MichaelSomething
Legend
Who will speak for the people who want immersion???
This is what made D&D the #1 role playing game, and kept it there for a long time. Though maybe Hasbro/WotC will knock D&D down with "not 6E", but we will have to see.In effect, the success of D&D as a mass market game is because it is not just a product of rules, but a comingling of the rules, norms, community, and history. In effect, the success of D&D is that it implicitly allows for a multitude of gameplay; that it does not speak to (or constrain) second-order design, and, moreover, explicitly allows a diversity of play in fundamental ways, even to the level of whether you play ToTM or grid.
I feel like I'm missing something about the "second-order" design principle that's being brought up here regularly. Is there something unique about it conceptually aside from when and where it occurs that makes it different from designing rules?
My immediate view of not designing a system, and then making decisions about it as an individual in the moment, is just that you're moving the design task to a different place/time and setting some constraints on the tools and time available to the designer (they must come up with a solution rapidly, they can't test their solution before deploying it, etc.), but I feel like I'm missing something unique that proponents are seeing in that.
The obvious benefit I'm seeing is that when you build the plane as you're flying it, you can ensure the design covers the exact situations/needs of the game as they arise, but I don't necessarily believe that's unique, particularly given that you can also use design as a tool to shape what will come up at a table to begin with.
The thing about rules is that they are descriptive as much as proscriptive. You can go from a transcript of play to writing a set of rules that would have (or are likely to have) produced that transcript. I'm struggling to conceptualize how not to do design work; it's a bit like being asked to look at a text and see the letters without reading it.
Military wargames are not games in the sense that we discuss on this forum. Game can also refer to prey, it can refer to gaming the system, to have a fighting spirit. So your comment that military wargames are not fun, while true, was also completely and totally irrelevant.I'd be rolling my eyes at the use of that metaphor for this discussion too, LOL.
Oh, rules-design choices that are purely driven by rules aesthetics are a huge 2000s thing; that's like 90% of the design of 3e, particularly the problematic design.So, I totally get what you're saying here. I have appreciated different approached to rules. Heck, there are many times that I ponder the difference between the TSR-era and WoTC-era saving throws.
But I guess my question was a little more narrow. There have been times I have purchased RPGs solely because of the art, or the lore, or because it "looked cool" (the materials). But I can't think of a time I bought an RPG because of an aesthetic appreciation of the rules. I can appreciate good rules, of course, but I can't think of a time when that was the selling point of the RPG.
It's actually not that complicated.
You're a game designer. You make the rules and procedures for the game. You write them. That's the first-order design.
However, once the game is released, once people play it, they will play it in different ways. This is the second-order design.
Or, to put it more simply- the game designer make the rulebook, but can't dictate the player's behavior.
That said, there are various ways that a game designer can influence second-order design. The most obvious is extensive playtesting. See how disparate groups interact with the rules, and tweak accordingly.
Another is to try and create rules that you think will have an impact on second-order design. For example, on thing that is popular is to have "principles" and "procedures" that are written down that the table should follow- things like "The GM Should Be a Fan of the Players" and have examples of that, as opposed to leaving this as an assumed heuristic.
A final way would be to make the rules fit more tightly to the assumed gameplay; an example of this would be if, for example, D&D didn't leave it open as to whether or not you played ToTM or grid, but instead insisted you played one way and made all the rules with the understanding you were playing that way.
Better?
As stated, the 2000s saw the rise of rules-aesthetics as a major motivation for people to buy and play games. Part of the negative reaction to 4e was that it was not designed--in the graphical or writing sense--to appeal to people who love rules-aesthetics. This is partly for reasons I consider good (namely, the 4e team actually put the methods of pursuing various design aesthetics to the test and found them very wanting), but also for reasons I recognize as very poor (too caught up in the sacred barbecue, as it were; not paying enough attention to important aesthetic considerations that weren't affecting mechanics; etc.)
No, I think we're on the same page here. What I'm asking is, as a GM or other player doing the second-order design, how does what you're doing differ from what a designer does in the first place? Is there some way in which the analysis that's relevant to the first point not relevant, or is there some unique aspect of what you're doing that requires different tools?
Interesting. I feel like you're drawing a distinction here that I'm not totally sure I'd have considered relevant before, and maybe this goes back to that point about the "aesthetics of rules" from a few posts back. Fundamentally, I don't really care whether the rules of the game I'm playing come from a manual, an instruction booklet, the imagination of my classmate on the bus next to me (I recall a fascinating combat arena game about elementally powered stick figures we used to play on field trips), but I am pretty invested in what the rules do in action, both literally, but also meta-textually. I want to use the rules, and I want to understand them. Part of that might be the board gaming background, where finding a rule that doesn't quite make sense or flow smoothly from established processes usually means there's something I don't yet understand about the game's strategy, or a weird and potentially degenerate board state that needed to be solved for I can try to go unpick.
It seems to me though, that you're drawing a line between the territory of "rules" and "gameplay at the table" that I'm finding unintuitive. Houserules are still rules by other means, a DM telling me "we'll do the called shot like this" is a rule I've just learned about right now, and so on. The same processes I'd use to evaluate rules outside that context, still seem to apply.
Perhaps it's inconsistency that's really the point of variance? Not just table to table, but rule to rule. You might use that called shot rule once, and a different approach the next time, and while that does retroactively establish a conditional on which rule is used, it's not a commitment to uphold that each time.