test stuff, they frequently even after play testing have rules that aren't well thought out.</p><p></p><p>One thing that I think older systems have as an advantage on post-FORGE systems is most Indy inspired systems are imagined whole cloth, usually without any play testing at all, based on a designer's conception of what an elegant, unified system will look like. And those systems are so tightly designed, play testing can't reveal much about them. There isn't much that you can actually tweak or change. The system just is, like it or leave it. Most of the time I leave it. I find that systems that grow organically out of play tend to vastly outperform (for me at least) those that were conceived fully formed from the mind of the designer. I admire those conceptions, and I read for example everything by Luke Crane, and try to apply what I learn to my table, but I'd never actually run Mouse Guard or Burning Wheel. I buy the rules to read them, and that's about it.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I was headed that way late in my AD&D era as I became increasingly frustrated with various aspects of the game. At the time, I lacked the language to really grapple with the problem intellectually, and I tended to - as many did in that era - fetishize 'realism' as the missing ingredient that was going to fix the holes in the game.</p><p></p><p>Had I had a word processor at the time (something I didn't get until '96) I might have stayed with AD&D, but I became increasingly frustrated with trying to track my 'errata' and house rules on hand written notes. So I spent the later part of the '90s experimenting with different 'more realistic' systems. The problem with those systems though I was to discover is that they were too much of a burden on play and especially on prep. They also didn't actually fix a lot of the central problems that I had had with the game during my AD&D era. I learned a lot from systems like GURPS and it influenced how I look at rules, but I don't ever want to run GURPS again. Besides, I ended up with a 1" thick set of GURPS house rules (many of which made it into later editions of the game).</p><p></p><p>When 3e came out I was largely done with RPGS out of frustration with them, lack of friends that wanted to play, and a deep love of games coming out of the German board gaming renaissance and an abiding love for Bloodbowl (GW's one real masterpiece IMO). I didn't get drawn into it again until a friend of a friend tried to get us all to play a game during the Christmas holidays (he was pushing either 3e D&D or Delta Green, neither of which I'd paid much attention to until that point). </p><p></p><p>The thing that blew me away as I read the 3e rules was that it was the game I had wanted to write 10 years before, cleaned up and in many ways more elegant than I'd imagined it. For example, what the designers were doing with combat maneuvers and attacks of opportunity paralleled what I had been doing with parry/riposte mechanics. That said...</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>RAW the system had some obvious problems right off the bat, and a bunch of even bigger problems that became apparent as the characters leveled up. The more books they published, the worse the problems got. PrC's went first. By 3.5 I'd had enough. So much was changed in 3.5 that clearly showed that they hadn't really play tested at all. The changes weren't organic. They looked very much like the sort of changes I'd expect to see bad designers make on the house rule forums. Unlike the original core rules, it was very clear that the 3.5 designers weren't really drawing on their experience as 1e DMs to figure out what problems needed to be solved. The changes to polymorph for example were obviously not tested and were right on their face immediately recognizable as bad ideas by anyone that had played the earlier editions. Casters were already a problem in 3.0: 3.5 blew the doors right off.</p><p></p><p>I'm pretty sure I would not play with a group that played 3.5 'RAW' and which blessed every single book published by WotC in that era as valid at the table. 3.5 without any restrictions at all is just a mess that depends on a bunch of implicit or explicit table contracts not to abuse it too much. But even more than that, I think it's the attitude implied by such a decision that would drive me away. Those tables to me are basically saying chargen is 100% of the game and the purpose of play is to facilitate chargen. Moreover, to me there is a bit of incoherence here in a table that says "No house rules at all" but readily accepts every single rule published in an official book. To me, all of those supplements official or not is just some other DMs house rules, that he's been lucky enough to have been paid to publish. The fact that he got paid to do it in no way guarantees though that those rules are somehow better than what the table or the DM might have come up with themselves through play. In point of fact, most of the 3.5 supplements were clearly not playtested and churned out to generate revenue streams regardless of how the rules enhanced or detracted from the game. It was clear very soon after 3.5 that WotC had lost interest in making the game better, and was just trying to milk the cash cow. The idea that those rules are somehow more valid than what you adopt to fix problems actually encountered in play to me boggles my mind.</p><p></p><p> [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]: I have no idea why you think my table rules are less stable than the RAW of 3.5 edition, or really any official edition. If anything, my house rules are _more stable_ and less subject to change than the RAW. The RAW gets errata all the time, and your table doesn't get input on those changes. The RAW gets altered or extended by new supplements all the time. Why should the table be forced to accept everything or anything that is in that supplement? Moreover, since the goal of writing my house rules up in a formal manner is to limit the number of times I have to make rulings, I probably less rarely make a ruling that I can't reference the letter of the rules than someone running the RAW. Running the RAW doesn't stop you having problems with rules interpretation. The RAW is and has been vague in every edition. You frequently don't notice this though until you actually use the rules, particularly if the player is creative in his propositions. New house rules only happen generally when something clunky happens in play that reveals just how dumb the RAW is. I rarely if ever have to amend my house rules. It's the RAW that generally has the holes in it, largely because its the RAW that was written as a result of play testing.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7379494, member: 4937"] Making good rules and particularly rules that prove functional and useful in play is not easy. Not only do the pros play test stuff, they frequently even after play testing have rules that aren't well thought out. One thing that I think older systems have as an advantage on post-FORGE systems is most Indy inspired systems are imagined whole cloth, usually without any play testing at all, based on a designer's conception of what an elegant, unified system will look like. And those systems are so tightly designed, play testing can't reveal much about them. There isn't much that you can actually tweak or change. The system just is, like it or leave it. Most of the time I leave it. I find that systems that grow organically out of play tend to vastly outperform (for me at least) those that were conceived fully formed from the mind of the designer. I admire those conceptions, and I read for example everything by Luke Crane, and try to apply what I learn to my table, but I'd never actually run Mouse Guard or Burning Wheel. I buy the rules to read them, and that's about it. I was headed that way late in my AD&D era as I became increasingly frustrated with various aspects of the game. At the time, I lacked the language to really grapple with the problem intellectually, and I tended to - as many did in that era - fetishize 'realism' as the missing ingredient that was going to fix the holes in the game. Had I had a word processor at the time (something I didn't get until '96) I might have stayed with AD&D, but I became increasingly frustrated with trying to track my 'errata' and house rules on hand written notes. So I spent the later part of the '90s experimenting with different 'more realistic' systems. The problem with those systems though I was to discover is that they were too much of a burden on play and especially on prep. They also didn't actually fix a lot of the central problems that I had had with the game during my AD&D era. I learned a lot from systems like GURPS and it influenced how I look at rules, but I don't ever want to run GURPS again. Besides, I ended up with a 1" thick set of GURPS house rules (many of which made it into later editions of the game). When 3e came out I was largely done with RPGS out of frustration with them, lack of friends that wanted to play, and a deep love of games coming out of the German board gaming renaissance and an abiding love for Bloodbowl (GW's one real masterpiece IMO). I didn't get drawn into it again until a friend of a friend tried to get us all to play a game during the Christmas holidays (he was pushing either 3e D&D or Delta Green, neither of which I'd paid much attention to until that point). The thing that blew me away as I read the 3e rules was that it was the game I had wanted to write 10 years before, cleaned up and in many ways more elegant than I'd imagined it. For example, what the designers were doing with combat maneuvers and attacks of opportunity paralleled what I had been doing with parry/riposte mechanics. That said... RAW the system had some obvious problems right off the bat, and a bunch of even bigger problems that became apparent as the characters leveled up. The more books they published, the worse the problems got. PrC's went first. By 3.5 I'd had enough. So much was changed in 3.5 that clearly showed that they hadn't really play tested at all. The changes weren't organic. They looked very much like the sort of changes I'd expect to see bad designers make on the house rule forums. Unlike the original core rules, it was very clear that the 3.5 designers weren't really drawing on their experience as 1e DMs to figure out what problems needed to be solved. The changes to polymorph for example were obviously not tested and were right on their face immediately recognizable as bad ideas by anyone that had played the earlier editions. Casters were already a problem in 3.0: 3.5 blew the doors right off. I'm pretty sure I would not play with a group that played 3.5 'RAW' and which blessed every single book published by WotC in that era as valid at the table. 3.5 without any restrictions at all is just a mess that depends on a bunch of implicit or explicit table contracts not to abuse it too much. But even more than that, I think it's the attitude implied by such a decision that would drive me away. Those tables to me are basically saying chargen is 100% of the game and the purpose of play is to facilitate chargen. Moreover, to me there is a bit of incoherence here in a table that says "No house rules at all" but readily accepts every single rule published in an official book. To me, all of those supplements official or not is just some other DMs house rules, that he's been lucky enough to have been paid to publish. The fact that he got paid to do it in no way guarantees though that those rules are somehow better than what the table or the DM might have come up with themselves through play. In point of fact, most of the 3.5 supplements were clearly not playtested and churned out to generate revenue streams regardless of how the rules enhanced or detracted from the game. It was clear very soon after 3.5 that WotC had lost interest in making the game better, and was just trying to milk the cash cow. The idea that those rules are somehow more valid than what you adopt to fix problems actually encountered in play to me boggles my mind. [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]: I have no idea why you think my table rules are less stable than the RAW of 3.5 edition, or really any official edition. If anything, my house rules are _more stable_ and less subject to change than the RAW. The RAW gets errata all the time, and your table doesn't get input on those changes. The RAW gets altered or extended by new supplements all the time. Why should the table be forced to accept everything or anything that is in that supplement? Moreover, since the goal of writing my house rules up in a formal manner is to limit the number of times I have to make rulings, I probably less rarely make a ruling that I can't reference the letter of the rules than someone running the RAW. Running the RAW doesn't stop you having problems with rules interpretation. The RAW is and has been vague in every edition. You frequently don't notice this though until you actually use the rules, particularly if the player is creative in his propositions. New house rules only happen generally when something clunky happens in play that reveals just how dumb the RAW is. I rarely if ever have to amend my house rules. It's the RAW that generally has the holes in it, largely because its the RAW that was written as a result of play testing. [/QUOTE]
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