D&D General D&D's Evolution: Rulings, Rules, and "System Matters"

[Jay Murphy1]

"Writing a roleplaying game isn't that difficult."

No, it's not. Writing a good roleplaying game is difficult, and publishing it even moreso.

Highly disagree. publishing a rpg is as easy as offering PDFs and POD copies. Drivethru or Lulu will print it and ship it and collect the money. The creator doesn't have to do anything.

 

[pemerton]

I think you are missing the point that was being made.

I could have a discussion with you about the canon version of Dis. We have both some idea of it. I can't have a discussion with you about "the island" because I've never encountered that material.

We could have a discussion about Action Surge. We couldn't discuss my homebrewed Icon of War ability for Fighters, because you haven't read it.

That is the point about "canon" and "official" in creating shared language. Not that such things should be considered "important" for the home game, but that they allow us to discuss between vast distances, because we have both seen that material

Well, you and I can't discuss the "official" (ie published) rules for battles in Prince Valiant I don't think, because I seem to be the only ENworlder to have read and played it.

So yes, it's true that if you and I have both read something we can talk about it. But that doesn't depend on further notions like "official" or "canon".

 

[pemerton]

This one was slapped together in an evening by another person

I doubt that all that text was written in one evening.

And I think this also reinforces the point that it is easy to write a mediocre RPG.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't disagree with any of this. Well put.

I think that, for the most part, people talk past each other when it comes to the subject. I think that the following two things are true:

1. Creating a coherent rule set (and accompanying body of lore) that is useable to people you don't know, understandable to people you don't know, internally consistent, and fun, is a difficult task.

2. Creating a fun RPG to play with people you know is easy. Heck, kids do it all the time.

A decent summary. But it does seem to imply a question: If it's so easy that "kids do it all the time," why do we pay any money at all for a game system?

It would seem to me that, if one is ponying up real money for it, one must want a product that, to some extent, just works "off the shelf," as you put it earlier. Which, if true, would mean there's no absolute divide between "everything is DIY, figure all of it out yourself" and "everything is prewritten, just plug-n-chug." Instead, we'd have a spectrum, with one end defined as "I want a real real basic skeleton that just works 'off the shelf,' and otherwise a system that embraces being filled in by me/my group," and the other defined as, "I want a fairly comprehensive system where most things I'd want to do will just work 'off the shelf,' and any remaining holes can be filled in by me/my group."

And presented that way, the two sound nearly indistinguishable. Both want a reliable core, and the ability to address gaps when they appear. One just wants to have the feeling of most everything being "under my control so I can make sure it fits," while the other wants to have the feeling of most everything being "already handled so I can focus on running the game." (Obviously not everyone fits into either bucket, but those seem to be the vast majority of the two sides.)

 

[Chaosmancer]

Highly disagree. publishing a rpg is as easy as offering PDFs and POD copies. Drivethru or Lulu will print it and ship it and collect the money. The creator doesn't have to do anything.

Which is why major publishers don't go to events like Gencon to sell physical products. Except they do.

So, do you have a point beyond trying to discredit an entire profession? Because I'm sure I could find some art made by an 11 yr old, or maybe find an audio clip of some child composer. You know, football can be played by 16 yr olds, so professional athletes could also be considered a waste of time. Heck, I drive a car, what's the point of NASCAR?

I mean, we can toss examples back and forth and try and make people's livelihoods seem like lies and wastes of time, but I don't see why we would want to do that. So, what's your larger point?

 

[Chaosmancer]

Well, you and I can't discuss the "official" (ie published) rules for battles in Prince Valiant I don't think, because I seem to be the only ENworlder to have read and played it.

So yes, it's true that if you and I have both read something we can talk about it. But that doesn't depend on further notions like "official" or "canon".

True, but it does help. If I said I had read Prince Valiant (I haven't) then you would assume I read the official rules, not a homebrewed system by the same name.

Again, no judgement values, the only point is that having official rules allows for a discussion about official rules with other people across the globe. That is a value.

 

[pemerton]

True, but it does help. If I said I had read Prince Valiant (I haven't) then you would assume I read the official rules, not a homebrewed system by the same name.

Again, no judgement values, the only point is that having official rules allows for a discussion about official rules with other people across the globe. That is a value.

In your first para, would would matter would not be the status of the rules as official, but clarifying what it was that you had read.

Official rules are useful where uniformity of resolution and adjudication matters - eg competitive sports played across multiple venues and leagues.

But I think they are overrated in RPGing.

In my 4e D&D game, we didn't have issues with "weapliments" that plagued some tables because it was obvious from the get-go (both in terms of flavour and mechanical effectiveness) which feats would work with a dagger used as a weapon, and which would work with it used as an implement. WotC finally released errata that gave effect to our house rules, but that didn't change anything about what was happening at our table.

Or from the other side: what makes Greg Stafford's rules for Prince Valiant a masterpiece of RPG design is not that they are official but that they work incredibly well. Which goes back to the other current sub-theme of this thread: designing a good RPG is not easy. Designers like Stafford, and Vincent Baker, and Robin Laws, can come up with ideas that are far from commonplace.

 

[Chaosmancer]

In your first para, would would matter would not be the status of the rules as official, but clarifying what it was that you had read.

Official rules are useful where uniformity of resolution and adjudication matters - eg competitive sports played across multiple venues and leagues.

But I think they are overrated in RPGing.

I agree with your first paragraph, but I think that "official" having that uniformity and coming from the publishing company makes it easier to confirm and more likely to have read than any homebrew rules.

For example, If I wanted to talk about the crafting rules for DnD 5e, I can reference Xanathars and PHB with some expectation that a person who plays 5e owns the PHB and has at least a familiarity with Xanathars. I really can't assume that about the work of Kibblestasty, whose crafting system I've been working to integrate, because it does somethings I like.

Again, it is a matter of a shared baseline, and yes, I can confirm if you have read the homebrew material and then once we are both familiar with it we can discuss it, but that process is more difficult than assuming that you have read the "official" rules to a game you are playing.

In my 4e D&D game, we didn't have issues with "weapliments" that plagued some tables because it was obvious from the get-go (both in terms of flavour and mechanical effectiveness) which feats would work with a dagger used as a weapon, and which would work with it used as an implement. WotC finally released errata that gave effect to our house rules, but that didn't change anything about what was happening at our table.

Or from the other side: what makes Greg Stafford's rules for Prince Valiant a masterpiece of RPG design is not that they are official but that they work incredibly well. Which goes back to the other current sub-theme of this thread: designing a good RPG is not easy. Designers like Stafford, and Vincent Baker, and Robin Laws, can come up with ideas that are far from commonplace.

I don't disagree with any of this. Again, I place no inherent value in official rules being better or worse than the homebrew material. I have encountered many homebrews I find superior. I myself have homebrewed extensively. But solely on the grounds of a shared baseline, my personal homebrew is not something that can be brought into a rigorous debate, because I'm the only one familiar with it. No one else is discussing the rules in the context of my homebrew, so it makes it incredibly difficult to make them part of the discussion from the beginning. Much easier to simply stick with the official rules, make sure an understanding is reached, and then branch out from that shared understanding to include things like personal homebrew.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm not really into "canon" - I don't need my fiction to be knowable in advance to other RPGers. When I've wanted to explain it to them, I've generally found myself able to do so.

My relationship with "official" is more complicated. I have no problem with introducing new game material where it is warranted - on the weekend I ran a session of Agon using the island I wrote up for "Not the Iron DM"; in my 4e D&D campaign I used plenty of game elements (eg creatures) that I made up myself; as a Rolemaster GM I authored my own systems for initiative, PC building, etc (which is practically compulsory for a serious RM GM).

Thankfully my point that I am trying to make is not dependent on pemerton's relationship to either "canon" or "official."

 

[Aldarc]

I don't disagree with any of this. Well put.

I think that, for the most part, people talk past each other when it comes to the subject. I think that the following two things are true:

1. Creating a coherent rule set (and accompanying body of lore) that is useable to people you don't know, understandable to people you don't know, internally consistent, and fun, is a difficult task.

2. Creating a fun RPG to play with people you know is easy. Heck, kids do it all the time.

Going back to this, I think one of the difficult issues with designing a system, much as you allude to in point 1, involves creating something that is not sustained by the creator. Sometimes the creator IS the heavy machinery that is running things rather than the system itself. I think that some games are great IF you have the right person to run them, because they rely on a particular facilitator to keep the game running as it should. So when they get that system in the hands of others, people sometimes are frustrated that it's not working as intended despite following the rules and system as written. It turns out that the system isn't all that great without the Creator's heart to keep blood pumping.

I think that is one reason why I have heard so often from game designers nowadays that game designers shouldn't just run the game they created, but also play the games and have other people run them as well as other tables and groups. You don't necessarily know how much of an RPG is the system or the designer/GM who is doing the heavy sustain work.