Listen, engines and all that donât matter, as long as it works. Itâs the person driving the car you have to worry about. If the driverâs a drunken lunatic, then driving the best care in the world wonât help.
This nonsense wouldnât usually fly, but somehow itâs become a trained response to anyone discussing problems or fixes in RPG systems.
You donât care about how the washing machine works until it breaks down. You donât care how, but everyone cares that it works.
Hereâs what happens when RPG systems break down.
When to Blame the System
When combat drags out for 45 minutes
âŚthe system has failed. Even the purest of action films donât have fight-scenes that last over 10 minutes.
Rather than making the game âfull of combatâ, this actually limits combat substantially. If a fight lasted 5 minutes, then 10 fights would take a total of 50 minutes from the game; but when one fight lasts 45 minutes, then the game needs 1.5 hours to have just two combat scenes.
When the Rules Drag the Narrative into a Ditch
âŚit really fucks with the entire genre. I once played a game of Dark Ages: Vampire where one character played a Kuldonic sorcerer, with Earth-Magic. One power allowed him to have the earth reach up and trap victims by the leg, rendering them immobile. It wasnât long before the coterie figured out how to kill just about any immobile foe, which meant they could kill anyone.
The nights took a very different turn after that. Multiple nights took very awkward turns, because of a single ability which the writers couldnât be bothered to test properly. Just âthere you go, earth-magic-vampire-thing or whatever, nerds love this stuffâ. But I was not a happy nerd.
When the Rules Leave Players with Nothing to Do
âŚthen they have abandoned that player to boredom.
- When a PC falls, nearly dead, it leaves the player with nothing to do while combat drags on without them.
- When a ritual spell requires 3 rounds to cast, it leaves the player with nothing to do.
- When everyone sends âthe social characterâ (with the highest Charisma Bonus) to do all the talking, then it leaves all the other players with nothing to do.
- When the GM has to make 4 encounter checks per day while the party travels for 5 days, it leaves all of them with nothing to do.
Systems can easily leave people with ânothing to doâ, which promotes long periods of players staring at their phones.
When the Rules Leave Rulings up to the GM
âŚthen the designer has abandoned their responsibility to provide easy, objective, results.
The Illusion of Subjectivity
Rule systems can be compared in objective ways, if we can only clean out some confusion on the matter.
Your GM determines when the table has fun
âŚbut that doesnât invalidate the time wasted on bad rules - it only serves as a distraction. So the question of the GMing skills may be more important than rules, but should also be ignored when rules are on the table of discussion.
A good ruleset may not help a bad GM, but it can certainly bring down a games night with any GM.
Some people prefer fantasy
âŚand clearly the preference cannot be wrong. Clearly rules are involved with representing fantasy or sci-fi, so the choice of rules seems subjective.
But this line of thinking has missed the exact point when rules are chosen; they come in after the subjective decisions have ended. A game designerâs choice of emulating Star Trek or the Witcher comes down to individual preference, with no right answer.[1] To find when the system has gone wrong, we wait until after someone wants a genre, and look at how well the selected system emulates the genre. Iâve never played an RPG which emulates Star Trek, but if I do, I want to be able to set my phaser to stun. And if the system says âwhen setting the phaser to stun, it deals fewer HP damageâ, then the system has failed, because this makes the stun setting on a phaser strictly worse, and draws out combat; it provides a clear disincentive to stunning opponents.
The GM can ignore the rules
âŚbut this threatens everything that the rules were brought in to avoid.
When players know that the GM will adjust everything for âcommon senseâ, they can no longer plan by thinking about what the game will facilitate, they will have to plan by thinking about what the GM will âlet them doâ. The plot will also fall from whatever the GM thinks should happen narratively, which removes exactly the thing we play RPGs for - an emergent narrative, with unexpected twists.
Where the Objectivity Lies
Where two systems give the same result, but one resolves in half the time, that one makes a better game. And if two systems resolve at the same time, but one provides richer information, that one makes a better game. Where players commonly understand one way a rule is phrased, but not the other phrasing, then the first is objectively better. And whenever rules give the table a surprising, but totally genre-appropriate result, the system has done its job well.
For a more positive analysis of systems, read what systems do[i]
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[1] To put this another way, the answer to âwhich genre?â is always correct, because people are describing what they want, and being wrong about what one wants is rare, even if being confused about how to get it is very common.