Making It Your Game: House Rules

When I mentioned a few weeks ago that my friend Wade had tweaked the rules to octaNe for our game, it never occurred to me that anyone would consider changing rules to fit your specific group or needs would be odd or unusual.

And that, alone, needs thought.

I don't know that I've ever played in an RPG where there wasn't a house rule somewhere. They're not necessarily rules that make huge differences - sometimes, they soften a particularly unforgiving part of the game. Sometimes, they clarify a vague rule. And they're another way to fight munchkinism. And, lastly, they set expectations under our Social Contract.

I played in a GURPS game a few years ago that had so many house rules that they called it "CURPS." Chris, the GM, had been running it for so long he knew which advantages and disadvantages caused problems and in what combinations. And with which players.

To counter this, he had a long handout that we got at character generation. No attributes higher than 15. If you choose X, you cannot have Y. These weren't set in stone for everyone - he knew that not all players were equal problems - but they provided good guidelines, and we could negotiate if there was something on the list that we desperately needed.

Occasionally, I run into house rules for board games. Bounty, for example. The rules have some .... issues. They're poorly-translated and don't cover all eventualities, which leaves players to determine what to do in certain situations. And the rule for buying a second ship broke the game. We house-ruled it to prevent the purchase of a second boat.

There are also House Rules which aren't game-specific:

Dice
If you cannot stack another die of the same type on top of a possibly-cocked die without tipping it over, it's cocked and should be re-rolled.
If the cocked die is part of a pool of dice, re-roll the entire pool, not just the cocked die.
Dice which fall off of the table (or other rolling surface) should be re-rolled.
Don't touch anyone else's dice without permission.
Don't roll dice unless it's your turn.

Seating
The GM gets whatever seat they want. The host gets second pick. Everyone else gets to fight for their seat.

Food
The GM should never bear the burden of providing food and beverages.
If the host is providing food, a list should be made available to everyone else with the understanding that players who want something else should provide their own.
If you're not bringing food (and are not the GM or the Host), bring a couple of bucks to chip in for the food. Or provide food next time.

Table Talk
Is acceptable, provided it doesn't get in the way of the game - unless the GM says otherwise.
Don't tell the current player what to do unless they ask for help or advice.

I don't think it's that odd, by the way, that there are so many dice-related rules. In fact, the relationship of gamers to dice led to a book I'll be ordering on my next payday: The Bones: Us and Our Dice. It's from the same team behind Things We Think About Games, which was brilliant.

And remember how I keep telling people that Your Game Is Not Literature? In the next few weeks, I will be ordering Hamlet's Hit Points. It's by Robin Laws, who brought us Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering and Feng Shui.

Want me to buy a book? Get him to write it.

Tonight, I have a potluck to attend. My weekly game group is celebrating eight years of gaming together. I think I have a lot to say about that - but not yet. It'll keep for another week or two. Meanwhile, here is a Geeklist I put together last year, which lists all the games played in the first year of game night.

Making Characters

I spent a part of my afternoon today tracking down character sheets for some of my games for a project I'm starting to work on, and it reminded me of how much I love character generation.

One of my greatest joys was always taking a pencil, some scratch paper, a character sheet, and the necessary books and creating something out of nothing.

Did I say something? I'm sorry. I meant someone.

It was always fascinating to me how many different ways there were to create characters, too. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition was strict die-rolling. FASA's Star Trek was a free-choice lifepath. Cyberpunk had a lifepath, too, but you had to roll on it - and it was more of an add-on to provide post-generation flavor to your character.

Over time, I grew to appreciate systems that gave me more control over my character. At the same time, it's easy to see why those systems were the most frustrating to GMs (I was young enough that the concept of a GM limiting our character generation in some way was an alien concept).

The first time I saw GURPS, my head about exploded. It was the first point-buy system I'd seen where everything came out of the same pool of points. And there were so many options! I spent close to 60 points on skills for my first character. I could have achieved the same results by spending more points on my attributes and fewer of those points on my attributes - and long-term, it would have been a more powerful character.

In fact, looking back, I see a lot of "mistakes" on my older characters. Optimizations that experienced players would have taken that a beginner to the game could easily miss. Character options that are more important than they appear to be - or that are worth more points than you spend on them.

And I'm curious in some cases: How will a total beginner to a given system handle character generation? Can I catch some of these "mistakes" on my own? How about my readers?

Thankfully, I live with someone who is a fairly inexperienced roleplayer. My beautiful wife, Stephanie. While she is a boardgamer, her roleplaying experience is limited (another reason I keep doing the one-shots). When I asked her if she'd be willing to participate, she was excited. And I'm excited to have her involved.

Don't look for this to be a regular series - we have a lot of games we're going to work through, but we need to schedule character generation into our (severely limited) free time, and then I need to write about the results (and scan the sheet, and so on and so forth).

I hope you enjoy reading about our experiences.

System Still Matters

Here's what we've covered so far:
System Matters because it sets up the expectations of the players.
System Matters because it provides a reward system, impacting the style of play.

Here's today's discussion:
System Matters because the system chosen restricts player choice.

This restriction begins at character generation:

If I tell you "Make a character for a game," you will probably first ask me what game it will be. After all, if we're playing D&D and you show up with a GURPS Traveller character, we have a problem.

If I'm more specific with my request - "Make a GURPS Swashbucklers character," then you have more information, but still not enough to get started. At this point, you need to know what power level the character should be, if there are any off-limits Advantages or Disadvantages, and so on.

Every choice that I, as a GM, give to my players modifies their available choices. "Make me a 150 point GURPS Swashbucklers character. Some GURPS Steampunk and GURPS Space skills and Advantages are available. Disadvantages worth more than 5 points require specific approval. Humans only, unless you have a really cool concept you want me to work in. No magic-users."

I've just told my players what I want - and have given them a clue about the game we'll be playing. I slammed a lot of doors shut - I won't be seeing a party of Elves, for example. But they know to expect Steampunk Swashbucklers in Space. Since magic is not a default in any of these settings, my mention of magic-users hints that magic does exist in the setting. It also suggests that it's rare - or problematic in some way. And non-humans do exist - that is made explicitly clear in my instructions.

System Matters because it can support the setting.

In Dungeons and Dragons, you very rarely see Wizards on the front lines going toe-to-toe with monsters. Instead, Wizards tend to stand back and fire spells from a safe distance.

The setting¹ says, "Wizards are not melee fighters - they are support characters." In response, the rules give wizards fewer hit points and it's harder for them to wear armor.

Many games have system "tweaks" to respond to specific setting differences. The Fuzion system is an excellent example of this: Even with the same rules, a Champions: New Millennium character would not fit into a Bubblegum Crisis campaign - even if you ignored the setting clash.

Why? Because Bubblegum Crisis is a fairly gritty setting where guns are a thing to be feared. Superheroes, by contrast, don't usually use guns (or fear guns). Because of this, the Champions character will eat most Bubblegum Crisis adventures for breakfast. And a Dragonball Z character will overpower a Champions character without breaking a sweat.

In general, I'm not fond of universal systems in part because people will inevitably try crossovers between two very different settings, and then get upset when it doesn't 'Work.' This is partly because of publishers who get lazy and don't tweak their engine for different settings - In my Fuzion example above, the system is tweaked for each setting.

Part of my general dislike for universal systems is because of this lack of subtle setting reinforcement - a GURPS Swashbucklers character will be equally as effective against a sword-wielding medieval knight out of armor as against a WWII soldier in the trenches. In theory, any 100-point GURPS character is on par with any other 100-point GURPS character.

This is one of the few areas where I give credit to Palladium Books. If you look at the Rifts setting and all of the hundreds of thousands of available character options, it rapidly becomes clear that certain character options are dramatically more powerful than others. The various authors and designers involved don't even try to maintain balance. There are character races which are clearly better than others. I'd go so far as to guess that there are options that less than 1% of Rifts players take because they are so dramatically inferior. At the core of this inferiority is the Mega-Damage settings, where some character are 100x as tough as others just because they're from a different universe. There's actually a decent rant on this here.

I've got more to say on this, but this post is long enough already, I think. I'll be at GenCon next week and will be spending my normal writing time packing. This means a two-week disruption in posting here². In the meantime, feel free to watch my Twitter feed, which will be active next week.

I'll see you after GenCon.


¹ I say "The Setting" - the same applies to all published D&D settings I can think of, many of which are virtually identical.

² The Wednesday AFTER GenCon may just be an overview of my haul.

System: Player Expectations and Style of Play

Since I'm going to be talking about system and how it impacts games for a bit, I think that it would be good to start by defining system.

For role-playing, I define a system as follows:

System: A set of rules used to determine the success or failure of characters within a role-playing game.

There are other elements which nearly every system has, but they are all designed to support the core success/failure mechanism of the system. For example, most games have a character generation system of some sort.

The most common core mechanisms involve dice, and can be summed up in a single sentence - "Roll one die, add appropriate modifiers and compare to a target number." "Roll a number of dice. Count the number of those dice which equal or exceed a certain number."

Systems also provide reward systems. Most of the time, this takes the form of experience points which allow characters to change and grow.

Each system brings with it certain expectations, which can drastically color how players react to it.

Where do the expectations come from? A variety of sources.

The most important and influential piece of the player expectation puzzle is the game's reward system. In Dungeons & Dragons, defeating monsters¹ and disarming traps give you experience points which are added to your total. At certain threshholds, you gain more abilities which make you more effective at defeating monsters and disarming traps. The system doesn't spell out rewards for outwitting NPC's or avoiding combat. This leads to a specific style of play.

In the Tribe 8 (and other Silhouette-system games), you gain experience for being involved with the game, for advancing the story, for staying in character, and for working as a team. Yes, you can get experience for defeating enemies, but you can potentially obtain more experience for a dramatic act of self-sacrifice than for that defeat.

In other games, survival is its own reward. Call of Cthulhu is probably the most infamous game in this respect.

Other games provide additional rewards - King Arthur Pendragon, with its Winter Phase allows players to build dynasties, not just characters.

While it's the major contributor, a game's reward system is not the only element which impacts a game's style of play. So what else influences player expectations?

Rules focus. In Ars Magica, for example, devotes more than two-thirds of the rules to the magic system. Not surprisingly, the game focuses on magic. In fact, the combat system is almost underdeveloped by comparison.

Skill Lists. Tales From The Floating Vagabond had a skill list which included, "Swing Nasty Pointy Thing with Panache." With a list like that players knew from the outset that the game didn't take itself too seriously. It's worth noting that the game (and a number of its supplements) are now available at Drive Thru RPG.

Interior Art. CthulhuTech is illustrated throughout, and there are a number of images that make me think, "I wanna be that guy."

Game Fiction. I'm not talking about the Dragonlance novels, here. Nearly every game includes one or more bits of introductory fiction. These are frequently incomplete and end with a cliffhanger of sorts before introducing the rules elements demonstrated by that fiction. More importantly, they give you an idea what the setting is.

So what about Universal Systems? That is: systems which don't tie to a specific setting or genre. Universal systems generally lack a specific rules focus, they have very diverse skill lists, and the interior art and game fiction are all over the map in terms of quality and flavor. GURPS, FUDGE, Silhouette, and d20 have all tried to be completely universal systems - how well do they succeed? I'll talk about universal systems next week.







¹ Until fairly recently, "Defeating" always meant "killing." Now, if you can force them to retreat or flee, you get credit for defeating them.

System Matters

Let's get to the meat of the discussion, shall we? I have two words for you - they are words that the large sections of the RPG publishing industry spent the better part of a decade trying to convince you were incorrect. Words that the rest of the industry spent the same amount of time trying to reinforce and remind you of.

These two words?

System Matters

In 2000, Dungeons & Dragons released its third edition. The game was a huge step forward for D&D - it transformed the game, and advanced the system so it was almost caught up to the rest of the industry¹. But it did one thing that advanced the entire industry - it opened its system up to third-party publishers, with a few restrictions. This meant that anyone could publish product that used the same system as the best-selling game in the industry. They were even allowed to claim compatiblity. Did I say allowed? I mean "required." Each book said on the front, "Requires the use of the Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook." Sales exploded. For everyone. We saw d20 Superhero games, d20 Pulp Noir Detective games, d20 Cyberpunk games, d20 Horror games ...

For the first few months, all you needed to do in order to sell product to a distributor was slap that d20 logo onto the product.

And everyone that produced d20 product spent time telling you, "System doesn't matter. The flavor of the game comes from the Game Master (GM)." In essence, "The d20 Version of Game is just the same as the non-d20 Version of Game. If you are noticing a difference in your game, it's all your GM's fault." More on this later. And by "later," I mean, "Probably next week."

What these publishers forgot - and hoped you would forget - is that each system brings with it its own set of player expectations. Someone who enjoys GURPS is probably not going to enjoy a system with fewer rules, such as Vampire: The Masquerade, because each game has a completely different reward system. And yes, I know about the train wreck known as GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade. It took the Gothic Punk setting of the one and shoehorned it to the system of the other. The problem was that most GURPS players weren't interested in the setting, and most V:tM players preferred the system they already had. Steve Jackson Games published a few other World of Darkness adaptations

In fact, I suspect that GURPS Vampire: The Masquerade is a large part of why White Wolf and Steve Jackson both approached the d20 system the way they did - White Wolf published a series of settings and adventures that were completely unrelated to their World of Darkness setting (and didn't use the White Wolf name), and Steve Jackson Games waited a few years, and then began mocking d20 with The Munchkin Player's Guide.

Meanwhile, other games quietly started to take advantage of a growing d20 backlash. In 2001, Sorcerer (a game which had existed since the mid-90's) was a success in its print incarnation - not a huge success, but enough that smaller independent publishers started to take note. Discussion of game theory on the Forge took off. A few years later, the Indie Press Revolution took off. While they haven't billed themselves as such, these groups are to role-playing what the Punk movement was to music. But that's another subject for another time.

Is this to say there is no such thing as a functional universal system? No. Not at all. I'm also not saying d20 was a bad game - I thought some a few d20 versions were actually superior to the "original" versions of some games. I'll talk more about both of these later, as well.

I know it seems like I spend more time talking about what I'm going to talk about instead of just talking about it.

Here is why:
Every sentence I type spills fifteen more ideas into my notebook. Just in the last few paragraphs, I've realized that I have six different Cthulhu games (Call of Cthulhu, Trail of Cthulhu, Toon², Call of Cthulhu d20, GURPS Cthulhupunk, and CthulhuTech), that I have two different universal systems within arms reach (GURPS and FUDGE), and that I haven't played a White Wolf game in nearly a decade.

And, once I start to talk about one of those, they spill even more ideas. For example, it occurs to me that the Cthulhu games are a perfect example of how system matters. Each has their own way of dealing with sanity, and each has a different "feel" to it which is based in large part on the system. I am also aware that d20 tried to be a universal system, and it succeeded to a limited extent, but it still isn't as universal as FUDGE. I should write about universal systems and where they succeed and fail.

...

So join me next week, when I continue talking about system and how it matters. And, in a few weeks, I'll talk about setting and how it matters and how it interacts with system.

I'll get back to boardgaming, I promise. In fact, next week - despite what I've said here - I'll probably have an entry about Dungeon Twister. Or Ghost Stories: White Moon, which I've now seen the rules to. If, of course, I'm allowed to say anything about it.

It's also worth mentioning that Asmodee Editions and Repos Productions are sharing a booth at GenCon this year. I'm looking forward to meeting the Repos team.





¹ Care to see the history of the d20 system? Check out Talislanta sometime. Especially the 3rd edition, written by Jonathan Tweet and published by Wizards of the Coast.

² The Tooniversal Tour Guide has a section entitled "The Crawl of Catchoolu." It's a parody, but it's a functional parody.