Modular Gaming Components (and what they do) - An introduction

Among game designers there was a debate for many years about whether a game system mattered. This was pushed at The Forge, with essays such as "System Does Matter" by Ron Edwards.

...but to show that the debate has been going on for years, here's a random assortment of links to articles and posts over the years that have addressed the idea.

• "Why System Matters"
• "Game Structures Addendum - System Matters"
• "System Doesn't Matter*"
• "RPG History - What events/games led to 'System Matters' needing to be 'rediscovered'?"
• "Does System Matter?"
• "Why the Rules you use matter"
• "System Matters 24 years later"

All of them are interesting reads and watches... (and yes, I know that two of the forum posts linked refer to the same video, but the varied discussions are interesting)

The thing about most of these discussions is that they refer to the written words on the pages of a game book, and they don't necessarily take into account that many of the rules inherent in a roleplaying session exist outside the game book. That art of why I developed the idea of the three-way tension. Players pull on the narrative, the narrator pulls on the narrative, and the rules pull on the narrative. Sure, it's possible to ignore the rules and have a narrative that is a direct tension between the players and the narrator, but what does that look like?... and how are issues resolved when the players and the narrator come to an impasse?

If system doesn't matter, why is D&D a multi-million dollar industry (probably a billion dollar industry at this stage)? Why do people buy sets of rules when the debate could just be resolved with a coin flip? Even a coin flip is a set of rules.

Hang on a minute, dude? You're confusing rules and rulings.

Yeah, sort of, but rulings are a form of rules...and many of the debates over the years have confused the two just as much, if not more so.

So what is this series going to be about anyway?

There have been a heap of great ideas hidden away in different games over the years. Many of them have been ignored, or forgotten because they didn't appear in D&D or in one of the big and popular games. I don't know all of them, and it would be nice to get some input from readers about game mechanisms that I don't mention. 

I'll probably get through 20 to 25 of these. Maybe revisitng some of my Game Mechani(sm)s of the Week, but if I do that, there will be more of a focus on what they do and why they're interesting, more than just writing about how they work. The aim here will be about how to integrate these ideas into other systems, by looking at how they integrate into their own systems and looking at how they manipulate the course of the narrative.