Jon Peterson: Does System Matter?

D&D historian Jon Peterson asks the question on his blog as he does a deep dive into how early tabletop RPG enthusiasts wrestled with the same thing.

Based around the concept that 'D&D can do anything, so why learn a new system?', the conversation examines whether the system itself affects the playstyle of those playing it. Some systems are custom-designed to create a certain atmosphere (see Dread's suspenseful Jenga-tower narrative game), and Call of Cthulhu certainly discourages the D&D style of play, despite a d20 version in early 2000s.

Does System Matter?

Dungeons & Dragons started out as a game with such an adaptable and open-ended set of rules that early adopters questioned whether any fur...

playingattheworld.blogspot.com

 

[Bacon Bits]

That's something I see being repeated often, but it's just not true. There's a very clear difference between rules and content. There's not a 1000 pages of rules.

The point is that if you're a brand new player with no experience at all and no understanding of how the game is played. You don't know anything. You don't know if you need to know what a Goblin does. You don't know if you need to understand everything in the DMG. You don't know what spells might come up or how often. You just don't know. You have no idea how many rules you need to keep in your head at any one time. And, most of all, you have no idea what someone has to do to actually get the game set up.

You see an advertisement for a game called X&X on your favorite YouTube channel. The ad says that it's the most popular game in it's genre. It has three Core rulebooks that you need to play, plus a set of dice. You look them up and each book is 330 pages long and costs $50. The dice are $15. You are now in a very real situation where you're going to put $165 on the line saying that you're going to read up to 1,000 pages, then find 2-4 other people who also will be willing to possibly read 1,000 pages, and then you'll all be able to sit down and try to play this game.

That is what the game looks like from a layperson's perspective.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

The point is that if you're a brand new player with no experience at all and no understanding of how the game is played. You don't know anything. You don't know if you need to know what a Goblin does. You don't know if you need to understand everything in the DMG. You don't know what spells might come up or how often. You just don't know. You have no idea how many rules you need to keep in your head at any one time. And, most of all, you have no idea what someone has to do to actually get the game set up.

You see an advertisement for a game called X&X on your favorite YouTube channel. The ad says that it's the most popular game in it's genre. It has three Core rulebooks that you need to play, plus a set of dice. You look them up and each book is 330 pages long and costs $50. The dice are $15. You are now in a very real situation where you're going to put $165 on the line saying that you're going to read up to 1,000 pages, then find 2-4 other people who also will be willing to possibly read 1,000 pages, and then you'll all be able to sit down and try to play this game.

That is what the game looks like from a layperson's perspective.

Well, yes, if someone approaches D&D entirely blindly and does very light search, it might seem overwhelming. But that doesn't seem so different from any hobbies that millions of peoples start practicing: painting miniatures, playing golf, woodworking, painting, photography. They all have a huge amount of knowledge or information that seems a bit daunting at first, they all cost a decent amount of money and often have addons or additional purchases you can make (new clubs, lenses, new knives, paint, brushes). But people go to a store, they ask questions, they read reviews or, if they're courageous, they dive in and they do it by themselves. It does not seem unique to D&D. I've had the exact same experience getting into most of the activities I do in my life.

 

[Morrus]

The point is that if you're a brand new player with no experience at all and no understanding of how the game is played. You don't know anything. You don't know if you need to know what a Goblin does. You don't know if you need to understand everything in the DMG. You don't know what spells might come up or how often. You just don't know. You have no idea how many rules you need to keep in your head at any one time. And, most of all, you have no idea what someone has to do to actually get the game set up.

You see an advertisement for a game called X&X on your favorite YouTube channel. The ad says that it's the most popular game in it's genre. It has three Core rulebooks that you need to play, plus a set of dice. You look them up and each book is 330 pages long and costs $50. The dice are $15. You are now in a very real situation where you're going to put $165 on the line saying that you're going to read up to 1,000 pages, then find 2-4 other people who also will be willing to possibly read 1,000 pages, and then you'll all be able to sit down and try to play this game.

That is what the game looks like from a layperson's perspective.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Image

That too! Which is why I'm still puzzled by why there's still large-scale TTRPGs like Pathfinder 2E only offer a Starter Set a whole year after the release of its second edition. It's as incomprehensible to me as one of my past coworkers that said we could just put a tutorial in our game through a patch later down the road.

 

[pemerton]

Moldvay Basic was playable out of the box by someone who had very little experience with games full stop, and none with RPGs.

I know, because I did it.

And it was possible to read all the rules - including all the monsters - as part of this process. Because it wasn't an especially long rulebook.

 

[Haffrung]

I've done it before, but give a brand new player the Player's Handbook. Tell them to read:

• Page 5 to 7 for the introduction.
• Page 173 to 179 for everything related to throws and ability scores.
• Page 181 to 186 for adventuring.
• Page 189 to 196 for the basics of combat.
• Pages 201 to 202 for spellcasting, if needed.

That's it. That's 21 pages of rules written in natural language. That's all the rules you need to play. Most tabletop or card games that I played had more dense, obtuse and numerous rules than D&D 5E. Also, if you decide to play in Theater of the Mind, you can probably forego a quarter of those pages. And as opposed to a boardgame, if you misunderstand and forget a rule, it doesn't break the mind. Because D&D is not as systemically-driven as most games with a win condition.

While I agree that 5E only really has about 20 pages of rules that a player needs to learn in order to play, I disagree that the natural language used to present those rules makes the game more accessible. It's the format and layout of the rules, rather than their scope or complexity, that makes D&D more difficult to learn than it needs to be. Boardgame rules use standard instructional design elements like bulleted lists, numbered lists, white space, sidebars, clear and concise language, etc. to present rules in a much more user-friendly manner than the wall-of-text model employed by WotC and most other RPG publishers.

If you want to see RPG rulebooks designed by people who understand instructional design, take a look at Old School Essentials or Five Torches Deep. If or when WotC comes out with a 6E, they need someone who understands design and user experience put in charge of formatting the books.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

While I agree that 5E only really has about 20 pages of rules that a player needs to learn in order to play, I disagree that the natural language used to present those rules makes the game more accessible. It's the format and layout of the rules, rather than their scope or complexity, that makes D&D more difficult to learn than it needs to be. Boardgame rules use standard instructional design elements like bulleted lists, numbered lists, white space, sidebars, clear and concise language, etc. to present rules in a much more user-friendly manner than the wall-of-text model employed by WotC and most other RPG publishers.

If you want to see RPG rulebooks designed by people who understand instructional design, take a look at Old School Essentials or Five Torches Deep. If or when WotC comes out with a 6E, they need someone who understands design and user experience put in charge of formatting the books.

I think people can, and do, reasonably disagree about what a rulebook "is" and "should be" in a TTRPG.

For example, you point out OSE as being an example of "good design" for new players, and 5e as being an example of "bad design" for new players. I don't disagree with you, necessarily.

But from a practical standpoint, while I don't have the numbers in front of me, I would say that there the difference in the numbers of players who begin playing TTRPGs with 5e as opposed to OSE is, well, ... it's orders of magnitude.

Put another way- I would assert (and no, I don't happen to have evidence) that most people who are playing OSE are not playing TTRPGs for the first time. Whereas there are significant numbers of players playing 5e that are.

This circles around to a slightly different point; what is the "purpose" of a rulebook. If it is simply to impart the rules in a clear and concise way, then it is best served in a certain manner. If, on the other hand, it serves other purposes (including being "fun to read" or "engaging the reader" or "sparking the imagination") then there might be other ways to present the information that is not always served up in the same way that you might do with a board game.

I say this not because I am trying to glorify obtuse rule sets that obfuscate key points, but because I have seen that many people who are new to the game become entranced not due to the rules, but because of the fluff, because of the art, because something within those rulebooks calls them to adventure.

It is an interesting balance; TTRPGs are often games that are spread through direct contact. While there are people that are self-taught, most learn from either playing or observing. Which, IMO, is partly why the rise of the internet and youtube also helps explain the resurgence of the game.

 

[Aldarc]

I say this not because I am trying to glorify obtuse rule sets that obfuscate key points, but because I have seen that many people who are new to the game become entranced not due to the rules, but because of the fluff, because of the art, because something within those rulebooks calls them to adventure.

It is an interesting balance; TTRPGs are often games that are spread through direct contact. While there are people that are self-taught, most learn from either playing or observing. Which, IMO, is partly why the rise of the internet and youtube also helps explain the resurgence of the game.

It's basic brand marketing. It's not just selling the product itself but also a "story" for the customer through how the product is packaged, sold, and marketed that makes them want to be a part of that product's story.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

While I agree that 5E only really has about 20 pages of rules that a player needs to learn in order to play, I disagree that the natural language used to present those rules makes the game more accessible. It's the format and layout of the rules, rather than their scope or complexity, that makes D&D more difficult to learn than it needs to be. Boardgame rules use standard instructional design elements like bulleted lists, numbered lists, white space, sidebars, clear and concise language, etc. to present rules in a much more user-friendly manner than the wall-of-text model employed by WotC and most other RPG publishers.

If you want to see RPG rulebooks designed by people who understand instructional design, take a look at Old School Essentials or Five Torches Deep. If or when WotC comes out with a 6E, they need someone who understands design and user experience put in charge of formatting the books.

Natural language is not inherently worse than the typical approach with tables, keywords, bullet points, etc. It really depends on the product itself, what type of player it's aimed at, it's complexity, etc. For some people, it's much less intimidating to just read through things naturally. For others, a large paragraph of text makes them sigh even before they've read it.

In the case of 5E, the natural language made it very easy for me to dive in, and I get a nosebleed when I open a more typical boardgame instructions where it describes the phases, tokens, currencies with a cold and precise language. But after I became comfortable with it, the natural language does have its issues where it's not precise and leaves things to ambiguity. Like many things, I think the balance is somewhere in the middle. And that's one thing that videogames are able to do better: having options. You can have tooltips for new players that are much more natural, have less crunch in them and have advanced tooltips that are enabled after a while or in the options.

 

[Bacon Bits]

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Yes, that is why the Starter Set exists. But it still doesn't help that much. Like can you be expected to just bust out D&D one evening like it's Cluedo or Monopoly, and just figure it out with friends in an evening? The rules for those games fit on a placemat.

There are a bunch of fairly small problems that are all things that need to be overcome:

1. It's $30 and, though it does contain dice, you're looking at $180. Yes, you can just get the $30 Starter Kit, but the end goal if things go well is to pay another $150 at least.
2. You still have a 30 page rulebook to ingest. This is still not a small amount of game rules to learn.
3. You know you're getting a very small subset of the game. Like $30 for just a demo. You have to be because those booklets are so small. The thing is, how do you know you're not just buying a really small part of the game? That is, how do you know if it's a horizontal cross section slice of the game instead of a vertical segment of a much larger game? With some complex board games you often have multiple ways to play them.
4. You don't know how well written the game is. How many times have you read an RPG and gotten through it and thought, even with your experience, that you have absolutely no idea how you'd actually run the game you've just read? That's one of the common criticisms I've seen about Blades in the Dark, Mage, Wraith, Exalted, and so on. Or how often have you started an RPG only to find that the book is so horribly organized that it is only useful as a manual of rules and not as a technical reference during actual play? What if you buy the book expecting Savage Worlds and you actually get Phoenix Command?

But the biggest problem is still there:

You still don't know what actually playing the game looks like. There's no board. There's no pieces. There's no setup. You sit at a table with a sheet of paper and a pencil. There's monsters and characters and several players and one referee, but there's no actual instructions of how to play. Compare it to Magic: The Gathering. You take your deck, shuffle it up, place it to the right or left of the play area, draw 7 cards, etc. There are turns, and a fixed setup, and an order of play. For as complex a game as Magic is, it's still structured like a traditional game. And Magic got a huge boost in popularity with Arena because there was a digital version that knows the rules. There's a tutorial that can walk through. It shows you how to play it and what to expect and when you can do things. D&D didn't have any of that until there were actual plays.

Further, you never know what you're going to get with planned scenarios in a game like the starter set. I remember a friend and I found his dad's copy of the Avalon Hill Starship Troopers war game. We tried playing it, and it took us about an hour to puzzle through the rules, an hour to get one game set up, and about 15 minutes into play to realize that the scenario was so grossly one-sided that it was almost certain victory for one side. The game scenarios had modeled the battles in the book, and it favored that over a balanced confrontation. It was as close to a fixed game as I've seen. We tried a later scenario, and it was the same way with the other side winning. There were no rules that I recall for creating your own scenarios.