Cycles of old and new

About 14 years ago, I wrote a post about rule bloat. It was when I was starting to develop on of the early incarnations of Walkabout, and when I was developing a bunch of Pocketmod games. Looking back at those ideas, I can now frame them in the concept of the 3-way tension, and how that applies to game sessions. 

 

A big and complex game has a strong pre-defined inertia, especially if the group is playing in a "Rules as Written" style. The more rules there are (whether "mechanical" non-diegetic rules controlling the flow of activities from outside the imagined space of the session, or "fluff" diegetic rules controlling the activities from within the imagined space), the more the system impacts on the flow of the session. A pocketmod or trifold game will have less pull on the session than a multi-volume collection of hardback tomes. 

If we're moving to more of a "rulings over rules" style of play, the influence of the system decreases and that level of influence shifts to the GM/Narrator. Rather than relying on the "infallibility of the rules as written" as a guide for the procedures of play, the group shifts to the "fairness of the arbitration of the GM/Narrator". This pretty much needs to happen when there aren't many rules in a game system, with more gaps in the system there becomes more need for someone to step up and offer their interpretations on the way various situations might need to be resolved.

One of the elements of the "Powered by the Apocalypse" design school that I actually like is the idea of game systems elegantly degrading to more generalised forms of play governance. If you don't remember the specifics, for a narrow situation, then the wider systems of play will basically cover you. Nuanced systems for a specific character may add more detail to the way a situation is resolved, but you can always fall back on 2d6+modifier versus 6-or-less(fail)/7-to-9(mixed success)/10-or-greater(full success). That system tension is a constant in the session if you're playing a PbtA game, other tensions from the system may come and go depending on narrative and situational circumstances. A low crunch PbtA game may only add  couple of extra situational systems, a high crunch version of the system might add a complex array of additional mechanisms and sub-mechanisms.

When we look at one of those systems with piles of hefty tomes, we might consider something like D&D or even something like Rifts from Palladium games. Lots of rules, but most of the successful games I've seen or heard about often discard most of the non-diegetic rules unless they specifically might add some kind of dramatic tension to the given cirumstances. It's s shift away from "rules as written" and toward "rulings as applied by the GM/Narrator", often sitting in the vague space that's defined as "rules as intended". Of course the question then becomes, whose intention is the guide for the rules. Using Rifts as an example, it was always interesting to hear stories about Kevin S (the founder and publisher of Palladium) running games at the open days where the company would open the warehouse to the public and he'd run games. As the writer and general arbiter of the rules for the game, he'd often play fast and loose, ignoring most of the systems he'd written in favour of a "GM fiat" "rulings over rules" style of play. Even he seemed to understand that a monolithic set of rules would get in the way of a good time.

This kind of plays into my recent post about cognitive convenience, there are certain rules in a game that we can take for granted unless there are explicit elements in the text that contradict them. A designer shouldn't need to write that gravity applies in their system, unless it specifically doesn't apply, or if it applies in ways that don't reflect our expected understanding of it. Putting this into a pocketmod game would waste valuable space, but putting "falling rules" into a game that already has a few hundred pages would just be one more subsystem in an already complex ecosystem of play.

Some play groups love the idea of having rules to fall back on, some prefer a style where on-the-fly rulings don't slow down play. Neither is "right"... it's just different strokes for different folks.