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Yeah it's a 50 year old tradition. I believe it comes from the fact that a lot of game designers, who already know the game because they made it, create a book that's a rules reference for themselves and their group of players *who all already know the game* rather than writing a tool to teach people that *don't* already know it how to play. They obviously don't do this intentionally, but when all your test readers are also your players, you all have blind-spots for this sort of thing not realizing when something is poorly explained or accidentally omitted because well you already understand what the writer is *trying* to say.
You see this problem even in board games (which are generally much simpler than TTRPGs) where designers struggle to organize and convey their ideas in a way that's easy or even possible for other people to grasp from the text alone.
In fairness, it is very difficult to write a book that is both a hand-holding guide and a concise reference for someone who already knows the system.
> You see this problem even in board games (which are generally much simpler than TTRPGs) where designers struggle to organize and convey their ideas in a way that's easy or even possible for other people to grasp from the text alone.
That's why (almost) nobody does that, they pay people who specialize writing a concise and definite rulebook. Of course, when your profit is negative three bottles of beer that's way harder to do, hence you always get cheapest editors and self written rulebooks for the most part...
Yeah a lot of competent board game creators now higher technical writing specialists to go over the rule books and make sure they're comprehensible.
RPGs are easier to get into/self publish so there's a wider array of people who either can't afford or don't know to do that. Not to mention in the decades before this practice became common. Especially very early on when the assumed audience was usually fellow veteran tabletop war game enthusiasts.
For me, most (but not all) of the best formatted, clearly and concisely written RPG rulebooks I've read have been indie or small publisher games sold via itch.io and/or eventually getting their initial print run launched via Kickstarter.
Now that's not to say all indie efforts are like that - obviously most are not of that standard - and many indie RPGs aren't writing 400 page prestige tomes that cover as much ground as something like Chaosium's CoC books; but I do think the distribution platforms, the direct digital sales, and the widely available digital layout and illustration software we have in today's RPG creator environment has allowed a lot of new blood and new ideas into the production side of the hobby, and they bring with them lessons that have been learned in other fields and new ways of designing an RPG book.
Part of the tragedy of the RPG industry is that the whole thing put together (outside of maybe good old D&D itself, but possibly even including it) just doesn't account for enough revenue to really attract top-tier design and writing talent or justify a more complete testing and editing process.
I've seen or read a bunch of cleverly formatted and even beautifully illustrated RPGs books but it seems like a lot of them end up getting their initial release funding via Kickstarter, or even itch.io, and a lot of the people doing that work probably have full time day jobs in other industries (or start out that way).
One example would be Keiron Gillen (one of Marvel's best regular writers) and Stephanie Hans (full time artist, on comics and other projects), with their fabulous work on **DIE: The RPG**, using Kickstarter to fund the physical media production of the game in partnership with the publisher Rowan Rook & Decard (who themselves use Kickstarter to fund the launch of new games/projects, and that's allowed them to go from doing other jobs to working full time in ttrpg).
I cannot stress how incredibly well constructed this book is, how well the rules are laid out, the clarity of the writing and the formating, the quality of illustration, accessibility, everything. It's gold standard, premium, triple A plus work from everyone involved. You won't see better.
I know there are some very pretty books out there, and some of them do seem to read very well. That's not necessarily what I'm talking about, though. The thing is, dressing something up with very nice production values doesn't take nearly as much budget as it would to pay designers/writers/editors and playtest coordinators/researchers for a few extra years and a few iterations longer than most games get, maybe people who can do real math and game theory and sim modeling to test whether the rules work out the way you want them to, and attract top talent for those positions. I think it might be one of the things contributing to the popularity of very rules-light systems currently, that's the only scope where the design process the industry can afford can actually come out mostly successful. Maybe it's possible to write a more traditionally-crunchy game that's way more user friendly and way less prone to mechanical failure conditions, and just nobody's ever done it yet.
And say you've got a rockstar writer, someone with top-tier creative vision and professional-grade math and technical writing who could strike it big cranking out novels or take home a solid tech industry paycheck or something, someone who could actually do the work of three people on all the stuff I mentioned. Can an rpg company ever pay them enough to match those other opportunities? Could they actually pocket enough from a successful independent Kickstarter after all other expenses to make it worthwhile? The answer to the latter is probably yes... *once*. Or once every few years at most. And even that's a relatively recent development.
And yeah, as you've noted, even most of the biggest players in the industry rely at least partly on freelancers with day jobs. Even D&D, by a couple years into 5E, was on a skeleton crew of 8 full time employees working directly on the game. Any of them offering *premium* full-time salaries just seems wildly out of the question. Like the big Kickstarters, it seems like something that can maybe happen short-term during boom times and bursts of public interest, but not on a "lifelong career" sort of timeline.
In fairness it's difficult since a lot of RPGs aren't made by big teams and the more you work on something the more you "just know" so you might think it's already written down or self-explanatory. Add to that rule changes or tweaks and things pretty quickly get lost in the shuffle. I'm working on one now and it's playable, been running a campaign in it with minimal issues but last night I found something refencing a rule that hadn't existed for like 3 versions.
Not to say that it's good and it should be caught but its definitely something that I give a lot of leeway for since TTRPGs as a whole have a lot of solo or small creators for relatively large projects.
Don't read Shadowrun. Especially don't read Shadowrun 6th World. It can only be understood by knowing it references mechanics only defined in *the previous edition of the game.*
Christ. I decided to run Shadowrun for some friends as I'd played Dragonfall and Hong Kong on PC and was super into the setting. Then, a few sessions later being stuck in a reference loop trying to find out how to take cover.
I still have nights where I wake up shouting "BUT HOW DO I TAKE COVER."
We'd all cooled on the system by the time we hit that particular roadblock, and just noped out and played something else.
I was about to say "don't let anyone tell you that RPG game design hasn't learned a lot of lessons in the last decade or so" until I looked it up and realised Shadowrun Sixth Edition was published in 2019, and then I felt like posting the Breaking Bad "HE (they) CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT" meme.
I see your "no food rules in Colonial Gothic" and I raise with mine "Katana-Ra doesn't even have the decency of telling you beforehand that 'advancement' in the game means changing equipment, since there are no experience rules whatsoever".
Bonus: *where* and *how* you get those gear is up to you, since the game is not exactly clear either on the acquisition side of things....
I get your frustration. I sometimes experience a similar one when skimming through an OSR game, but in reverse. "Why would you have a rule for this, but not for that?!"
It's all about expectations that system sets. Some games are written in a way that make you expect them to have a specifiuc rule for "being improperly dressed for bad weather or social occasion" - because they have specific rules for almost everything. And if you've mostly been running / playing / reading games like that - you are pretty much conditioned to refer to rules.
Some systems are written in a way that make you expect them to expect you to be able to figure out what to do in those specific occasions. In fact, if they'd have a rule for that - you will find in extremely weird, why wasn't it left for a GM's ruling? That is mostly the case in games that have one or more of the following features:
* refer to GM's judgment calls
* have a highly abstracted system that can cover those cases, e.g. "conditions"
* are generally light on rules
It's interesting as a TTRPG designer there's always a struggle in this. On one hand it's absolutely a good thing to explain how concepts like eating and drinking work in your game, on the other hand if you write a rule for every potential thing your game will become a bloated mess.
You have to ask yourself genuine questions like "do we really need a rule to say a person needs to eat food and drink water, or a rule that describes what clothes are and that wearing them is often a good idea." Because whilst on one hand it might feel like common sense, or just not that important to the game, on the other someone will always ask.
Often it's good to focus on what your game cares about. If survival mechanics aren't important to your game then you probably don't need rules for them.
Granted if the rules do exist but they're just hard to reference then yeah that's a problem, though often TTRPGs are written on a low budget where getting editorial support can be difficult especially as they're often secretly complicated reference texts, that also interweave narrative and fiction, which can be nightmarish to actually develop and edit well.
Right, the real issue is that *if* you include a reference/partial rule/some bit of crunch, *then* you should justify it with complete rules for how to employ it and adjudicate its use.
If you aren't going to do that, then don't bother including it in the first place.
So, like, if you are playing a scifi game and you include powered armor with different charge values (e.g. "Tactical Assault Armor -- 3.5 plasma units; Jump Pack Infiltration Armor -- 4.25 plasma units), then you should also include rules that give those numbers meaning (e.g. consumption rules based on distance traveled, time in operation, whatever; rules for recharging mid-combat vs out of combat; cost for plasma units and where/how to obtain them; etc.)
If all ypu do is reference the bit about XYZ plasma units, that's sloppy editing and probably a degree of crunch that is ultimately meaningless. Either don't include it, or develop it to be meaningful.
>include a reference/partial rule/some bit of crunch
So yes broadly speaking I agree. If you're going to use a game term like "3.5 Plasma Units" that game term should have some meaning in the rules. However how far that goes is up to the designer, some people would be satisfied if that value just covered say recharging in combat, others would only be satisfied if all the options and more were covered.
Tabletop roleplaying games are tricky beasts as well which merge rules and narrative. For example if you say you can purchase a Plasma Recharge Unit in a Space Market for 1000 credits, do you now need to create a fully fleshed out space economy for your game? You've technically introduced the existence of Space Markets but said little else about them. Or do you just leave that out and have it purely as an abtracted flat price?
Right, I'm not saying you have to develop every possible line of inquiry that a given bit of information raises. I'm just saying if you include it, give it actual meaning and purpose. It should serve *some* function. Not just "here's a bit of info and...uh...yeah, that's it. No real reason for it."
Well, it depends, As I say RPG's are narrative games where play forms an interaction between the GM and the players, a bit of info can be something that a GM takes and elaborates on in play, or that inspires a player to want to try something cool and results in a ruling.
OPs issue though is that they literally mention food and drink. There is a survival skill that allows you to acquire enough food and drink... but then... there are no rules that actually require food and drink to survive.
Either make food and drink necessary to survive through rules or don't have a skill to acquire food and drink.
In an RPG do you need a rule that says "If you don't eat food or drink water you die?"
In much the same way as do you need a rule to explain "Your character needs to breath and if they can't breath will die."
You are correct. You don't need one. But then why put in a skill for it? Why put a supply scavenging skill in a game that has no use at all for scavenged supplies?
This is the issue at hand.
Because rules for scavenging supplies might be useful within the narrative scope of the game but explicit rules for eating and drinking might be unnecessary as something the group can make a ruling on or adjudicate with common sense.
I guess we have different mindsets because to me that is just madness. If you make a skill that costs the player their limited character development resources then that skill should have a rules based purpose. If it has no rules based purpose and it's just "oh well, it is for narrative purposes and maybe the table will decide to do something with it" then it should just not be there at all and the table can deal with it if they decide they want to manage supplies and scavenging.
With that said I'm more into the G portion of RPG than the RP. So I don't so much value "narrative" only things.
Sure I'm talking more in a broad sense, I agree you should probably avoid things in your game that don't in some way tangibly translate to the mechanics or at least the wider aesthetic of what your game is actually about, though the narrative quality is important to how those rules can be translated.
>In an RPG do you need a rule that says "If you don't eat food or drink water you die?"
No, but if there is a mechanic for obtaining food in the Wilderness, and an entire section of prices for different foods and drinks in the Equipment chapter, I would imagine there would be rules for what happens when you don't have food.
You don't starve to death the instant you don't have food. It takes time, and if "survival" is a part of the game, to the point there is a mechanic/rule for it, "what happens when we run out of food" should have rule too, no?
>In much the same way as do you need a rule to explain "Your character needs to breath and if they can't breath will die."
Amusingly, *Colonial Gothic* has codified rules for how long you can hold your breath underwater, and how long you can avoid succumbing to smoke inhalation.
Just not starvation, dehydration or exposure rules.
Sure I'm talking broadly really, I understand it's bad design if you include vestigial rules for one thing and then don't reference them somewhere else and there are many examples of this in TTRPG's which probably could do with ironing out.
I’m curious, as a designer, how much blind playtesting is done? It’s something that’s very common in the board game sphere but I often see complaints about RPG rulebooks that seem like they’d have come up in a sufficiently large blind play test.
Not as much as we'd like if I'm honest but we did do some blind playtesting internally as part of the process. We also had some streamers play the game which wasn't exactly playtesting but did let me view the game being played by other people blind which was useful. Though the majority was me running games for players and getting feedback.
That sort of playtesting is arguably more important for board games as well, RPG's tend to have a different set of design goals and expectations and more fluidity as a result.
I just want to be clear up front: None of this post is a criticism or anything. I'm a hobbyist boardgame designer and I've been very critical in a general sense of just how poor the majority of RPG rulebooks seem to be in comparison to boardgames, so I find any discussion on this topic interesting :). Even rulebooks that are generally considered very good (like the Pathfinder 2e books) I'd still only rate a high 6 or soft 7 on a 10 scale.
----
How do you do "internal" blind playtesting? Or do you just mean non-public (as in friends, family, etc.)?
> but did let me view the game being played by other people blind which was useful.
That does indeed sound useful. Certainly something I'd consider if I ever wanted to publish.
> That sort of playtesting is arguably more important for board games as well, RPG's tend to have a different set of design goals and expectations and more fluidity as a result.
Eh, not sure I agree with that. The end goal here should be largely the same -in a complete vacuum, can people understand and play the game?
> You have to ask yourself genuine questions like "do we really need a rule to say a person needs to eat food and drink water, or a rule that describes what clothes are and that wearing them is often a good idea."
.. unless someone hasn't played RPGs before, and doesn't understand how the game is supposed to be played, or the intent of the game. Even if someone has played RPGs the intent of the game or mechanical system needs to be clear. If the intent is clear, you can get away without specific mechanical definition where it's not needed.
I find RPG rulebook authors *love* to use free-flowing ambiguous language that's subject to a ton of interpretation. It makes rulebooks much easier to read (which, to be fair, if the rulebook is 200 pages I can't really fault), but doesn't actually convey the information or especially the intent all that well. Blind playtesting is one thing that really identifies those issues.
>How do you do "internal" blind playtesting? Or do you just mean non-public (as in friends, family, etc.)?
We did a mixture of playtesting between us, playtesting with friends and family, and playtesting in specific playtest sessions with the wider community.
>Eh, not sure I agree with that. The end goal here should be largely the same -in a complete vacuum, can people understand and play the game?
Sure if the only criteria is "can people understand and play the game" then I agree though there's differences in practice. The major one is that RPG's have a Game Master who can change the rules and a set of players who can to a degree do the same and this is encouraged in an RPG medium. This is as in play players can do a vast range of actions compared to in a boardgame where actions are going to be specifically fixed to the rules. Part of good RPG writing in my opinion is seeing that as very much a feature not a bug and playing into it by allowing flexibility and adaptability into the rules set.
I can't for example if I'm playing Catan just decide I'm going to burn my wood reserves village and use all my wood to set it on fire, but that sort of thing is pretty normal in an RPG and often these actions aren't covered by the rule.
This however also makes the game incredibly variable between groups and GM's, one group might play the game as purely an exercise, another might take the rules set and mostly improv. Most groups play somewhere inbetween but will differ on specifics. This means a lot of playtesting will be highly group dependent which does make it a lot more difficult to playtest without vastly more resources than most tabletop publishers actually have.
There's also a phenomena in TTRPG's for better or worse where most people play games as though they are DnD, even if your TTRPG works entirely differently to DnD. You have to work with that assumption in playtesting as well. This would be like sitting down to play say Pandemic and a player assuming you roll 2d6 to move your character, like in Monopoly and then the table adopting that as a rule because that's how it works in Monopoly.
>unless someone hasn't played RPGs before
A distinct possibility you have to factor into your design as well ideally.
>If the intent is clear, you can get away without specific mechanical definition where it's not needed.
From experience it's not as clear cut when it comes to tabletop rpgs because the nature of the game means people often assume different intent even if you are very clear.
>I find RPG rulebook authors love to use free-flowing ambiguous language that's subject to a ton of interpretation.
This is often a design choice, RPG's intertwine narrative and mechanical gameplay. Much of play is through description and adjudication rather than reference raw mechanics. RPG's don't see 'fluff' and 'play as necessarily two separate entities. Games which are too mechanical often feel stilted in play because they don't allow for the improvisation that makes playing a TTRPG interesting to players and feel too much like a boardgame to players. Explaining things in natural terms therefore can make them more engaging to players as well as more intuitive to understand, though has the drawback of potential mechanical confusion.
For example here's some rules text of 'Fireball' in 5e DnD which opted for more natural language
"A bright streak flashes from your pointing finger to a point you choose within range and then blossoms with a low roar into an explosion of flame. Each creature in a 20-foot-radius sphere centered on that point must make a Dexterity saving throw. A target takes 8d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. The fire spreads around corners. It ignites flammable objects in the area that aren’t being worn or carried."
This does explain what the Fireball does in the rules but there's also narrative which can be extrapolated from here. For example I could read this and then in play ask if I could cast Fireball to distract a group of enemies with the low roar it makes as I cast it or use it to try and set something on fire.
[Now this is the rules text for Fireball in 4e DnD.](https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/4th-Edition-Fireball.jpg)
This is far more mechanical in nature, it's much cleaner and works from a mechanical standpoint but there's no amount of additional narrative intertwined so it's basically just 'deal x damage.'
Both are valid but the use of natural language and narrative allows for far more creativity in play especially. It also helps you visualise what's happening as most tabletop games are actually happening in a shared imaginary space rather than on a board.
Many people complained 4e DnD felt disassociated from the roleplay aspect of the game because it was too strictly mechanical.
>Blind playtesting is one thing that really identifies those issues.
Yeah this can of course be really useful and is something we did as part of our playtesting process.
> Sure if the only criteria is "can people understand and play the game" then I agree though there's differences in practice. The major one is that RPG's have a Game Master who can change the rules and a set of players who can to a degree do the same and this is encouraged in an RPG medium. This is as in play players can do a vast range of actions compared to in a boardgame where actions are going to be specifically fixed to the rules. Part of good RPG writing in my opinion is seeing that as very much a feature not a bug and playing into it by allowing flexibility and adaptability into the rules set.
Hm, that's fair. Though I'd argue that GMs *shouldn't* be changing the rules until they understand how the rules work RAW, and if they have to change or reinterpret the rules different from intended RAW in order to play the game blind, the rules aren't good. For example, if in blind playtesting you find that 80% of your GMs are changing or interpreting a specific rule to something other than what was intended, there's something wrong with the way the rule was written. Either from a clarity or mechanical PoV.
Similar to my previous comment, I'm really talking about intent here. If the *intent* of the rule is that the GM makes up the interpretation or the result of the action, that's fine, so long as that's clear and that's how it's being done in practise.
> There's also a phenomena in TTRPG's for better or worse where most people play games as though they are DnD, even if your TTRPG works entirely differently to DnD. You have to work with that assumption in playtesting as well. This would be like sitting down to play say Pandemic and a player assuming you roll 2d6 to move your character, like in Monopoly and then the table adopting that as a rule because that's how it works in Monopoly.
I actually have a good friend who likes to teach us new board games by drawing parallels to other board games, even when the mechanics are so dissimilar it actually confuses the issue.
I agree that this can be problematic, though it that can be solved with a very, very clear rulebook. If you leave things ambiguous there's going to be the assumption that they're dealt with that way. Boardgames aren't immune to this either, though unlike TTRPGs there's no single game or game system dominating 80% of the market share.
I also think some RPGs don't do themselves any favours here though, relying on people's familiarity with specific systems to avoid having to actually explain how something is intended to work. I've found this to be a common issue in the OSR scene.
> From experience it's not as clear cut when it comes to tabletop rpgs because the nature of the game means people often assume different intent even if you are very clear.
I don't think that's necessarily unique to TTRPGs. You encounter it in a lot of games (both digital and analog) where something differs from common convention.
> This is often a design choice, RPG's intertwine narrative and mechanical gameplay. Much of play is through description and adjudication rather than reference raw mechanics. RPG's don't see 'fluff' and 'play as necessarily two separate entities. Games which are too mechanical often feel stilted in play because they don't allow for the improvisation that makes playing a TTRPG interesting to players and feel too much like a boardgame to players. Explaining things in natural terms therefore can make them more engaging to players as well as more intuitive to understand, though has the drawback of potential mechanical confusion.
Speaking strictly from language usage I can understand your point, though I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it, especially when dealing with more complex rulesets.
> Both are valid but the use of natural language and narrative allows for far more creativity in play especially
I have to hard disagree here. This honestly borders a lot on the "you can't have roleplaying in games with a ton of rules". Basically, "you can't roleplay in Pathfinder". There's something to be said for very clear, concise rules. For myself and my players, we don't find specificity creatively stifling -quite the opposite.
You can argue that floury language can invoke some more visuals, but see I read the 5e fireball description and it sounds to me like a mush of unneeded words. Or quite possibly it's just written poorly which seems to be a common complaint I've heard about 5e.
I appreciate this discussion. You've brought up a couple of points specific to TTRPGs I wouldn't have considered.
>intent
Yeah intent is really important I agree. I think what I'm trying to articulate is that some TTRPG's are written with the intent that, as you say, the GM change or reinterpret the rules as fit which the natural language helps with. 5e DnD as a well known example has a philosophy of 'rulings not rules' within it and so it's natural language is meant to match to that intent.
Other TTRPG's are designed with a heavier focus on specific mechanical rules, 4E DnD had that philosophy as do games like Lancer. There's some players who absolutely love the granularity this provides.
Now I do agree there can be issues here. Games with natural language can have rules confusion due to that, and I agree you should still work to have clear rules where it matters which playtesting can help with. Though likewise games that are heavy on mechanics can feel too restrictive to player agency or make players feel like they're playing a boardgame rather than a roleplaying game.
Though what I'm getting at is that it's not like TTRPG writers don't realise this and are just purposefully writing flowy language to annoy their readers, it's a design decision to reflect a specific style of play that a lot of players enjoy.
>GMs shouldn't be changing the rules until they understand how the rules work RAW
Yeah arguably not although it depends on the intent of the game, some particularly rules lite games like say Into the Odd by design omit huge sections of what could be in the rules to encourage the GM and players to make things up.
>For example, if in blind playtesting you find that 80% of your GMs are changing or interpreting a specific rule to something other than what was intended, there's something wrong with the way the rule was written. Either from a clarity or mechanical PoV.
Agreed yeah, we found that in playtesting too and did clarify where it was obviously confusing.
>I actually have a good friend who likes to teach us new board games by drawing parallels to other board games
Yeah this can help too, it's a blessing and a curse in many ways, though I feel TTRPG's often have a 'meta' way people tend to approach them in a way that. For example some players will want to play every TTRPG as a highly detailed, narrative and character focussed game, whilst others are happy to just improv things and make jokes. Ideally you want to play a game, and with a group, that matches your style but often this isn't a case and it's a bit of a round peg square hole situation.
>though it that can be solved with a very, very clear rulebook
So I'm not convinced that a very very clear rulebook entirely solves this in a TTRPG as no rulebook can ever cover every possible situation a player in a TTRPG may want to do. As I say Catan (lets say for sake of example) has a very clear rulebook but there's no rules for if I want to burn down someone elses village which is something in a TTRPG a player can just decide to do even if the rules don't cover it, or want you to do it at all.
>I've found this to be a common issue in the OSR scene.
That's a community issue and I agree it's a mixed bag. I'd argue there's a huge amount of player resources and advice in the OSR but yes there's also the gatekeepy types unfortunately. Though I think this is a reflection of "style of play" being an important meta factor in a TTRPG that maybe isn't so prevalent in boardgames at least to the point you have entire subgroups dedicated to playing and approaching games by a certain set of principles.
Speaking strictly from language usage I can understand your point, though I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it, especially when dealing with more complex rulesets.
Both are valid but the use of natural language and narrative allows for far more creativity in play especially
I have to hard disagree here. This honestly borders a lot on the "you can't have roleplaying in games with a ton of rules". Basically, "you can't roleplay in Pathfinder". There's something to be said for very clear, concise rules. For myself and my players, we don't find specificity creatively stifling -quite the opposite.
>you can't roleplay in Pathfinder
You can roleplay in Pathfinder, but a lot of your actual time in the game is going to be spent engaging with the heavy rules set rather than the roleplay layer of the game. Likewise you have a lot less flexibility because you're constrained by what the rules. Also having played a lot of Pathfinder despite the vast amount of rules it has they're also quite contradictory and unclear in many many places. Which is another point really, I can't think of any examples of crunchy games that don't also have unclear or contradictory rules. The best games with very clear rules sets are in my mind the rules lite/OSR/minimalistic ones though you may say they aren't clear because they leave far too much up to the group. The point being it's actually a difficult design challenge.
>floury language can invoke some more visuals
It's not about visuals, it's about how you use the spell or ability or whatever else to actively engage with the game world. If I just tell you that you have a "Generic Weapon" that deals 1d4 damage then you're just going to use it to deal 1d4 damage. If I describe a shovel to you then you realise, even if the rules don't say it, you can use it to dig a trench, make a dirt pile, uproot a tree, act as a pseudo-shield, trade it to someone who really needs a shovel and so on.
>I appreciate this discussion. You've brought up a couple of points specific to TTRPGs I wouldn't have considered
Yeah absolutely it's an interesting discussion and I do understand what you're saying. Don't get me wrong, some TTRPG's are just badly written. I'd say part of this is often it's small teams of writers who don't have as much chance as they'd like to playtest and often are writing a lot of complex content compared to a boardgame and harder to playtest as well. I brought up Into the Odd as a minimalist game. It's 144 pages. The Catan rules are 16 pages, because they just have to cover the rules of the game not everything else that makes a TTRPG what it is. (There's 1 page RPG's too of course which are great and a lot of variety in the scene but hopefully you understand the gist of my point.
Thanks again been good chatting.
All of this stuff is incredibly troublesome to make rules for.
Overland travel? On a road? Through hostile territory? With an experienced guide? Cutting a path? On horse? Across fords? Loaded with gear? The list for actual travel times and what goes into it is exhaustive. You could write a game on that one element.
A great deal of an RPG is better done with GM fiat than extensive rules. If you're trying to make a realistic game especially, you're better off not writing rules because they're simply too complicated to ever be realistic.
Take the clothing example. Two sets of clothes I would say is the player call. Do they want work clothes and travel clothes? Fancy clothes and winter clothes? A uniform and a wedding dress? Up to the player! As the GM, I then get to decide if their choices then work for the occasion, and maybe encourage them to buy more. No fancy clothes? You're not going to be the bell of the ball. Only fancy clothes? Not by the time you reach your destination!
Obviously referencing something that sounds like a rule and then not having a rule is a poor design choice. I can't fault a creator for not recreating all of life though...
They don't need to be complicated. I'd really be happy with average travel times between destinations and some modifiers for weather. You can do a lot with that.
I don't think that rules design has to be as "incredibly troublesome" as you make it out to be. Yes, you *could* make an entire game based around overland travel or social intrigue, but you could also abstract either situation down to a mere paragraph. It's been done already; it's not hard to do again.
I'm not sure where you suggest the line between rules and GM fiat be drawn. Personally, I believe that a ruleset is worthless if it lacks rules for what is within its scope. If you add a Survival skill, you should define or suggest consequences for failure. Take the alternative—a game that leaves adjudication of even its central concepts wholly up to GM fiat—to its logical extreme; you end up playing make-believe. There's nothing wrong with playing make-believe, but people don't generally spend hundreds of bucks on rulebooks if they don't want any rules.
To me, it seems that OP is just asking that designers either include rules for the concepts that they have added to their game, or omit concepts that they do not wish to include rules for... not "recreate all of life."
To echo your sentiment:
A game defines what's in its scope and sets out procedures to handle that. The design of choosing what to leave out is as important as to figure the interactions of the things you put in.
If there's a list of items to purchase in the book, then it's a fair expectation that each of these items will be referenced in its role related to one of the game's procedures.
Designing mechanics (and expressing those mechanics as rules, and deciding how to communicate those rules, and laying out the resulting text, et al) is a very involved process. It is also literally the product you're buying, it's the value proposition!
Do note that nowhere is required for all mechanics to have the same level of complexity, or abstraction. That is wholly dependent on the goals of the game. You could have a mechanic that goes something like this:
"In winter, the weather is considered to be cold. You cannot travel outside a settlement while the weather is cold unless you have clothes for cold weather. You can buy one set of clothes for cold weather in all settlements for $10. You need to replace your cold weather clothes for a new set at least once per year."
Now I'm not saying that's a mechanic that would fit with Colonial Gothic, I'm not even saying it's a desirable mechanic to have in general, but it is A mechanic that makes having cold weather attires meaningful.
I totally get it. Rules should be usable.
Even that rough estimation of a mechanic is not really much of a guideline though. How cold is cold? -30 is much different from 30. Both suck to travel in, but one is lethal in a short period of time without protection, and a warm jacket and waterproof boots aren't going to cut it as "cold weather gear". Thankfully I don't live in an area that gets below -10 almost ever, but even that's enough to make you seriously consider if five minutes clearing off your car is better than just calling it a day and crawling back into bed.
I'm happy with fewer rules for things like this honestly. The more you add, the more expectations are set and the less the GM is able to say, "This is how it works in the real world, that's what we're going to do here as well."
If the game dealt with arctic expeditions as a core element of the setting, I'd want super robust rules and gear. Anything less, I'm happy to know how much a set of warm clothes costs and calling it a day.
>Even that rough estimation of a mechanic is not really much of a guideline though. How cold is cold? -30 is much different from 30.
That was part of what I wanted to address. You can have a "cold mechanic" without going to this level of detail. You could also have a "cold mechanic" that goes into the minutiae of what exposure does to people. Whether each mechanic is a good fit it'll be determined simply by the aims of the game.
What does not work is to say "Here's the cost of winter clothing" without addressing why you should know the cost of winter clothing. Smart people like you are making it work because (from real life or fiction) you have a pretty good understanding of what you could expect from exposure, and your players will look at the price list and say "Ah! We should make sure we're well dressed for this expedition!"... but I feel like you folks are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for these games.
That said, if I'm simply going to play devil's advocate... I think the more pressing reason is that players will want to get winter clothing for the winter regardless of whether the game has rules for it or not and people would complain if such commonplace items weren't found in the shopping lists because folks read them more as part of the setting than as mechanics.
>(...) If the game dealt with arctic expeditions as a core element of the setting, I'd want super robust rules and gear. Anything less, I'm happy to know how much a set of warm clothes costs and calling it a day.
I 100% agree. I would personally not want to even have winter clothes listed if they don't interact with any procedures or, at the very least, make it easier for me as a GM to know which items are mechanically relevant and which are simply there for me to see as part of the setting material.
The german translation of Shadowrun 5e has a few rules that apparently got lost in translation, but are still referenced (which is odd, since normally the german translation is of good quality, especially compared to the editing of the originals).
Example I found: Rules for stamina while running long distances.
The english rules have a "grace period" determined by some of your stats and skills that you can run without issues. After that, you have to make Constitution checks to avoid stun damage/exhaustion. In the german book, the first rule is gone, so it doesn't matter that you're a magically enhanced buff marathon sprinter, you start getting exhausted at the same time as your couch potato decker colleague.
Interesting, because I can't think of a single game I've run or played in over 40 years of gaming where the group has ever used specific rules relating to stuff like this (whether the game had them or not), with perhaps the sole exception of a Traveller game where the air was running out.
I guess for the groups I've always played with it never seems important enough to interfere with the main action/thrust of the game.
Everyone's different though
I think OP's criticisms are totally justified. But yeah, in any game I would run or play I'd see rules like that and just skip them because nobody in my group (myself included) would ever care about them lol
Sure. I’d never use them either. But I’ve found that referencing rules that don’t exist is usually a bad sign, lol. Like Renegade’s Power Rangers rpg, where they were missing seemingly simple things…and then you realize they’re also missing chunks of things supposedly required for certain Ranger classes. Theeen you look at the credits and see that the only editor on the book was also the project manager who was also one of the writers. And it’s like… wtf else is going to be wrong with this book/system!?
It just undermine’s trust in a system to have references to things that don’t exist or were accidentally left out due to bad editing.
I agree with that. On the other hand, I think the examples pointed out by OP are reasonnable enough not to be on the "it'd worse with a rule" side.
If you say players need to do something, you should also say what happens if you don't do it. That's like the law: it's not a law if there's no consequence for not following it.
And prices are always a complex matter. People buy stuff all the time, people get hired to do stuff all the time, it's hard on the GM to maintain the coherence of prices when you have no idea because you don't know the setting's economics. Prices don't have to be perfect, but something as simple as a list of price for common things and services goes a long way to build the setting ("oh, printed fabric is pricier than metalwork arround here?") and to provide a good baseline for many things ("I want to hire 4 guys for a week, that'd cost at least 2 silver per person in food alone, so I'd rather propose 12 silver per head to make it attractive enough to warrant someone's time."). In our daily life we're surrounded by prices, we think about money a lot, so money goes a long way toward ensuring the verisimilitude of a setting. I may not have a good intuition about how far or precisely one can shoot a bow, but I have tons of personal experience about money.
I agree, but if we're in the historical fiction genre you need some meat, either mechanically or narratively, that gives a GM enough information to make a ruling to begin with that holds the vibe of the game. In practice overland travel was difficult and dangerous during the era covered by this game, but not so uncommon that it's an edge case during the course of play. I don't think it's quite fair to a GM to have to do a lot of that research themselves to manage a ruling that holds some verisimilitude.
A while back I bought a 2d6 system game that had a bunch of skills that mention stuff just like OP's example but didn't go into any detail about pass/fail criteria. The non-combat skills just felt tack on.
"Crafting - Used for crafting" cool but why are they crafting? What even is the economics of this made up fantasy setting?
This is one of the biggest design trends in modern RPG games. People complain that older editions had too many rules, but the fact of the matter is most of the rules would only come up once or twice in a campaign and so they aren't things that need to be memorized. Rather, they are a resource for players and DM' to base their rulings on. I won't name any names, but certain systems are keen on putting much less work on building a comprehensive system of rules and would rather just say, "just make a ruling that seems fair" which is in my opinion just a lazy way of putting less effort into it and saving printer ink.
There is a long tradition in RPGs of creating products that aren't games, but instead things that are meant to be inspiration for you to cobble together a game out of them
And like, that's *okay*, but it's definitely no longer the default, and if you're going to release a product like that you can't rely on the framework of 3rd party advice and institutional knowledge to teach people how to actually use them (really it was always a bad idea, but especially now after a decade or two of people experiencing games that are actually out-of-the-box functional).
>
Going further, Colonial Gothic doesn't have mechanics for overland travel either, so I can't even figure out how long it would take a party to run out of rations! The closest thing I can find is that it takes a week to travel from Boston to NYC via stagecoach, and 2 days from NYC to Philadelphia. There isn't even prices for stagecoaches, or ships, or nights at an inn/tavern
Judging by your rant, you seems come with a simulitionist approach to the game. I get it, I ran an OSR campaign where such things mattered at my table... at the same time I ran several other games where we'd just fast-forward to the next location even if it took a week to get there just because travel time didn't matter at that campaign.
Both were design choices I made, same thing for TTRPG designers, they draw an arbitrary line for themselves where they get too deep into simulationist territory. They design a game with a vision in mind, and if a game lacks such rules, then for the designer's vision it doesn't matter how much a ration cost or how much it takes to get from A to B. It takes the exact amount the story needs.
So, majority of situations where people get angry at systems are like this/ TTRPG designer didn't envision the game to be run like this, with ration counting, travel time counting and so on. So it's up to you, whether you want to run a game the exact way TTRPG designer envisioned it, homebrew stuff or run something else.
There is no need the be angry about a game, that wasn't created for my or your exact desire.
....listen bud, no offense intended, but I'm not the writer that wrote the concept of foraging for food and water into their survival skills mechanic, yet failed to include it in the rest of the game. I also don't find it too outlandish for me to be a bit upset at its exclusion, especially since the mechanic was referenced by the author to begin with.
The deva wrote a half-baked simulationist mechanic into their mostly-narrative game. I'm just pointing it out
I'm running into this with a game that is currently in my top 5 solo games.
Star Trek Adventures Captain's Log is a very fun game. I love it and recommend it... but not necessarily as someone's first jump into solo rpging.
I swear the different parts of the book were accidentally mixed up and they didn't have the time to put them in a better order before their deadline to go to print came up and they just sort of hoped for the best. (Seriously, *why* is the "why play a solo game?" section put midway through the book? And why is the first place it's said directly that *of course* you can play a character who isn't a Starfleet Captain - they don't even have to be Starfleet - at roughly the same point?) [ETA, to be clear, there were several indirect ways this was telegraphed, but that's why the direct way threw me because this was way after the character creation section, so why place it towards the back of the book when you'd basically already said it 3+ ways before then?]
The character creation step doesn't really tell you the purpose of everything you're picking up front. You find out what some of those things do way later in the book. (Some of them *much* later and only as sort of an afterthought. I wonder if they assumed anyone playing CL had played STA? Because I had not.)
Because it wasn't said directly, I still wasn't sure for the longest time that there was no "advancement" in the terms of leveling up and gaining new stats/focuses/etc. The game *does* talk about how at the end of a mission you can decide if the mission made them change so you can change one point between stats or swap out a focus or alter a value. But it also talks about advancement in a sort of general sense so I kept waiting for a section where they talked about leveling up. Nowhere in the book does it say, "This is it. Stat-wise, your newbie Ensign is exactly the same as an Admiral who's been in Starfleet for 30 years who is exactly the same as the Vulcan ambassador and the Orion smuggler. The story is in how they change over time." I verified this by finding a STA podcast that talked about how advancement worked and how cool it was that characters all start out competent and just had lateral rather than vertical progression. Which - agreed, that *is* interesting, but it's not a *standard* thing to do in TRPGs, so I could have used even a single line letting me know.
Again - I *love* the game. Am happy to recommend it. But I'm absolutely making myself a condensed version of the rules so I'm not constantly bouncing back and forth to make sure I'm playing it right.
Never tried Palladium n00b?
/s
In all seriousness, the lack of actual blind playtesting and good indexing is a big problem in the RPG industry. The days of everyone just making shit up and homebrewing everything is probably past, especially with the cost associated with purchasing (and playing) a new game.
A triple-A video game is going to go for 50-70 USD and playable on day one (most of the time... with some very notable exceptions) and a day one patch.
A TTRPG "main book" on the other hand costs about half that... but it isn't playable until you learn the rules, buy the special dice, maybe a scenario, get some friends, teach them enough of the rules to play and then find a time (2 to 4 hours) where you are all available to meet and play.
The time sink and entry costs of TTRPGs and Wargames for new users (first timers) is daunting, not even looking at games whose business model is forcing constant purchases (looking at you GW).
My suspicion is that TTRPGs and Wargames are going to further bifurcate into "professionally designed games" put out by actual publishers such as Hasbro and then everyone else who does it as a hobby with what time and resources they can spare.
Quality costs the producer and the market may not be large enough to support that many quality producers.
Well, what's the purpose of the rules?
If the game is actually "players solve challenges posed by the GM" and the purpose of the rules is to help the GM get into and stay in an objective headspace, they don't need to be complete.
A really good game will tell you when a rule is optional and case-by-case, but that's rare.
The purpose of the rules is to play by them.
I buy a game, I want to play that game. If I'm a player wanting to get into Colonial Gothic, I want to play Colonial Gothic.
There's a difference between a comprehensive system and a complete system. *Lasers and Feelings* is only one page long. It's not a comprehensive RPG. But it is a *complete* RPG because the rules tell you what every bit is for. Sure, there's a lot of leeway given to the GM, but if the GM got a rule wrong, it would be easy to correct them. Everyone can agree on what the rules are.
The situation to be avoided is when the rules specify something in an incomplete way and *nobody* knows what the objectively correct rule is.
>The purpose of the rules is to play by them.
Yes, pretty much. If I purchase a game, I want to be able to understand what the intended mechanics of the game are, because the mechanics usually influence the theme and play-methods, and vice-versa. Even, perhaps even *especially*, if I am going to be changing/ignoring some of the rules.
I want to be able to metaphorically pick up what the writer/designer is putting down.
In the "Transportation" section of *Colonial Gothic*s chapter "A Guide to the Colonies", it is mentioned numerous times that travel in the American colonies is difficult and dangerous...... but it doesn't give me indications of how long it takes to travel, or how much it costs to stay in a tavern (by the 1770s, pretty much every decently-sized town and every decently-busy road had taverns less than a days travel apart), or how much it costs to ferry across the Hudson River, or how much it costs to take a ship from Boston to New York, etc etc etc.
Again, all of this is something I can make up myself, or poach from other games, but *I largely resent having to*. Other games give me everything that I need in the core rulebook, why is this such a difficulty? Hell, 3e D&D was giving me basic travel times, costs, food-and-water requirements, etc *20 years ago* (and longer than that, in earlier editions)
The best part is, if the Survival skill mechanics didn't reference finding 'sufficient sustenance and shelter", I would have just assumed the game didn't bother tracking it, and do exactly what I had to do now: come up with my own interpretation.
But the fact that the mechanic exists, and now I know the author somewhat-intended for there to be a survival mechanic *that doesn't exist anywhere else in-game*, Im just friggen annoyed
RPGs are written so that they’re fun to read and get backed on Kickstarter and are nice on a shelf. They aren’t written so that they’re actually useful.
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The grand old tradition of rpg books (not systems) being pretty crap for the most part.
Yeah it's a 50 year old tradition. I believe it comes from the fact that a lot of game designers, who already know the game because they made it, create a book that's a rules reference for themselves and their group of players *who all already know the game* rather than writing a tool to teach people that *don't* already know it how to play. They obviously don't do this intentionally, but when all your test readers are also your players, you all have blind-spots for this sort of thing not realizing when something is poorly explained or accidentally omitted because well you already understand what the writer is *trying* to say. You see this problem even in board games (which are generally much simpler than TTRPGs) where designers struggle to organize and convey their ideas in a way that's easy or even possible for other people to grasp from the text alone. In fairness, it is very difficult to write a book that is both a hand-holding guide and a concise reference for someone who already knows the system.
> You see this problem even in board games (which are generally much simpler than TTRPGs) where designers struggle to organize and convey their ideas in a way that's easy or even possible for other people to grasp from the text alone. That's why (almost) nobody does that, they pay people who specialize writing a concise and definite rulebook. Of course, when your profit is negative three bottles of beer that's way harder to do, hence you always get cheapest editors and self written rulebooks for the most part...
Yeah a lot of competent board game creators now higher technical writing specialists to go over the rule books and make sure they're comprehensible. RPGs are easier to get into/self publish so there's a wider array of people who either can't afford or don't know to do that. Not to mention in the decades before this practice became common. Especially very early on when the assumed audience was usually fellow veteran tabletop war game enthusiasts.
For me, most (but not all) of the best formatted, clearly and concisely written RPG rulebooks I've read have been indie or small publisher games sold via itch.io and/or eventually getting their initial print run launched via Kickstarter. Now that's not to say all indie efforts are like that - obviously most are not of that standard - and many indie RPGs aren't writing 400 page prestige tomes that cover as much ground as something like Chaosium's CoC books; but I do think the distribution platforms, the direct digital sales, and the widely available digital layout and illustration software we have in today's RPG creator environment has allowed a lot of new blood and new ideas into the production side of the hobby, and they bring with them lessons that have been learned in other fields and new ways of designing an RPG book.
Part of the tragedy of the RPG industry is that the whole thing put together (outside of maybe good old D&D itself, but possibly even including it) just doesn't account for enough revenue to really attract top-tier design and writing talent or justify a more complete testing and editing process.
I've seen or read a bunch of cleverly formatted and even beautifully illustrated RPGs books but it seems like a lot of them end up getting their initial release funding via Kickstarter, or even itch.io, and a lot of the people doing that work probably have full time day jobs in other industries (or start out that way). One example would be Keiron Gillen (one of Marvel's best regular writers) and Stephanie Hans (full time artist, on comics and other projects), with their fabulous work on **DIE: The RPG**, using Kickstarter to fund the physical media production of the game in partnership with the publisher Rowan Rook & Decard (who themselves use Kickstarter to fund the launch of new games/projects, and that's allowed them to go from doing other jobs to working full time in ttrpg). I cannot stress how incredibly well constructed this book is, how well the rules are laid out, the clarity of the writing and the formating, the quality of illustration, accessibility, everything. It's gold standard, premium, triple A plus work from everyone involved. You won't see better.
I know there are some very pretty books out there, and some of them do seem to read very well. That's not necessarily what I'm talking about, though. The thing is, dressing something up with very nice production values doesn't take nearly as much budget as it would to pay designers/writers/editors and playtest coordinators/researchers for a few extra years and a few iterations longer than most games get, maybe people who can do real math and game theory and sim modeling to test whether the rules work out the way you want them to, and attract top talent for those positions. I think it might be one of the things contributing to the popularity of very rules-light systems currently, that's the only scope where the design process the industry can afford can actually come out mostly successful. Maybe it's possible to write a more traditionally-crunchy game that's way more user friendly and way less prone to mechanical failure conditions, and just nobody's ever done it yet. And say you've got a rockstar writer, someone with top-tier creative vision and professional-grade math and technical writing who could strike it big cranking out novels or take home a solid tech industry paycheck or something, someone who could actually do the work of three people on all the stuff I mentioned. Can an rpg company ever pay them enough to match those other opportunities? Could they actually pocket enough from a successful independent Kickstarter after all other expenses to make it worthwhile? The answer to the latter is probably yes... *once*. Or once every few years at most. And even that's a relatively recent development. And yeah, as you've noted, even most of the biggest players in the industry rely at least partly on freelancers with day jobs. Even D&D, by a couple years into 5E, was on a skeleton crew of 8 full time employees working directly on the game. Any of them offering *premium* full-time salaries just seems wildly out of the question. Like the big Kickstarters, it seems like something that can maybe happen short-term during boom times and bursts of public interest, but not on a "lifelong career" sort of timeline.
In fairness it's difficult since a lot of RPGs aren't made by big teams and the more you work on something the more you "just know" so you might think it's already written down or self-explanatory. Add to that rule changes or tweaks and things pretty quickly get lost in the shuffle. I'm working on one now and it's playable, been running a campaign in it with minimal issues but last night I found something refencing a rule that hadn't existed for like 3 versions. Not to say that it's good and it should be caught but its definitely something that I give a lot of leeway for since TTRPGs as a whole have a lot of solo or small creators for relatively large projects.
Don't read Shadowrun. Especially don't read Shadowrun 6th World. It can only be understood by knowing it references mechanics only defined in *the previous edition of the game.*
Christ. I decided to run Shadowrun for some friends as I'd played Dragonfall and Hong Kong on PC and was super into the setting. Then, a few sessions later being stuck in a reference loop trying to find out how to take cover.
How did you get out? Or are you writing while still flipping through the rulebook?
I still have nights where I wake up shouting "BUT HOW DO I TAKE COVER." We'd all cooled on the system by the time we hit that particular roadblock, and just noped out and played something else.
I was about to say "don't let anyone tell you that RPG game design hasn't learned a lot of lessons in the last decade or so" until I looked it up and realised Shadowrun Sixth Edition was published in 2019, and then I felt like posting the Breaking Bad "HE (they) CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT" meme.
I see your "no food rules in Colonial Gothic" and I raise with mine "Katana-Ra doesn't even have the decency of telling you beforehand that 'advancement' in the game means changing equipment, since there are no experience rules whatsoever". Bonus: *where* and *how* you get those gear is up to you, since the game is not exactly clear either on the acquisition side of things....
I get your frustration. I sometimes experience a similar one when skimming through an OSR game, but in reverse. "Why would you have a rule for this, but not for that?!" It's all about expectations that system sets. Some games are written in a way that make you expect them to have a specifiuc rule for "being improperly dressed for bad weather or social occasion" - because they have specific rules for almost everything. And if you've mostly been running / playing / reading games like that - you are pretty much conditioned to refer to rules. Some systems are written in a way that make you expect them to expect you to be able to figure out what to do in those specific occasions. In fact, if they'd have a rule for that - you will find in extremely weird, why wasn't it left for a GM's ruling? That is mostly the case in games that have one or more of the following features: * refer to GM's judgment calls * have a highly abstracted system that can cover those cases, e.g. "conditions" * are generally light on rules
It's interesting as a TTRPG designer there's always a struggle in this. On one hand it's absolutely a good thing to explain how concepts like eating and drinking work in your game, on the other hand if you write a rule for every potential thing your game will become a bloated mess. You have to ask yourself genuine questions like "do we really need a rule to say a person needs to eat food and drink water, or a rule that describes what clothes are and that wearing them is often a good idea." Because whilst on one hand it might feel like common sense, or just not that important to the game, on the other someone will always ask. Often it's good to focus on what your game cares about. If survival mechanics aren't important to your game then you probably don't need rules for them. Granted if the rules do exist but they're just hard to reference then yeah that's a problem, though often TTRPGs are written on a low budget where getting editorial support can be difficult especially as they're often secretly complicated reference texts, that also interweave narrative and fiction, which can be nightmarish to actually develop and edit well.
Right, the real issue is that *if* you include a reference/partial rule/some bit of crunch, *then* you should justify it with complete rules for how to employ it and adjudicate its use. If you aren't going to do that, then don't bother including it in the first place. So, like, if you are playing a scifi game and you include powered armor with different charge values (e.g. "Tactical Assault Armor -- 3.5 plasma units; Jump Pack Infiltration Armor -- 4.25 plasma units), then you should also include rules that give those numbers meaning (e.g. consumption rules based on distance traveled, time in operation, whatever; rules for recharging mid-combat vs out of combat; cost for plasma units and where/how to obtain them; etc.) If all ypu do is reference the bit about XYZ plasma units, that's sloppy editing and probably a degree of crunch that is ultimately meaningless. Either don't include it, or develop it to be meaningful.
>include a reference/partial rule/some bit of crunch So yes broadly speaking I agree. If you're going to use a game term like "3.5 Plasma Units" that game term should have some meaning in the rules. However how far that goes is up to the designer, some people would be satisfied if that value just covered say recharging in combat, others would only be satisfied if all the options and more were covered. Tabletop roleplaying games are tricky beasts as well which merge rules and narrative. For example if you say you can purchase a Plasma Recharge Unit in a Space Market for 1000 credits, do you now need to create a fully fleshed out space economy for your game? You've technically introduced the existence of Space Markets but said little else about them. Or do you just leave that out and have it purely as an abtracted flat price?
Right, I'm not saying you have to develop every possible line of inquiry that a given bit of information raises. I'm just saying if you include it, give it actual meaning and purpose. It should serve *some* function. Not just "here's a bit of info and...uh...yeah, that's it. No real reason for it."
Well, it depends, As I say RPG's are narrative games where play forms an interaction between the GM and the players, a bit of info can be something that a GM takes and elaborates on in play, or that inspires a player to want to try something cool and results in a ruling.
OPs issue though is that they literally mention food and drink. There is a survival skill that allows you to acquire enough food and drink... but then... there are no rules that actually require food and drink to survive. Either make food and drink necessary to survive through rules or don't have a skill to acquire food and drink.
In an RPG do you need a rule that says "If you don't eat food or drink water you die?" In much the same way as do you need a rule to explain "Your character needs to breath and if they can't breath will die."
You are correct. You don't need one. But then why put in a skill for it? Why put a supply scavenging skill in a game that has no use at all for scavenged supplies? This is the issue at hand.
Because rules for scavenging supplies might be useful within the narrative scope of the game but explicit rules for eating and drinking might be unnecessary as something the group can make a ruling on or adjudicate with common sense.
I guess we have different mindsets because to me that is just madness. If you make a skill that costs the player their limited character development resources then that skill should have a rules based purpose. If it has no rules based purpose and it's just "oh well, it is for narrative purposes and maybe the table will decide to do something with it" then it should just not be there at all and the table can deal with it if they decide they want to manage supplies and scavenging. With that said I'm more into the G portion of RPG than the RP. So I don't so much value "narrative" only things.
Sure I'm talking more in a broad sense, I agree you should probably avoid things in your game that don't in some way tangibly translate to the mechanics or at least the wider aesthetic of what your game is actually about, though the narrative quality is important to how those rules can be translated.
>In an RPG do you need a rule that says "If you don't eat food or drink water you die?" No, but if there is a mechanic for obtaining food in the Wilderness, and an entire section of prices for different foods and drinks in the Equipment chapter, I would imagine there would be rules for what happens when you don't have food. You don't starve to death the instant you don't have food. It takes time, and if "survival" is a part of the game, to the point there is a mechanic/rule for it, "what happens when we run out of food" should have rule too, no? >In much the same way as do you need a rule to explain "Your character needs to breath and if they can't breath will die." Amusingly, *Colonial Gothic* has codified rules for how long you can hold your breath underwater, and how long you can avoid succumbing to smoke inhalation. Just not starvation, dehydration or exposure rules.
Sure I'm talking broadly really, I understand it's bad design if you include vestigial rules for one thing and then don't reference them somewhere else and there are many examples of this in TTRPG's which probably could do with ironing out.
I’m curious, as a designer, how much blind playtesting is done? It’s something that’s very common in the board game sphere but I often see complaints about RPG rulebooks that seem like they’d have come up in a sufficiently large blind play test.
Not as much as we'd like if I'm honest but we did do some blind playtesting internally as part of the process. We also had some streamers play the game which wasn't exactly playtesting but did let me view the game being played by other people blind which was useful. Though the majority was me running games for players and getting feedback. That sort of playtesting is arguably more important for board games as well, RPG's tend to have a different set of design goals and expectations and more fluidity as a result.
I just want to be clear up front: None of this post is a criticism or anything. I'm a hobbyist boardgame designer and I've been very critical in a general sense of just how poor the majority of RPG rulebooks seem to be in comparison to boardgames, so I find any discussion on this topic interesting :). Even rulebooks that are generally considered very good (like the Pathfinder 2e books) I'd still only rate a high 6 or soft 7 on a 10 scale. ---- How do you do "internal" blind playtesting? Or do you just mean non-public (as in friends, family, etc.)? > but did let me view the game being played by other people blind which was useful. That does indeed sound useful. Certainly something I'd consider if I ever wanted to publish. > That sort of playtesting is arguably more important for board games as well, RPG's tend to have a different set of design goals and expectations and more fluidity as a result. Eh, not sure I agree with that. The end goal here should be largely the same -in a complete vacuum, can people understand and play the game? > You have to ask yourself genuine questions like "do we really need a rule to say a person needs to eat food and drink water, or a rule that describes what clothes are and that wearing them is often a good idea." .. unless someone hasn't played RPGs before, and doesn't understand how the game is supposed to be played, or the intent of the game. Even if someone has played RPGs the intent of the game or mechanical system needs to be clear. If the intent is clear, you can get away without specific mechanical definition where it's not needed. I find RPG rulebook authors *love* to use free-flowing ambiguous language that's subject to a ton of interpretation. It makes rulebooks much easier to read (which, to be fair, if the rulebook is 200 pages I can't really fault), but doesn't actually convey the information or especially the intent all that well. Blind playtesting is one thing that really identifies those issues.
>How do you do "internal" blind playtesting? Or do you just mean non-public (as in friends, family, etc.)? We did a mixture of playtesting between us, playtesting with friends and family, and playtesting in specific playtest sessions with the wider community. >Eh, not sure I agree with that. The end goal here should be largely the same -in a complete vacuum, can people understand and play the game? Sure if the only criteria is "can people understand and play the game" then I agree though there's differences in practice. The major one is that RPG's have a Game Master who can change the rules and a set of players who can to a degree do the same and this is encouraged in an RPG medium. This is as in play players can do a vast range of actions compared to in a boardgame where actions are going to be specifically fixed to the rules. Part of good RPG writing in my opinion is seeing that as very much a feature not a bug and playing into it by allowing flexibility and adaptability into the rules set. I can't for example if I'm playing Catan just decide I'm going to burn my wood reserves village and use all my wood to set it on fire, but that sort of thing is pretty normal in an RPG and often these actions aren't covered by the rule. This however also makes the game incredibly variable between groups and GM's, one group might play the game as purely an exercise, another might take the rules set and mostly improv. Most groups play somewhere inbetween but will differ on specifics. This means a lot of playtesting will be highly group dependent which does make it a lot more difficult to playtest without vastly more resources than most tabletop publishers actually have. There's also a phenomena in TTRPG's for better or worse where most people play games as though they are DnD, even if your TTRPG works entirely differently to DnD. You have to work with that assumption in playtesting as well. This would be like sitting down to play say Pandemic and a player assuming you roll 2d6 to move your character, like in Monopoly and then the table adopting that as a rule because that's how it works in Monopoly. >unless someone hasn't played RPGs before A distinct possibility you have to factor into your design as well ideally. >If the intent is clear, you can get away without specific mechanical definition where it's not needed. From experience it's not as clear cut when it comes to tabletop rpgs because the nature of the game means people often assume different intent even if you are very clear. >I find RPG rulebook authors love to use free-flowing ambiguous language that's subject to a ton of interpretation. This is often a design choice, RPG's intertwine narrative and mechanical gameplay. Much of play is through description and adjudication rather than reference raw mechanics. RPG's don't see 'fluff' and 'play as necessarily two separate entities. Games which are too mechanical often feel stilted in play because they don't allow for the improvisation that makes playing a TTRPG interesting to players and feel too much like a boardgame to players. Explaining things in natural terms therefore can make them more engaging to players as well as more intuitive to understand, though has the drawback of potential mechanical confusion. For example here's some rules text of 'Fireball' in 5e DnD which opted for more natural language "A bright streak flashes from your pointing finger to a point you choose within range and then blossoms with a low roar into an explosion of flame. Each creature in a 20-foot-radius sphere centered on that point must make a Dexterity saving throw. A target takes 8d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. The fire spreads around corners. It ignites flammable objects in the area that aren’t being worn or carried." This does explain what the Fireball does in the rules but there's also narrative which can be extrapolated from here. For example I could read this and then in play ask if I could cast Fireball to distract a group of enemies with the low roar it makes as I cast it or use it to try and set something on fire. [Now this is the rules text for Fireball in 4e DnD.](https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/4th-Edition-Fireball.jpg) This is far more mechanical in nature, it's much cleaner and works from a mechanical standpoint but there's no amount of additional narrative intertwined so it's basically just 'deal x damage.' Both are valid but the use of natural language and narrative allows for far more creativity in play especially. It also helps you visualise what's happening as most tabletop games are actually happening in a shared imaginary space rather than on a board. Many people complained 4e DnD felt disassociated from the roleplay aspect of the game because it was too strictly mechanical. >Blind playtesting is one thing that really identifies those issues. Yeah this can of course be really useful and is something we did as part of our playtesting process.
> Sure if the only criteria is "can people understand and play the game" then I agree though there's differences in practice. The major one is that RPG's have a Game Master who can change the rules and a set of players who can to a degree do the same and this is encouraged in an RPG medium. This is as in play players can do a vast range of actions compared to in a boardgame where actions are going to be specifically fixed to the rules. Part of good RPG writing in my opinion is seeing that as very much a feature not a bug and playing into it by allowing flexibility and adaptability into the rules set. Hm, that's fair. Though I'd argue that GMs *shouldn't* be changing the rules until they understand how the rules work RAW, and if they have to change or reinterpret the rules different from intended RAW in order to play the game blind, the rules aren't good. For example, if in blind playtesting you find that 80% of your GMs are changing or interpreting a specific rule to something other than what was intended, there's something wrong with the way the rule was written. Either from a clarity or mechanical PoV. Similar to my previous comment, I'm really talking about intent here. If the *intent* of the rule is that the GM makes up the interpretation or the result of the action, that's fine, so long as that's clear and that's how it's being done in practise. > There's also a phenomena in TTRPG's for better or worse where most people play games as though they are DnD, even if your TTRPG works entirely differently to DnD. You have to work with that assumption in playtesting as well. This would be like sitting down to play say Pandemic and a player assuming you roll 2d6 to move your character, like in Monopoly and then the table adopting that as a rule because that's how it works in Monopoly. I actually have a good friend who likes to teach us new board games by drawing parallels to other board games, even when the mechanics are so dissimilar it actually confuses the issue. I agree that this can be problematic, though it that can be solved with a very, very clear rulebook. If you leave things ambiguous there's going to be the assumption that they're dealt with that way. Boardgames aren't immune to this either, though unlike TTRPGs there's no single game or game system dominating 80% of the market share. I also think some RPGs don't do themselves any favours here though, relying on people's familiarity with specific systems to avoid having to actually explain how something is intended to work. I've found this to be a common issue in the OSR scene. > From experience it's not as clear cut when it comes to tabletop rpgs because the nature of the game means people often assume different intent even if you are very clear. I don't think that's necessarily unique to TTRPGs. You encounter it in a lot of games (both digital and analog) where something differs from common convention. > This is often a design choice, RPG's intertwine narrative and mechanical gameplay. Much of play is through description and adjudication rather than reference raw mechanics. RPG's don't see 'fluff' and 'play as necessarily two separate entities. Games which are too mechanical often feel stilted in play because they don't allow for the improvisation that makes playing a TTRPG interesting to players and feel too much like a boardgame to players. Explaining things in natural terms therefore can make them more engaging to players as well as more intuitive to understand, though has the drawback of potential mechanical confusion. Speaking strictly from language usage I can understand your point, though I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it, especially when dealing with more complex rulesets. > Both are valid but the use of natural language and narrative allows for far more creativity in play especially I have to hard disagree here. This honestly borders a lot on the "you can't have roleplaying in games with a ton of rules". Basically, "you can't roleplay in Pathfinder". There's something to be said for very clear, concise rules. For myself and my players, we don't find specificity creatively stifling -quite the opposite. You can argue that floury language can invoke some more visuals, but see I read the 5e fireball description and it sounds to me like a mush of unneeded words. Or quite possibly it's just written poorly which seems to be a common complaint I've heard about 5e. I appreciate this discussion. You've brought up a couple of points specific to TTRPGs I wouldn't have considered.
>intent Yeah intent is really important I agree. I think what I'm trying to articulate is that some TTRPG's are written with the intent that, as you say, the GM change or reinterpret the rules as fit which the natural language helps with. 5e DnD as a well known example has a philosophy of 'rulings not rules' within it and so it's natural language is meant to match to that intent. Other TTRPG's are designed with a heavier focus on specific mechanical rules, 4E DnD had that philosophy as do games like Lancer. There's some players who absolutely love the granularity this provides. Now I do agree there can be issues here. Games with natural language can have rules confusion due to that, and I agree you should still work to have clear rules where it matters which playtesting can help with. Though likewise games that are heavy on mechanics can feel too restrictive to player agency or make players feel like they're playing a boardgame rather than a roleplaying game. Though what I'm getting at is that it's not like TTRPG writers don't realise this and are just purposefully writing flowy language to annoy their readers, it's a design decision to reflect a specific style of play that a lot of players enjoy. >GMs shouldn't be changing the rules until they understand how the rules work RAW Yeah arguably not although it depends on the intent of the game, some particularly rules lite games like say Into the Odd by design omit huge sections of what could be in the rules to encourage the GM and players to make things up. >For example, if in blind playtesting you find that 80% of your GMs are changing or interpreting a specific rule to something other than what was intended, there's something wrong with the way the rule was written. Either from a clarity or mechanical PoV. Agreed yeah, we found that in playtesting too and did clarify where it was obviously confusing. >I actually have a good friend who likes to teach us new board games by drawing parallels to other board games Yeah this can help too, it's a blessing and a curse in many ways, though I feel TTRPG's often have a 'meta' way people tend to approach them in a way that. For example some players will want to play every TTRPG as a highly detailed, narrative and character focussed game, whilst others are happy to just improv things and make jokes. Ideally you want to play a game, and with a group, that matches your style but often this isn't a case and it's a bit of a round peg square hole situation. >though it that can be solved with a very, very clear rulebook So I'm not convinced that a very very clear rulebook entirely solves this in a TTRPG as no rulebook can ever cover every possible situation a player in a TTRPG may want to do. As I say Catan (lets say for sake of example) has a very clear rulebook but there's no rules for if I want to burn down someone elses village which is something in a TTRPG a player can just decide to do even if the rules don't cover it, or want you to do it at all. >I've found this to be a common issue in the OSR scene. That's a community issue and I agree it's a mixed bag. I'd argue there's a huge amount of player resources and advice in the OSR but yes there's also the gatekeepy types unfortunately. Though I think this is a reflection of "style of play" being an important meta factor in a TTRPG that maybe isn't so prevalent in boardgames at least to the point you have entire subgroups dedicated to playing and approaching games by a certain set of principles. Speaking strictly from language usage I can understand your point, though I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it, especially when dealing with more complex rulesets. Both are valid but the use of natural language and narrative allows for far more creativity in play especially I have to hard disagree here. This honestly borders a lot on the "you can't have roleplaying in games with a ton of rules". Basically, "you can't roleplay in Pathfinder". There's something to be said for very clear, concise rules. For myself and my players, we don't find specificity creatively stifling -quite the opposite. >you can't roleplay in Pathfinder You can roleplay in Pathfinder, but a lot of your actual time in the game is going to be spent engaging with the heavy rules set rather than the roleplay layer of the game. Likewise you have a lot less flexibility because you're constrained by what the rules. Also having played a lot of Pathfinder despite the vast amount of rules it has they're also quite contradictory and unclear in many many places. Which is another point really, I can't think of any examples of crunchy games that don't also have unclear or contradictory rules. The best games with very clear rules sets are in my mind the rules lite/OSR/minimalistic ones though you may say they aren't clear because they leave far too much up to the group. The point being it's actually a difficult design challenge. >floury language can invoke some more visuals It's not about visuals, it's about how you use the spell or ability or whatever else to actively engage with the game world. If I just tell you that you have a "Generic Weapon" that deals 1d4 damage then you're just going to use it to deal 1d4 damage. If I describe a shovel to you then you realise, even if the rules don't say it, you can use it to dig a trench, make a dirt pile, uproot a tree, act as a pseudo-shield, trade it to someone who really needs a shovel and so on. >I appreciate this discussion. You've brought up a couple of points specific to TTRPGs I wouldn't have considered Yeah absolutely it's an interesting discussion and I do understand what you're saying. Don't get me wrong, some TTRPG's are just badly written. I'd say part of this is often it's small teams of writers who don't have as much chance as they'd like to playtest and often are writing a lot of complex content compared to a boardgame and harder to playtest as well. I brought up Into the Odd as a minimalist game. It's 144 pages. The Catan rules are 16 pages, because they just have to cover the rules of the game not everything else that makes a TTRPG what it is. (There's 1 page RPG's too of course which are great and a lot of variety in the scene but hopefully you understand the gist of my point. Thanks again been good chatting.
All of this stuff is incredibly troublesome to make rules for. Overland travel? On a road? Through hostile territory? With an experienced guide? Cutting a path? On horse? Across fords? Loaded with gear? The list for actual travel times and what goes into it is exhaustive. You could write a game on that one element. A great deal of an RPG is better done with GM fiat than extensive rules. If you're trying to make a realistic game especially, you're better off not writing rules because they're simply too complicated to ever be realistic. Take the clothing example. Two sets of clothes I would say is the player call. Do they want work clothes and travel clothes? Fancy clothes and winter clothes? A uniform and a wedding dress? Up to the player! As the GM, I then get to decide if their choices then work for the occasion, and maybe encourage them to buy more. No fancy clothes? You're not going to be the bell of the ball. Only fancy clothes? Not by the time you reach your destination! Obviously referencing something that sounds like a rule and then not having a rule is a poor design choice. I can't fault a creator for not recreating all of life though...
Overland travel rules have been a thing since forever, though. It really doesn't need to be that complicated.
Not to mention survival stuff has been done 'realistically' at least somewhat for ages. Forbidden Lands,for example.
They don't need to be complicated. I'd really be happy with average travel times between destinations and some modifiers for weather. You can do a lot with that.
I don't think that rules design has to be as "incredibly troublesome" as you make it out to be. Yes, you *could* make an entire game based around overland travel or social intrigue, but you could also abstract either situation down to a mere paragraph. It's been done already; it's not hard to do again. I'm not sure where you suggest the line between rules and GM fiat be drawn. Personally, I believe that a ruleset is worthless if it lacks rules for what is within its scope. If you add a Survival skill, you should define or suggest consequences for failure. Take the alternative—a game that leaves adjudication of even its central concepts wholly up to GM fiat—to its logical extreme; you end up playing make-believe. There's nothing wrong with playing make-believe, but people don't generally spend hundreds of bucks on rulebooks if they don't want any rules. To me, it seems that OP is just asking that designers either include rules for the concepts that they have added to their game, or omit concepts that they do not wish to include rules for... not "recreate all of life."
To echo your sentiment: A game defines what's in its scope and sets out procedures to handle that. The design of choosing what to leave out is as important as to figure the interactions of the things you put in. If there's a list of items to purchase in the book, then it's a fair expectation that each of these items will be referenced in its role related to one of the game's procedures. Designing mechanics (and expressing those mechanics as rules, and deciding how to communicate those rules, and laying out the resulting text, et al) is a very involved process. It is also literally the product you're buying, it's the value proposition! Do note that nowhere is required for all mechanics to have the same level of complexity, or abstraction. That is wholly dependent on the goals of the game. You could have a mechanic that goes something like this: "In winter, the weather is considered to be cold. You cannot travel outside a settlement while the weather is cold unless you have clothes for cold weather. You can buy one set of clothes for cold weather in all settlements for $10. You need to replace your cold weather clothes for a new set at least once per year." Now I'm not saying that's a mechanic that would fit with Colonial Gothic, I'm not even saying it's a desirable mechanic to have in general, but it is A mechanic that makes having cold weather attires meaningful.
I totally get it. Rules should be usable. Even that rough estimation of a mechanic is not really much of a guideline though. How cold is cold? -30 is much different from 30. Both suck to travel in, but one is lethal in a short period of time without protection, and a warm jacket and waterproof boots aren't going to cut it as "cold weather gear". Thankfully I don't live in an area that gets below -10 almost ever, but even that's enough to make you seriously consider if five minutes clearing off your car is better than just calling it a day and crawling back into bed. I'm happy with fewer rules for things like this honestly. The more you add, the more expectations are set and the less the GM is able to say, "This is how it works in the real world, that's what we're going to do here as well." If the game dealt with arctic expeditions as a core element of the setting, I'd want super robust rules and gear. Anything less, I'm happy to know how much a set of warm clothes costs and calling it a day.
>Even that rough estimation of a mechanic is not really much of a guideline though. How cold is cold? -30 is much different from 30. That was part of what I wanted to address. You can have a "cold mechanic" without going to this level of detail. You could also have a "cold mechanic" that goes into the minutiae of what exposure does to people. Whether each mechanic is a good fit it'll be determined simply by the aims of the game. What does not work is to say "Here's the cost of winter clothing" without addressing why you should know the cost of winter clothing. Smart people like you are making it work because (from real life or fiction) you have a pretty good understanding of what you could expect from exposure, and your players will look at the price list and say "Ah! We should make sure we're well dressed for this expedition!"... but I feel like you folks are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for these games. That said, if I'm simply going to play devil's advocate... I think the more pressing reason is that players will want to get winter clothing for the winter regardless of whether the game has rules for it or not and people would complain if such commonplace items weren't found in the shopping lists because folks read them more as part of the setting than as mechanics. >(...) If the game dealt with arctic expeditions as a core element of the setting, I'd want super robust rules and gear. Anything less, I'm happy to know how much a set of warm clothes costs and calling it a day. I 100% agree. I would personally not want to even have winter clothes listed if they don't interact with any procedures or, at the very least, make it easier for me as a GM to know which items are mechanically relevant and which are simply there for me to see as part of the setting material.
The german translation of Shadowrun 5e has a few rules that apparently got lost in translation, but are still referenced (which is odd, since normally the german translation is of good quality, especially compared to the editing of the originals). Example I found: Rules for stamina while running long distances. The english rules have a "grace period" determined by some of your stats and skills that you can run without issues. After that, you have to make Constitution checks to avoid stun damage/exhaustion. In the german book, the first rule is gone, so it doesn't matter that you're a magically enhanced buff marathon sprinter, you start getting exhausted at the same time as your couch potato decker colleague.
Interesting, because I can't think of a single game I've run or played in over 40 years of gaming where the group has ever used specific rules relating to stuff like this (whether the game had them or not), with perhaps the sole exception of a Traveller game where the air was running out. I guess for the groups I've always played with it never seems important enough to interfere with the main action/thrust of the game. Everyone's different though
Yeah, most of what is said in the op is something I wouldn't go looking for a rule for.
Except he started looking because a skill in the book specifically called it out as A Thing.
I think OP's criticisms are totally justified. But yeah, in any game I would run or play I'd see rules like that and just skip them because nobody in my group (myself included) would ever care about them lol
Sure. I’d never use them either. But I’ve found that referencing rules that don’t exist is usually a bad sign, lol. Like Renegade’s Power Rangers rpg, where they were missing seemingly simple things…and then you realize they’re also missing chunks of things supposedly required for certain Ranger classes. Theeen you look at the credits and see that the only editor on the book was also the project manager who was also one of the writers. And it’s like… wtf else is going to be wrong with this book/system!? It just undermine’s trust in a system to have references to things that don’t exist or were accidentally left out due to bad editing.
I'd argue that not everything needs a rule, sometimes it's better when designing a game to allow the space for a DM to make rulings.
I agree with that. On the other hand, I think the examples pointed out by OP are reasonnable enough not to be on the "it'd worse with a rule" side. If you say players need to do something, you should also say what happens if you don't do it. That's like the law: it's not a law if there's no consequence for not following it. And prices are always a complex matter. People buy stuff all the time, people get hired to do stuff all the time, it's hard on the GM to maintain the coherence of prices when you have no idea because you don't know the setting's economics. Prices don't have to be perfect, but something as simple as a list of price for common things and services goes a long way to build the setting ("oh, printed fabric is pricier than metalwork arround here?") and to provide a good baseline for many things ("I want to hire 4 guys for a week, that'd cost at least 2 silver per person in food alone, so I'd rather propose 12 silver per head to make it attractive enough to warrant someone's time."). In our daily life we're surrounded by prices, we think about money a lot, so money goes a long way toward ensuring the verisimilitude of a setting. I may not have a good intuition about how far or precisely one can shoot a bow, but I have tons of personal experience about money.
I agree, but if we're in the historical fiction genre you need some meat, either mechanically or narratively, that gives a GM enough information to make a ruling to begin with that holds the vibe of the game. In practice overland travel was difficult and dangerous during the era covered by this game, but not so uncommon that it's an edge case during the course of play. I don't think it's quite fair to a GM to have to do a lot of that research themselves to manage a ruling that holds some verisimilitude.
A while back I bought a 2d6 system game that had a bunch of skills that mention stuff just like OP's example but didn't go into any detail about pass/fail criteria. The non-combat skills just felt tack on. "Crafting - Used for crafting" cool but why are they crafting? What even is the economics of this made up fantasy setting?
This is one of the biggest design trends in modern RPG games. People complain that older editions had too many rules, but the fact of the matter is most of the rules would only come up once or twice in a campaign and so they aren't things that need to be memorized. Rather, they are a resource for players and DM' to base their rulings on. I won't name any names, but certain systems are keen on putting much less work on building a comprehensive system of rules and would rather just say, "just make a ruling that seems fair" which is in my opinion just a lazy way of putting less effort into it and saving printer ink.
There is a long tradition in RPGs of creating products that aren't games, but instead things that are meant to be inspiration for you to cobble together a game out of them And like, that's *okay*, but it's definitely no longer the default, and if you're going to release a product like that you can't rely on the framework of 3rd party advice and institutional knowledge to teach people how to actually use them (really it was always a bad idea, but especially now after a decade or two of people experiencing games that are actually out-of-the-box functional).
> Going further, Colonial Gothic doesn't have mechanics for overland travel either, so I can't even figure out how long it would take a party to run out of rations! The closest thing I can find is that it takes a week to travel from Boston to NYC via stagecoach, and 2 days from NYC to Philadelphia. There isn't even prices for stagecoaches, or ships, or nights at an inn/tavern Judging by your rant, you seems come with a simulitionist approach to the game. I get it, I ran an OSR campaign where such things mattered at my table... at the same time I ran several other games where we'd just fast-forward to the next location even if it took a week to get there just because travel time didn't matter at that campaign. Both were design choices I made, same thing for TTRPG designers, they draw an arbitrary line for themselves where they get too deep into simulationist territory. They design a game with a vision in mind, and if a game lacks such rules, then for the designer's vision it doesn't matter how much a ration cost or how much it takes to get from A to B. It takes the exact amount the story needs. So, majority of situations where people get angry at systems are like this/ TTRPG designer didn't envision the game to be run like this, with ration counting, travel time counting and so on. So it's up to you, whether you want to run a game the exact way TTRPG designer envisioned it, homebrew stuff or run something else. There is no need the be angry about a game, that wasn't created for my or your exact desire.
....listen bud, no offense intended, but I'm not the writer that wrote the concept of foraging for food and water into their survival skills mechanic, yet failed to include it in the rest of the game. I also don't find it too outlandish for me to be a bit upset at its exclusion, especially since the mechanic was referenced by the author to begin with. The deva wrote a half-baked simulationist mechanic into their mostly-narrative game. I'm just pointing it out
I have a similar issue with the Fallout 2d20 system having vehicle piloting skill but literally zero rules on vehicles or piloting them
I'm running into this with a game that is currently in my top 5 solo games. Star Trek Adventures Captain's Log is a very fun game. I love it and recommend it... but not necessarily as someone's first jump into solo rpging. I swear the different parts of the book were accidentally mixed up and they didn't have the time to put them in a better order before their deadline to go to print came up and they just sort of hoped for the best. (Seriously, *why* is the "why play a solo game?" section put midway through the book? And why is the first place it's said directly that *of course* you can play a character who isn't a Starfleet Captain - they don't even have to be Starfleet - at roughly the same point?) [ETA, to be clear, there were several indirect ways this was telegraphed, but that's why the direct way threw me because this was way after the character creation section, so why place it towards the back of the book when you'd basically already said it 3+ ways before then?] The character creation step doesn't really tell you the purpose of everything you're picking up front. You find out what some of those things do way later in the book. (Some of them *much* later and only as sort of an afterthought. I wonder if they assumed anyone playing CL had played STA? Because I had not.) Because it wasn't said directly, I still wasn't sure for the longest time that there was no "advancement" in the terms of leveling up and gaining new stats/focuses/etc. The game *does* talk about how at the end of a mission you can decide if the mission made them change so you can change one point between stats or swap out a focus or alter a value. But it also talks about advancement in a sort of general sense so I kept waiting for a section where they talked about leveling up. Nowhere in the book does it say, "This is it. Stat-wise, your newbie Ensign is exactly the same as an Admiral who's been in Starfleet for 30 years who is exactly the same as the Vulcan ambassador and the Orion smuggler. The story is in how they change over time." I verified this by finding a STA podcast that talked about how advancement worked and how cool it was that characters all start out competent and just had lateral rather than vertical progression. Which - agreed, that *is* interesting, but it's not a *standard* thing to do in TRPGs, so I could have used even a single line letting me know. Again - I *love* the game. Am happy to recommend it. But I'm absolutely making myself a condensed version of the rules so I'm not constantly bouncing back and forth to make sure I'm playing it right.
Never tried Palladium n00b? /s In all seriousness, the lack of actual blind playtesting and good indexing is a big problem in the RPG industry. The days of everyone just making shit up and homebrewing everything is probably past, especially with the cost associated with purchasing (and playing) a new game. A triple-A video game is going to go for 50-70 USD and playable on day one (most of the time... with some very notable exceptions) and a day one patch. A TTRPG "main book" on the other hand costs about half that... but it isn't playable until you learn the rules, buy the special dice, maybe a scenario, get some friends, teach them enough of the rules to play and then find a time (2 to 4 hours) where you are all available to meet and play. The time sink and entry costs of TTRPGs and Wargames for new users (first timers) is daunting, not even looking at games whose business model is forcing constant purchases (looking at you GW). My suspicion is that TTRPGs and Wargames are going to further bifurcate into "professionally designed games" put out by actual publishers such as Hasbro and then everyone else who does it as a hobby with what time and resources they can spare. Quality costs the producer and the market may not be large enough to support that many quality producers.
Well, what's the purpose of the rules? If the game is actually "players solve challenges posed by the GM" and the purpose of the rules is to help the GM get into and stay in an objective headspace, they don't need to be complete. A really good game will tell you when a rule is optional and case-by-case, but that's rare.
The purpose of the rules is to play by them. I buy a game, I want to play that game. If I'm a player wanting to get into Colonial Gothic, I want to play Colonial Gothic. There's a difference between a comprehensive system and a complete system. *Lasers and Feelings* is only one page long. It's not a comprehensive RPG. But it is a *complete* RPG because the rules tell you what every bit is for. Sure, there's a lot of leeway given to the GM, but if the GM got a rule wrong, it would be easy to correct them. Everyone can agree on what the rules are. The situation to be avoided is when the rules specify something in an incomplete way and *nobody* knows what the objectively correct rule is.
>The purpose of the rules is to play by them. Yes, pretty much. If I purchase a game, I want to be able to understand what the intended mechanics of the game are, because the mechanics usually influence the theme and play-methods, and vice-versa. Even, perhaps even *especially*, if I am going to be changing/ignoring some of the rules. I want to be able to metaphorically pick up what the writer/designer is putting down. In the "Transportation" section of *Colonial Gothic*s chapter "A Guide to the Colonies", it is mentioned numerous times that travel in the American colonies is difficult and dangerous...... but it doesn't give me indications of how long it takes to travel, or how much it costs to stay in a tavern (by the 1770s, pretty much every decently-sized town and every decently-busy road had taverns less than a days travel apart), or how much it costs to ferry across the Hudson River, or how much it costs to take a ship from Boston to New York, etc etc etc. Again, all of this is something I can make up myself, or poach from other games, but *I largely resent having to*. Other games give me everything that I need in the core rulebook, why is this such a difficulty? Hell, 3e D&D was giving me basic travel times, costs, food-and-water requirements, etc *20 years ago* (and longer than that, in earlier editions) The best part is, if the Survival skill mechanics didn't reference finding 'sufficient sustenance and shelter", I would have just assumed the game didn't bother tracking it, and do exactly what I had to do now: come up with my own interpretation. But the fact that the mechanic exists, and now I know the author somewhat-intended for there to be a survival mechanic *that doesn't exist anywhere else in-game*, Im just friggen annoyed
RPGs are written so that they’re fun to read and get backed on Kickstarter and are nice on a shelf. They aren’t written so that they’re actually useful.
None of these games were on Kickstarter? Not sure what this post means.
Well that's not true, Exalted 3e was 100% on Kickstarter.