Worlds of Design: Harmony

Harmony and its opposite, the kludge, are fundamental to good game design.

Harmony and its opposite, the kludge, are fundamental to good game design.

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Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

Harmony makes small things grow, lack of it makes great things decay.” Sallust

What is Harmony in Game Design?​

The definition of harmony in the context of game design is different from other systems, like music. Harmony is often noted by its absence. Here is a quote from a 1997 lecture by Brian Moriarty where this concept of harmony in game design comes from:

It’s something you feel. How do you achieve this feeling that everything works together? Where do you get this harmony stuff? Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t come from design committees. It doesn’t come from focus groups or market surveys. It doesn’t come from cool technology or expensive marketing. And it never happens by accident or by luck. Games with harmony emerge from a fundamental note of clear intention.

I prefer a simpler definition: “everything in the game feels as though it belongs there and contributes to the purpose and feeling of the game as a whole.” That's harmony. It's important because games are not just collections of mechanics. Not just data. Not just metrics. Games make intellectual and emotional impressions on players, and lack of harmony is noticeable, sometimes clearly, sometimes in subtle ways.

What Harmony is Not

Harmony is not the same thing as “elegance.” Even the term elegance is sometimes used as a bludgeon to attack fans of other kinds of tabletop games. “Elegant” is often used in much the same sense as “clever.” It's usually used in relation to abstract games, games that are not simulationist.

Harmony isn't cleverness; it’s something that affects the game as a whole. It's about appropriate fit. Now what's an appropriate fit depends on what standards people are using, and those standards have changed over the years. Think about movies and TV shows over the years. What makes sense? The screen has always required a heavy “suspension of disbelief," but those entertainments have consistently become less believable. People will accept all kinds of foolishness and huge plot-holes because the program is otherwise entertaining.

This may well be due to more forms of narrative entertainment becoming more popular. Superhero movies and television shows have made previously unbelievable plots mainstream. Similarly, tabletop role-playing games are more popular than ever, and as storytelling and narrative has become ascendant, more play styles have become accepted. Rules alone are not required to make a game great, because games are more than just their rules.

Now that tabletop games are more mainstream and there's more space to enjoy them not as tactical simulations but as fun time killers, "harmony" in rules is much less important to gamers. Harmony can now mean more than just harmonized rules, but harmony in narrative, and even fun. Even with all these new forms of gaming expression, harmony matters -- dissonant rules, odd themes, or abrupt tone shifts can all make a game feel like something is off, even if players can't point to one particular rule or plot point that makes it feel that way.

And its Opposite

What's the opposite of harmony? The Kludge. I borrow this term from software (“kludgy” is the adjective that's used.) A kludge is a tacked-on solution to a particular problem, or a solution that works but isn’t consistent with the rest of the program. Fortunately, unlike software, kludges are easier to address in game design.

Games that lack rules harmony or have kludgy aspects can be challenging to play, though some succeed. Fortunately, most inharmonious games are never published, or only self-published. Players may not always recognize the inharmony, but its existence still affects the game. Designers may not recognize inharmony if they think of the game as “their baby.” But that doesn't diminish the importance of eliminating kludgy rules from the game. I’ll discuss the Kludge at length next time.

Your Turn: How do you deal with the inharmonious aspects of your favorite games?
 

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Lewis Pulsipher

Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio
I think Harmony is an unnecessary jargon term that in actuality is just describing an already existing thing, that being integration.

In video game land, that issue is best exemplified in the modern trend of tacking on RPG-like progression systems that very obviously are only there to inflate playtime, and isn't there because the game was designed with progression being part of the fun.

Such games tend to reveal this if you can cheat your way out of engaging with it, at which point the game suddenly is a lot more fun and stays that way until its actual unique content is exhausted. Cheating in games with integrated progression doesn't work like that; skipping to the end often means you lose out on the fun after the initial excitement of unlocks fades. Its the difference between unlocking everything in Far Cry 3 and now you have a huge sandbox to be a bad ass in, and using cheated in Rare Candys to jack up your Pokemon starter such that you're no longer engaging with all the fun parts of the game.

Going back to RPGs, integration as an issue is mostly rooted in games typically called "crunchy" to some degree, and in particular those that were designed to be modular. Such games aren't designed with an integrated gameplay loop in mind, so entire systems if they aren't especially fun on their own become easy to drop or, if they aren't fun or are poorly designed, get in the way of whatever the actual gameplay loop is.

Exploration and Survival mechanics in 5e for example, are pretty much vestigial and this has been an ongoing problem since WOTC took over, where these poorly designed aspects of previous editions, rather than fixed, are simply deemphasized if not eliminated entirely with subsequent editions. Ergo, attempts in 5e to use them more often and not just results in disruption, and the prevailing trend is to question why they should be used, and the game doesn't provide any real justification to that end. They're not integrated, so if they aren't fun, they're superflous.

Integration is something I've been harping about for a while, and is pretty core to how my own games have developed over time.

The issue with integration, though, tends to be that its hard to have design discussions about a game that emphasizes full integration of all of its elements with each other, because you can't talk about individual systems out of context.

One only needs to read one of my design posts where it was vitally important that I cover the context needed to see why; its a lot to read and internalize from a design POV. That doesn't mean the game has to be understood to that level just to be played, but it does mean most people just don't bother reading it because they're lazy and don't want to chew on things that long, no matter what is done to make it accessible.

(And one only needs to look at earlier posts of mine where I didn't provide that context and kept getting chewed out, to see the catch-22 that has lead me to consider the online RPG Design space as completely moronic and a waste of time and energy, despite the fact I still try to get more eyeballs on things than I can get in real life)
 

Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow
Id have to see examples of what a kludge would look like in TTRPG and what RPGs are particularly harmonious.

Im thinking of Palladium and RIFTs, would that be particurly disharmonious?
 

Id have to see examples of what a kludge would look like in TTRPG and what RPGs are particularly harmonious.

Im thinking of Palladium and RIFTs, would that be particurly disharmonious?
Isn't D&D full of kludge?

Like adding story telling to dungeon crawling?
Or adding tactical options to long term resource management?
Or adding economics to adventuring?
Or adding anime to swords and socery?
 

Tonguez

A suffusion of yellow
Isn't D&D full of kludge?

Like adding story telling to dungeon crawling?
Or adding tactical options to long term resource management?
Or adding economics to adventuring?
Or adding anime to swords and socery?
then I'm not sure harmony is the correct term to be using. Those are all components of a game system that need to be kludged together to get the system thats wanted, but 'harmony' is surely applicable to the final result not to the process used to get it
 


aramis erak

Legend
Elegance is important; its feeling good for the situation because the design is a natural fit.

Harmony is nice, but harmony done right is often the prerequisite to elegance, and elegance is always preferable.
 

talien

Community Supporter
I think the challenge is from a game design perspective there's not an agreement on phrasing what a "smooth" game feels like. That is, top to bottom, rules, narrative, etc. work.

D&D gets stretched massively to accommodate playstyles it probably wasn't originally intended for. It's quite flexible in that way but when you play more story-style games that are designed for that kind of play, you see the difference.

Conversely, early days of the World of Darkness games sometimes felt (despite the prevailing sentiment they were "story-focused") that they were actually just ill-defined rules and "story" filled in the blanks; because of this, we mostly ended up with combat monster style characters anyway. That is, we were supposed to play vampires role-playing intrigue and ended up playing Underworld style gun battles vs. werewolves. It never felt like the rules truly supported the style of play the game espoused until later versions came along.
 

aramis erak

Legend
I think the challenge is from a game design perspective there's not an agreement on phrasing what a "smooth" game feels like. That is, top to bottom, rules, narrative, etc. work.

D&D gets stretched massively to accommodate playstyles it probably wasn't originally intended for. It's quite flexible in that way but when you play more story-style games that are designed for that kind of play, you see the difference.

Conversely, early days of the World of Darkness games sometimes felt (despite the prevailing sentiment they were "story-focused") that they were actually just ill-defined rules and "story" filled in the blanks; because of this, we mostly ended up with combat monster style characters anyway. That is, we were supposed to play vampires role-playing intrigue and ended up playing Underworld style gun battles vs. werewolves. It never felt like the rules truly supported the style of play the game espoused until later versions came along.
I've known groups who found the first ed with its autosuccess rule allowed a lot less rolling and a lot more politicing.
(VTM 1 was dice pool, count vs the difficulty; autosuccess allowed when the difficulty was less than the dice pool, no roll, counts as 1 success, no risk of botch, no chance of exceptional outcome. VTM 2nd and later were fixed TN, difficulty being number of successes lost.)

Some groups used the rules as intended, others played what the rules encouraged. The ones I got to listen to at table were indeed VTM as supers, but I was aware of groups not doing so. (My then roommie and his then GF were running a game at his folks' place.)
 
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Theory of Games

Storied Gamist
"Storygames" like PbtA games are very inharmonious. They lack rules depth and most of them fail to deliver the long-term campaign play experience found with D&D and CoC.

Because of their limited and confusing rules, most Story-games get ignored by most ttrpg gamers. Those games feel unfinished. They can never offer the deeper play experiences easily acquired from systems like GURPS or D&D. Harmony is a facet of complete rules systems.
 

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