Why designing new roleplaying systems is futile for anyone.
Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2014 4:02 pm
So you want to design a roleplaying game? Think you have a fancy new idea for a rules system that will be the best? Forget it. You probably aren't even making a roleplaying system, but a rule-playing system.
What is the key difference in a roleplaying system and a ruleplaying system? Well for starters it is how you use the rules. If the rules are the vessel you use to travel through the game, it is a ruleplaying system. This includes fancy "roles" that have been derived from MMO nomenclature. It is like designing physics for a game, before you even decide if it will have gravity. It just doesn't work.
What a roleplaying game is is simply assuming the life of a fictional character per say, and placing your mind in their body. You have no risk of getting hurt even though your character might, and you cannot really see what they see, nor have to smell what they smell; but they are described enough for YOU, the player to make informed decisions.
What has been lost in modern game design thanks to Forge and Robin Laws, and other incompetent hacks that think their next version of Shadowrun will have the perfect system, is that the system is secondary to the game. Will all X smell like Y? Yes says a rule-playing system, and it probably won't even matter because the way something smells will likely have little to no effect on the rules used. If there is no rule for it, then there is no reason to even bother trying to figure it out. It is a dead system like a computer language. Well I shouldn't say dead, but it was lifeless to begin with.
Now you have tons of payers that always complain why the rules don't allow them to make the fiction they want. This is false, but in a way also true. Many times people try to make something that just doesn't fit with the vision of the other payers they are playing with, but it doesn't mean they cannot find people that will fit with the idea. So what does this mean? Aside from visions not matching, there are too many rules in these rule-playing systems that prevent the ideas and visions of the players. Who has the right vision for what a swashbuckelr is and does? Nobody and everybody, because that is something about a vision. What is a vision anyway? It is the imagination of the player. Rule-playing systems lack the ability for anyone to have their own imagination about a swshbuckler is because it has already pre-defined what you are allowed to imagine it to be.
This lack of designing so that the imagination can take the forefront and places RULES-FIRST in both design and application is the downfall of RPGs. It works for wargames like Warhammer, because you have to pick which little pawn you want to play with and have the rules to move and how it attacks, just like other wargames such as Chess, Go, Shoji, etc. Though often those games do not present you with a choice of which type of piece you can play with, unless you play a variant.
In order for ANYONE to be able to design a roleplaying GAME, not system, they must first get back in touch with their own imagination and see what kind of visions they want to show in it, but at the same time make sure NOT to destroy the ability for someone else to have a different vision, at the same table, or even conflicting vision at a table that will never cross paths with the one designing it.
This is how it all began, and this is where it will have to return to, design by imagination, not by rules codification that prevents imagination during use.
What is the key difference in a roleplaying system and a ruleplaying system? Well for starters it is how you use the rules. If the rules are the vessel you use to travel through the game, it is a ruleplaying system. This includes fancy "roles" that have been derived from MMO nomenclature. It is like designing physics for a game, before you even decide if it will have gravity. It just doesn't work.
What a roleplaying game is is simply assuming the life of a fictional character per say, and placing your mind in their body. You have no risk of getting hurt even though your character might, and you cannot really see what they see, nor have to smell what they smell; but they are described enough for YOU, the player to make informed decisions.
What has been lost in modern game design thanks to Forge and Robin Laws, and other incompetent hacks that think their next version of Shadowrun will have the perfect system, is that the system is secondary to the game. Will all X smell like Y? Yes says a rule-playing system, and it probably won't even matter because the way something smells will likely have little to no effect on the rules used. If there is no rule for it, then there is no reason to even bother trying to figure it out. It is a dead system like a computer language. Well I shouldn't say dead, but it was lifeless to begin with.
Now you have tons of payers that always complain why the rules don't allow them to make the fiction they want. This is false, but in a way also true. Many times people try to make something that just doesn't fit with the vision of the other payers they are playing with, but it doesn't mean they cannot find people that will fit with the idea. So what does this mean? Aside from visions not matching, there are too many rules in these rule-playing systems that prevent the ideas and visions of the players. Who has the right vision for what a swashbuckelr is and does? Nobody and everybody, because that is something about a vision. What is a vision anyway? It is the imagination of the player. Rule-playing systems lack the ability for anyone to have their own imagination about a swshbuckler is because it has already pre-defined what you are allowed to imagine it to be.
This lack of designing so that the imagination can take the forefront and places RULES-FIRST in both design and application is the downfall of RPGs. It works for wargames like Warhammer, because you have to pick which little pawn you want to play with and have the rules to move and how it attacks, just like other wargames such as Chess, Go, Shoji, etc. Though often those games do not present you with a choice of which type of piece you can play with, unless you play a variant.
In order for ANYONE to be able to design a roleplaying GAME, not system, they must first get back in touch with their own imagination and see what kind of visions they want to show in it, but at the same time make sure NOT to destroy the ability for someone else to have a different vision, at the same table, or even conflicting vision at a table that will never cross paths with the one designing it.
This is how it all began, and this is where it will have to return to, design by imagination, not by rules codification that prevents imagination during use.
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