Games and Systems

Goal oriented campaigning.

Arguing over the wrong thing

Much ink (digital and real) has been spilled over the years arguing the benefits of Rules as Written vs Homebrew in the sphere of table top roleplaying. Having done a few rounds of it, I’ve come to a realization that might be obvious to some. Most people are arguing about the wrong thing. They believe their disagreement stems from wether or not a person is beholden to the system in question, or if the players are truly the masters of their own domain. In general the conversation boils down to “why bother playing the system at all if you aren’t going to follow the rules” vs “I bought the system, I can change it as I want to fit my table’s needs.” The issue is that both these positions are making different assumptions about what the point of using the system even is in the first place. The former camp is assuming the goal is to play the system, while the later is assuming the goal is play a game using the system. These may seem like the same thing, but they are not. To illustrate my point, consider Magic the Gathering. EDH (or commander is modern parlance) is a game played with magic cards but it bears only a passing resemblance to the more standard 60 card constructed formats. There are several other games one can play with magic cards and most of the rules of the standard 60 card game (eg Cube Draft or Forgetful Fish). These are not Magic by rules as written, but no one would argue they aren’t a valid way to play. This sort of “game with pieces from another game” tinkering is the root of the hobby. Had Dave Wesely not created Strategos N from Strategos the hobby as we know it know would look very different, if it even existed at all. Bringing it back to the larger point, I believe that much of the online homebrew is in a similar ethos. The potential group wants a specific experience, and such and such a system gets 80-90% percent of the way there. So some rules are changed or ignored or added. Then everyone gets on the internet and talks about their awesome D&D campaign where the only available character class was Hafling Thief and then the arguments begin. What gets lost is that the halfing thief campaign was the goal, not playing ad&d 3.5 as RAW as possible. They were playing Commander and now we are arguing about whether or not you can cheat at the pro-tour. It’s a nonsensical cycle.

Goalsetting

Any campaign that a group starts usually starts with a pitch of some kind. It may be implicit, but usually it’s explicit (“Hey guys I’m running a d&d game set in Egypt”, “going to run Call of Cthulhu during the American Civil War”, “going to run Netrunner during a rebellion against X mega-corp”, etc). Each pitch tells the group of potential players what to largely expect from the upcoming game, both in mechanics, tone, and possible outcomes for characters. As a staunch believer in <Simulationist Gaming> as articulated by Archon and exemplified in the Autarch systems(ACKS, Ascendant), I believe that pitches should give a broad idea of the initial conditions and boundaries for the ensuing simulation (and I have posted about it as much in threads on Fudging vs Ignoring, more on this in a future article). It stands to reason that a D&D game in Egypt is probably not going to have a bunch of Oriental Adventures monsters and class, the Call of Cthulhu game probably isn’t going to be using the modern firearms and 1920s lingo, and the Netrunner game probably isn’t going to look fondly on whatever the mega-corp in question is. This pitch is largely what I would consider the goal of the campaign/game (game from here on out). The system is just one part of that goal. The goal can be as wide or as narrow as desired by the person offering to run a game. It can be based in a desired narrative, simulation, or mechanical experience. In general, my campaigns are simulations, as I said. I set up a world with some initial conditions and then let the players go. However, I have ran games that had a more narrative related goal, generally with different systems. One such was a Ryuutama game where the goal was the players fulfilling a narrative of recovering a sacred artifact and returning it. The BroSR started off with the goal of experiencing a AD&D 1e as close to RAW as possible. The important thing to remember is that this goal doesn’t just stop existing as soon as play actually begins. Play groups are capable of determine if a game (and the system being used to run the game) is satisfactorily delivering on the intended goal and the adjust accordingly. And this, I believe, is where the breakdown actually occurs online. People who have conflicting goals arguing over things completely unrelated to their fundamental disagreement in goal. When a person who is attempting to run a swashbuckling game with D&D and as such might be adding rules to punish platemail (pirates don’t wear a lot of plate), or a person is ignoring Perils of the Warp in Rogue Trader to allow a group to travel easily with a defined region and focus more on the politic rules interacts with a person whose primary goal is system mastery, the sparks fly.

Systems don’t define games, Games inform system choice.

So, understanding that a group is always sitting down with some goal in mind for the game they are about to run or play in, what does that have to do with Rules as Written? The answer is that the set of possible games and goals vastly outnumbers the set of extant ttrpg systems. This means that for many games, there is no “perfect system,” just several really close ones within 90-99% of what a given person needs to run whatever their desired experience is. What this means is that practically speaking, most people are going to pick a system that gets close enough and the tweak it to their liking. People do not have the mental capacity to come up with a bespoke personal game every time they want to run a campaign that slightly differs from what a system can do. Look at the myriad of campaigns online that are D&D but set somewhere other than a Fantasy Medieval setting. Many times these come with rule changes to enforce narrative or world feel. An example I bring up is Guns in my personal setting. In the original Shallow Sea game, I wanted guns to be rare and powerful. So I shopped around for various systems that had included guns (This is how I found Lamentations of the Flame Princess). However, I also wanted the simplicity of B/X for basically every other aspect of the game. Finally, I decided to just make up some rules for each gun and treat them more like magic items; and this worked extremely well to reinforce the idea that in this world, blackpowder was just coming into it’s own and while there were specific, very powerful guns, most common ones were clunky and not very useful. Meeting a character with a fancy gun meant something and stuck out. This would not have happened if I had simply opted to run B/X rules as written or some other system like Castles and Crusades were guns are very common and about on par with other weapon choices.

In general, a system by itself is a vehicle to the larger game the group wants to play. It is not the game in and of itself. This is not to say, as some might claim, that any system can be used for any game. A good system will have some degree of flex built in, but will have a range of things it does best, a wider range of things it can do, and an even wider range of things it simply can’t do. This is best exemplified in people practically begging 5e players to please play another system whenever they start trying to rework it for a cyberpunk setting, or in the BroSR coming to the realization that to play high intrigue diplomacy like games, they need to throw off the shackles of 1e some and just free-form patron play.

Goals vs “Fun”

Much of this will sound like a wordcel way of saying “Just play how you think is fun teehee” but that is not my intention. The best thing about viewing systems in light of the goal that you are trying to accomplish is that goals and the attainment thereof can actually be measured. If your goal is to play whatever system as RAW as possible, that can be measured. Conversely, If your goal is to simulate a certain genre of fiction, how well the system delivers can also be measured and tweaked. Goal based refinement like this is based in objective reality. Meanwhile wether or not something is fun is completely subjective. Again, the hobby itself was largely developed through the process of picking a ruleset that was kind of close and then altering it slightly for the exact nature of the campaign ahead.

The Rules as Agreed paradigm

The conclusion of this is what I am going to call Rules as Agreed (RAA). Under this paradigm, a campaign acknowledges up front what its goal is. The platonic ideal as it were. From then on, that is the overriding force in making rulings, altering rules, and so on and so forth. Under RAA players and referees alike are not slaves to each other or to the system they are choosing to run, but instead are brother-workmen in attempting to achieve whatever the higher-order goal of the game is. Once you begin operating under this paradigm, questions like “is fudging cheating, what about ignoring random results?”, “Can I port this subsystem from X game to this campaign?”, and “Do I have to use these extremely cumbersome rules when the thing in question can be decided much cleaner with a single dice roll?” become actually answerable. These answers differ for different goals obviously, but that is for the table to decide, not anyone else.

As always, sail on,

-ShockTohp

Addendum

It may seem as those I am being overly harsh to RAW. I do not intend to be. In general, I believe that it is actually quite wise to run at least one campaign RAW with any system you are trying to add to your toolbelt. The only way you can actually learn what parts of a system work for what games is by actually playing the system as a whole. You might discover that a system is bad, with only a few redeeming qualities or you might discover that RAW the system is actually 100% what you wanted and there’s no reason to ever do anything different. Naturally also I believe that games in public where the intent is a level of drop in-drop out play should be RAW. This is in the realm of Adventurer’s League or a convention game. A semi-private gaming club may also wish to do this for recruiting purposes, but likely will have private games doing as they want. Again, as modeled by the founders of the hobby.