I really and I mean REALLY disagree with the ‘system matters’ take on RPG design popularized by Ron Edwards and Forge. I believe that fundamentally, any game designed strictly from the system matters perspective will fail as a popular game. It’s an approach to gaming from a theoretical perspective that has nothing to do with the realities of table play, and as such will never create games as broadly appealing as more organic and more pragmatic games like D&D. It’s this reason that lies behind seemingly badly designed games (from a rules perspective) being more popular and enduring than all the elegantly designed systems out there. The people producing the elegant designs all too often don’t know what they are designing for.
One of the first flaws the ‘system matters’ designers make is assuming that a group is willing and able to accept whatever goals the designer had for the game as their own. What you end up with is game designed by designers for themselves, and which basically work only for their own tables (if that, since play testing doesn’t seem to be the hallmark of designs of this sort). In the real world, most groups aren’t composed entirely players who have the attitude or the ability to adopt the goals of whatever game they are thrust into, and even when they can a good percentage of those players don’t stay satisfied for long because they’d rather be playing in a game that had their preferred goals.
In practice, most groups will have at least one gamer who is a purist for style. Regardless of the game, this gamer is only interested in playing the game for a story, or to win, or to kill things and take their stuff, or toy with the rules, or to engage in complex ‘what if’ scenarios, or to explore philosophical issues, or whatever. Regardless of the game’s goals, the player tries to adapt the game to his own goals. Likewise, most groups will have at least one gamer who is purist for alignment. Regardless of the game or the nominal character he is playing, he always plays the character from a certain moral perspective – every character is lawful good, or chaotic neutral, or chaotic evil, or simply is unconcerned with morality and makes choices solely based on their perceived survival value. Likewise, most groups will have at least one player that enjoys competing AND story AND emersion and will feel cheated if the game isn’t offering all three either simultaneously or at least in turns. And finally, almost every group has at least one member that is learning disabled in one RPG skill set or another. Despite 5 or 16 years in the game, that player simply can’t RP… or can’t build optimized characters without help… or has no idea what to do in a tactical situation. Games that try to tell the group how the game should be played in GNS terms, almost always fail on this level.
The typical response is ‘you should get a different group’, but groups of friends are what they are. You go to game with the group you got, not the one the designer tells you should have, because friends are scarce and friends that will show up every week to commit 4+ hours to a game are even rarer. You don’t abandon your group because some designer tells you that you are doing it wrong. Instead of finding a different group, you find a different game – either within the system that the designer didn’t imagine – or in another system. And if your system is inflexible in that way, as many ‘system matters’ systems are, then usually it’s the later.
Another way the ‘system matters’ philosophers go wrong is that they fail to realize that the rules aren’t even remotely the most important things at the table. In addition to the personalities and abilities of the players being more important than the system, and the social contract prevailing at the table being more important than the system (the ‘meta-rules’) there is one area of a the game that I consider all important that ‘system matters’ designers almost invariably neglect. And that area is, what does the story teller bring to the table?
The single most important factor in determining what a game is like is not the rules, but how a story teller envisions play and prepares to play the game. Regardless of system, if the story teller prepares for play by drawing a complex asymmetrical map of an underground environment, populates that environment with monsters, treasure, and traps and proceeds to describe the game in terms of the players step by step investigation of this environment, the game is going to play a lot like D&D. This may result in some degree of system weirdness from time to time if the designer really REALLY didn’t anticipate this possibility, but by and large those system effects are going to be submerged down beneath the level of the story being created so that – if you really did novelize the game so that you removed all meta-descriptions from the story, you couldn’t tell what system was really being played. You can see that effect in the reverse. Tolkien’s LotR may not be best suited as a 1e AD&D game, but ultimately ‘Gandalf is a 6th level Wizard’ can be seen as a reasonable enough interpretation that it’s possible to see back to a campaign played by a particular group of players using a particular system (that never actually occurred).
The really crazy thing that I’m asserting is that regardless of the system, not only can you prepare the game to be like D&D by assuming that a dungeon is fundamental to play, but you can probably make that work within the system by preparing for that properly. You might not get the impression from the text that ‘Dogs in the Vineyard’ is a game of dungeon exploration where you kill things and take their stuff, but with the right game preparation and the right players it would probably work as one. In fact, the only reason I don’t right ‘certainly’ instead of probably is I haven’t bothered to try it yet. Often here the question becomes ‘why would you want to’, and the answer to that is depending on the situation either “Right. Exactly” or else “Because groups can adjust faster than systems can.” The story teller may start out with a theory of how the game is going to be played, but consciously or unconsciously adapt to how the game is actually played at that table.
And yes, you can get a session of ‘Dogs in the Vineyard’ style low drama, philosophical, moral and narrative tension out of D20 (or even 1e AD&D) if you prepare for it right and have the right players.
Because the system is of so relatively minor importance, problems with the system can be plowed through. What you can’t plow through is problems between the games the story teller makes and the games that the players want to play, or failures of the social contract, or so forth. A game that tells you what the game you are supposed to play is, or tells you what social contract you are supposed to have, or even tells you where the fun is supposed to be, is setting itself up for failure. And in general, I tend to be far more impressed by a game that provides copious examples of how to successfully prepare to play the game, and how to run the game once it begins, than one that has an elegant or innovative system.
