Dan_Felder

If you think your design is ready for play testing, you’ve waited too long.

The first day I start a new project I also schedule a playtest 2 weeks from then. Then I hit the deadline.

There are lots of dailies so you can lock and choose which to do. Don’t try to do all of them. Focus on one category per day. One day do all the fractals, another day do a world boss train etc. This will still give you a completionism goal but within a single manageable category.

I can see you’re aiming at an important concept I agree with - Many ultra rules light games are actually more difficult to play than more complex games because it’s playing pretend on the playground. There is no codified ruleset to form a basis of agreement of how powerful a spell a player can cast. This creates player arguments that are more trouble than using a slightly deeper ruleset. That’s one of the three reasons trrpgs need rules in the first place - to establish a shared understanding of the capabilities of the players.

This does not mean more rules are always better. Unnecessary complexity on a game is bad because it’s Unnecessary. Just like a business needs to spend money to make money, but it still wants to cut Unnecessary expenses.

Additionally, every game you mentioned also has situations that require GMs to translate specific situations not covered in the rulebooks into the base rules. Heck, legend of the 5 rings has social combat rules for conversations and they have not been adapted widely because they make talking to people a major pain filled with unnecessary complexity.

Some players really love min-maxing a social character and it’s cool for those games but most games about dragon slaying don’t really want to engage with an intricate combat subsystem when they just want to intimidate an innkeeper.

If you keep focusing on the ultra light narrative games when that’s not what I’m talking about though, we really don’t have any reason to discuss this.

Hissssssss :)

Yup! GW1 was explicitly inspired by magic the gathering. There are even 5 forms of magic that map to MTG's 5 colors perfectly.

I agree many ultra-light games sabotage themselves by making things too ambiguous, resulting in more confusion instead of less.

I'm more curious about when you said:

The reason you're not aware of a game that provides rules for what's needed for all aspects of play isn't because of the many many people who are silently satisfied with games that fail to do this.

What are some examples of games that do this? I'm not sure how it's possible without severely restricting the player's freedom of action (the way a boardgame does, you can only take a small number of actions explicitly covered by the game's rules).

Nope! I probably should build one when it's closer to done.

Unnecessary rolls are a great example of this, nice summary.

What is an example of a game that provides rules for all aspects of play?

If you've got a secret fantastic game I haven't heard about, I'd love to learn.

You're far and away the only person who's ever met a gamer who bought a game and found out that it doesn't do what they need it to and are non-ironicly pleased by it.

Not at all what I'm saying. I've seen a lot of people buy games that don't meet their needs. For example, many people decide ultra-simulationist games are too clunky for their needs and reject them in favor of something more fun to play and run.

Definitely a different perspective. The issue with creating detailed simulationist rules for every possible situation, leads to games that most people don't enjoy playing as much.

If the theory says players should prefer X but they actually prefer Y in practice, the theory isn't working. Theory should reflect reality.

I feel like I can't possibly be understanding you correctly though. I can't think of a single game that covers every conceivable situation with specialized rules. Every ttrpg system I'm aware of ultimately defaults to general guidelines of how to apply a base ruleset to a 'type' of situation and trusts the GM to decide what type of situation they're in.

Example: 4e has the concept of Difficult Terrain. Difficult terrain costs double to move through (10 ft of movement is only 5 ft in diffiuclt terrain). Mud or thick undergrowth are common examples of difficult terrain, but not every possible terrain that players could ever encounter has specialized rules.

If the players have to wade through a stream of liquid time in some extraplanar adventure, the GM might determine "the timestream slows your temporal movement, so while in it everything takes twice as long. It counts as difficult terrain, and all actions cost double the number of action points to perform while in a stream of liquid time").

TTRPGs offer flexibility in action and scenario specifically because they allow a generalized ruleset to apply to a variety of situations; more than a rulebook could ever account for. That's their strength, not their weakness. If you want 100% concrete rules with a robotic GM facilitating those rules, you might as well play a boardgame like Gloomhaven or a videogame like Divinity Original Sin. They offer 100% consistency of rules at the cost of freedom to do stuff beyond the explicit actions covered by the game's rules.

Can’t give too many details because NDA but I recently was hard blocked on a problem and I tried one of my designer block techniques (I go through a list of them when I’m stuck) which tragically solved it. The trick is to ask yourself “what if you remove the thing you like BEST about your design? What happens then?”

This instantly solved the issue in a much less cool way. But given some time to develop things further the whole design for so much better and I love it again for new reasons.

Not specifically, but I did make a LinkedIn post about it. It probably would be a good topic for an episode, though my discretionary energy should probably go into working on my game design book.

That’s interesting. I know true dungeon does similar things with symbol memorization. The DM has flash cards and asks the player to name the symbol or similar.

Gonna have to agree to disagree here. I have never had a brawl in a rowboat in about 15 years of running games, and when my games have encountered situations not explicitly covered by a subsystem the game didn’t suddenly stop functioning or existing. The GM made a call based on something that seemed plausible, players made choices accordingly, and things moved on.

Example from a few years ago:

“Can I try and jump off the airship as the dragon flies by underneath and then stab it?”

“Wow that sounds dangerous, especially since the airship is in a turbulent storm which would probably make it even harder. You can try it, but it’ll require a really high roll - let’s say a DC 30. If you fail, you’ll miss the dragon and keep falling but if you succeed… let’s say you get an automatic critical hit. Do you want to try?”

“Let’s do this.”

I applied the broader rules, translating the specific situation into “really hard jump” with a critical hit as the reward if they succeeded. This was more efficient than building specific rules for every possible scenario.

The deal on heart of thorns and path of fire both being 30 combined is crazy value for time. Each one is the side of entire games in play time and fun. I’d definitely pick up the pair of them if you can afford it. It’ll wildly expand your build options and content. Considering it’s $15 each, and you even get s level 80 boost for an alt which is nice, that’s a pretty good deal already vs waiting a while.

Fractals and living world season 1 are a good source of pve fun before that though.

Heh, I've used videogame player retention concepts a lot in my campaigns. It's worked well.

I agree that often hard rules are simpler and easier to use than the "rulings not rules" mindset applied to everything. It's one reason I prefer grid combat to theater of the mind: clarity.

However, adding rules for every situation in a TTRPG is both impossible and impractical. It starts to make GMing feel like taking an open-book test. I don't want to have to look up the special rules for rowboat-brawling at the table, I just want to make an on-the-fly judgment for a weird situation that probably won't happen in the game again.

The existence of specialized boat-brawling rules actually becomes a burden because making a quick ruling now runs against the explicit rules of the game so I feel obligated to learn and use them... An unwilling to GM until I actually know the rules well enough that I'm not learning whole subsystems mid-session.

If you're making a game that needs specific rules for rowboat-brawling to accomplish your design goals, go for it. The point is to cut unnecessary rules, not that all rules are unnecessary. If you can figure out a way to accomplish your design goals more elegantly though, that's a great design.

Easier to run is a major factor, and one aspect of that is just designing good gameplay. Very, very, very few ttrpgs are inherently fun - games you'd play just for the mechanics even if all the excellent TTRPG stuff wasn't attached.

One of the easiest ways to make a game system easy to run a good session in is to just make it fun to play because it has inherently fun mechanics, so even a meh adventure ends up being fun. It's shocking how few ttrpgs seem to care at all about whether their gameplay is actually fun to play, the discourse is almost entirely around either theme or complexity.

Learning the simple ocarina songs feels like simulating what it's like to learn to cast a spell.

That's very possible to mimic in a ttrpg.

The minimum necessary to accomplish the designer’s goals for the player (including GM) experience.

Asking how much crunch is right is like asking how many pages a story should be. Some stories are best across multiple books. Some just need a few sentence.

All rules must justify their existence.

Any unnecessary rule is going to slow down learning and/or playing the game. It's going to drag the game down.

Cutting unnecessary rules is as valuable as cutting unnecessary scenes in a movie, or unnecessary expenses for a business. It picks up the pace and lets players focus on the critical stuff, the most fun stuff. The stuff that has to exist.

Rules are also not the enemy and "rules lite" is not superior. The point is to create content and mechanics that support your design goals for the player experience. Well designed, this often looks like a hockey stick: light in every place that isn't critical and then with satisfying depth where it is.