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

 

[Haffrung]

I've been running 5e since it came out, and I still can't find things in the rulebook when I need to.

Same here. Basic stuff like how many spells a wizard has in their spellbook at level 1 is buried in paragraphs of text. It's ridiculous. And no, putting that in a wall of text does not spark the imagination or make the learning the game more immersive.

 

[Haffrung]

I think you’re dramatically overestimating the amount of time the new wave of players approach the game. My observations with a 18 month old group born out of board gaming is that they don’t paw through the book searching for rules between sessions. They turn up expecting to do character design and level up at the table as part of the game. They may check out a forum like this for ideas, or read a guide, but they don’t spend a huge amount of time planning.

While I appreciate this is anecdotal, I believe I saw that a lot of new players are also families playing with children. A generation of older players passing it on to the next generation. I don’t believe in these cases it would be typical for everyone in the family to have their own book.

In short. While it might be desirable to have your own copy of PHB it certainly isn’t necessary in situations where You’re playing with friends and family (rather than at a club/store/con). I definitely don’t see more than one copy of Xanathars or Tasha’s at the table. That’s my copy.

I really don’t see any evidence of the accusation that D&D conditions players to have their own copies of books.

This matches my experience. In our group at the office made up almost entirely of newbs, two people out of six bought a PHB. Other than those two, nobody has cracked a book or given any thought to D&D outside the time we were playing. Everybody bought their own dice, though, because funky dice are fun and people like to buy stuff for their hobbies.
Heck, I have a couple guys in the group I've been playing with for 30 years who have never cracked a D&D book away from the table. For most participants, D&D is a far more casual hobby than one would be think from reading these forums.

 

[MGibster]

But "will this book sit on my shelf unloved?" is a different question from your original one about whether players would likewise buy a copy.

It's related to the original question though in that it's one of the many points of data that's taken into account when deciding whether or not to purchase a book. Even though I've already said price isn't much of a barrier it's still a factor. I avoided purchasing the Conan RPG for a while because I wasn't sure my players would be interested. But when it went on sale at my FLGS and I decided to take a chance because the price was too good. We would have had a go of it in 2020 had it not been for the pandemic.

I'm not sure if reading the rules would actually help players like this one.

That's not an unfair statement.

Then why even bother asking if the players would read the setting materials as a pertinent question to take under consideration?

I typically have six players in my regular group and they're not all exactly alike. When I ran my Vampire game, two of the players eagerly ate up all the lore videos I sent, one of them read enough to get by, the other was already familiar with the setting, and two of my regulars opted out of the campaign because they just didn't care for the material. Sometimes what grabs one player doesn't grab another. And I'm the same way and I can remember the name of one of those games I just couldn't get into: Exalted! Oh, man! I played the game because most of the group wanted to but I never had any idea what was going on, the rules were confusing, and I was so happy when that campaign was over.

 

[fearsomepirate]

This matches my experience. In our group at the office made up almost entirely of newbs, two people out of six bought a PHB. Other than those two, nobody has cracked a book or given any thought to D&D outside the time we were playing. Everybody bought their own dice, though, because funky dice are fun and people like to buy stuff for their hobbies.
Heck, I have a couple guys in the group I've been playing with for 30 years who have never cracked a D&D book away from the table. For most participants, D&D is a far more casual hobby than one would be think from reading these forums.

As much as people slammed 4e's layout for being boring, it was, for the most part, very effective as an in-game reference manual.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Which systems to you have in mind?

Cthulhu Dark is a 4 page free PDF. There is no cost, the time required to read it is very minimal, and there is nothing I can think of that the rules don't address.

Prince Valiant is one book that is thinner than any D&D hardback since about 1978. (It's a similar size to the AD&D PHB, but is a complete game that also includes a number of sample scenarios.) And the rules are not less complete than D&D.

I'm talking about the systems people actually seem to be playing. The ones showing up on icv2 and roll20 lists and that my FLGS was telling me sold well (when they were open). D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulu, Savage Worlds, Starfinder, Warhammer, One Ring, Cyberpunk Red, Stars Without Number, Blades in the Dark, etc. All these games have big, beefy rulebooks.

Even Dungeon World, a famously rules-light game, has a rulebook that is several hundred pages. Yes, it's in a format that lends itself to a longer book with a ton of whitespace and larger print, but even if you condensed it down it'd still be a couple hundred pages. Mouse Guard, another game I think most people would consider rules-light, has a core rulebook with 320 pages, too.

The existence of MicroLite20 doesn't mean that switching systems is easy. Just like the existence of Fiasco doesn't mean you should expect to play any TTRPG game with zero preparation. People still seem to mostly be interested in RPG games with significant heft to them to simulate a real world. Just like we see boardgames on kickstarter including dozens of bits and bobs and tokens and cards, RPG books generally show up with a hefty hardcover. That's the kind of bespoke RPG product people are willing to fund, regardless of whether or not that's what they end up playing. The same people who funded TSR's products in the mid to late 90s are the same ones funding kickstarters. On the flip side, established RPGs are also already this type of game, too.

People aren't playing Cthulu Dark. It's a game with exactly one mechanic. That's barely enough to be a one-shot. They're playing Call of Cthulu, which is a couple hundred pages. We know that because that's what's been in the top 5 of the sales charts and in the top 5 of the roll20 campaigns for the past couple of years. Unless they were in the KS, people aren't playing Prince Valiant, either. You can't get that anymore, including the 2018 edition; it's not on DriveThruRPG or Chaosium's site. They're playing Pendragon because that's what Chaosium is still selling, which clocks in at at 220 pages.

I think the biggest obstacle to D&D players picking up systems like Cthulhu Dark or Prince Valiant is that these require them to learn new and unfamiliar processes of play.

Yes, obviously. And where do we learn these new and unfamiliar processes of play? By reading the often quite thick rulebooks.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm talking about the systems people actually seem to be playing. The ones showing up on icv2 and roll20 lists and that my FLGS was telling me sold well (when they were open). D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulu, Savage Worlds, Starfinder, Warhammer, One Ring, Cyberpunk Red, Stars Without Number, Blades in the Dark, etc. All these games have big, beefy rulebooks.

Even Dungeon World, a famously rules-light game, has a rulebook that is several hundred pages. Yes, it's in a format that lends itself to a longer book with a ton of whitespace and larger print, but even if you condensed it down it'd still be a couple hundred pages. Mouse Guard, another game I think most people would consider rules-light, has a core rulebook with 320 pages, too.

It's worth noting, that while these some of these systems may have "big, beefy rulebooks," they aren't typically sold individually as PHB, DMG, and/or MM, but simply as the singular core rulebook. So a lot of the information therein is not always meant for the non-GM players. For some of these books, it has everything you need for running the game.

The PC-pertinent material in Blades in the Dark is within the first 1-186 pages. In comparison, 186 pages doesn't event touch the Combat chapter in the 5e PHB.

When you cut out the GM materials, Dungeon World is 157 pages, but the idea that a new player would need to read those 157 pages doesn't really equate to my actual experience running it. IME, games like Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, or other PbtA-type games often simply involves the GM presenting the players with playbooks pre-printed. A basic rundown of the game happens (e.g., "describe what you want to do, it may trigger a move, and then roll 2d6: if 1-6, then X; if 7-9, then Y; if 10+, then Z...") and then play resumes pretty quickly. A big benefit with PbtA, FitD, and Fate games is that they tend to be exceptionally fiction-first games, which helps new players jump into the games quite readily.

Yes, obviously. And where do we learn these new and unfamiliar processes of play? By reading the often quite thick rulebooks.

IME, generally for players it's by playing in a game with someone who has done so already.

 

[Bacon Bits]

It's worth noting, that while these some of these systems may have "big, beefy rulebooks," they aren't typically sold individually as PHB, DMG, and/or MM, but simply as the singular core rulebook. So a lot of the information therein is not always meant for the non-GM players. For some of these books, it has everything you need for running the game.

The PC-pertinent material in Blades in the Dark is within the first 1-186 pages. In comparison, 186 pages doesn't event touch the Combat chapter in the 5e PHB.

When you cut out the GM materials, Dungeon World is 157 pages, but the idea that a new player would need to read those 157 pages doesn't really equate to my actual experience running it. IME, games like Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, or other PbtA-type games often simply involves the GM presenting the players with playbooks pre-printed. A basic rundown of the game happens (e.g., "describe what you want to do, it may trigger a move, and then roll 2d6: if 1-6, then X; if 7-9, then Y; if 10+, then Z...") and then play resumes pretty quickly. A big benefit with PbtA, FitD, and Fate games is that they tend to be exceptionally fiction-first games, which helps new players jump into the games quite readily.


IME, generally for players it's by playing in a game with someone who has done so already.

That's exactly the point, though. I'm pointing out that new systems are difficult to move to when nobody in the group is familiar with them. When all anybody has is the back-of-the-box description.

You don't know until you get the book how much you need to read. You often won't know until you play what parts are actually important. You can't say "Dungeon World is really only 50 pages because that's all you really need" because that's based on knowledge you only have after you've read it and after you've played. Someone had to read the other 350 pages to know that they're not always useful or not necessary. And, yes, while not every player needs to read the sections outlined as the GM section, at least one person does and it often is a tremendous help if more than one person does.

The whole point is that even if you know that a lion's share of the book isn't going to be useful in every session or even every campaign, someone still has to go through the task of figuring out what to keep and what to discard. Someone has to read everything first. The first step in running a new system you have no familiarity with is reading everything written as the rulebook at least to the point of understanding the purpose and goal of each section of the rulebook so you can reference it during play. Like you don't want to get 5 sessions in to One Ring and discover the rules for Sauron's influence, or 5 sessions in to Call of Cthulu and discovering the rules for sanity, or 5 sessions in to D&D and discovering the rules for skill checks. Each game has a set of minimal systems built in to it to function as a game, and somebody has to figure that out before the table can play.

Otherwise you're just filling in a character sheet with numbers you'll never use because nobody knows when they come up.

 

[prabe]

I think you’re dramatically overestimating the amount of time the new wave of players approach the game. My observations with a 18 month old group born out of board gaming is that they don’t paw through the book searching for rules between sessions. They turn up expecting to do character design and level up at the table as part of the game. They may check out a forum like this for ideas, or read a guide, but they don’t spend a huge amount of time planning.

While I appreciate this is anecdotal, I believe I saw that a lot of new players are also families playing with children. A generation of older players passing it on to the next generation. I don’t believe in these cases it would be typical for everyone in the family to have their own book.

In short. While it might be desirable to have your own copy of PHB it certainly isn’t necessary in situations where You’re playing with friends and family (rather than at a club/store/con). I definitely don’t see more than one copy of Xanathars or Tasha’s at the table. That’s my copy.

I really don’t see any evidence of the accusation that D&D conditions players to have their own copies of books.

Eh. One of my table has two players new to the game. They both have their own copies of the PHB, and they both have done some thinking about their characters away from the table. I'll admit, my tables started at stores (and will, inshallah, be in stores again, someday), which is a condition you admit is different. Also, the more veteran players at both tables do put a fair amount of away-from-the-table thought into their characters, which does go some way toward setting a tone/expectation.

FWIW, I was attempting to explain others' thinking, not argue with you. It is possible to play TRPGs you don't own the book/s for; I've done it.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Yes, obviously. And where do we learn these new and unfamiliar processes of play? By reading the often quite thick rulebooks.

I'm not sure I agree with this, especially with the number of people that fail to grasp how a number of games function when reading them. Usually this is due to bringing prior experience forward, and expecting the new game to operate largely as a previously learned game does. This is fine when moving among the game systems that are similar to D&D -- ones that feature GM as the primary, if not sole, author of world fiction and adjudication of said world. The number of people that have trouble moving from a D&D-like experience in games to something like the PbtA games is markedly high -- because they're not actually reading the rulebooks to learn to play but assuming they know how to RPG and this is just a new way. Hence the large amount of confusion on how certain mechanics can possibly work.

I'm speaking from experience, here -- my first attempt to move away from the D&D sphere into Burning Wheel was a complete disaster of failure to understand how the game even worked, despite the rulebook being pretty clear on how it does work. I kept trying to fit that into my then understanding of how RPGs worked, and it didn't fit. I can mostly learn a new game from a rulebook now, though, because I make sure to leave everything else at the front cover.

 

[Aldarc]

That's exactly the point, though. I'm pointing out that new systems are difficult to move to when nobody in the group is familiar with them. When all anybody has is the back-of-the-box description.

You don't know until you get the book how much you need to read.

...the Table of Contents, which I can read for free on DriveThruRPG or flip through in a hobby store.