In this episode of Play on Target we talk generally about homebrews, hacks, and house rules. In our group we've been playing primarily with a homebrew system since '01. But even before that we made pretty drastic changes to the way Rolemaster and GURPS operated. We'd played enough by the baseline rules we felt comfortable with those changes. I do wonder in this age of chunky rulebooks- Champions 6, Legendary, Iron Kingdoms, and Shadowrun 5 for example- how much actual play fully adheres to the rules. And that's not a question of option systems. How much are we dropping, streamlining, and cutting in an effort to make the play work at the table. Is that house ruling? Or is it something else?
WHAT THEY SEE
As I mentioned last week in my supers post, players can read
elements vastly differently. In that case some saw Hero Points as a resource to
be called on to represent their determination and effort. But another player
saw them as purely dramatic- only for the most extreme situations and
representing a turning point in the scene. That gap has consequences for play:
especially when a GM has one vision and the players have another.
If you’re going to modify a system or create one from scratch:
consider what that system will look like to the players. What parts will they
come into contact with? What kinds of outputs will they see from the rules? It’s
frustrating if players find themselves getting pummeled or feel helpless, but
aren’t sure why or what kind of build would fix that. Building fancy systems
for social combat, organization development, or weapon-crafting suggest to the
players that will be important. So they probably ought to be. On a more
granular level, think about all the steps a player will have to go through with
a standard resolution in this system. They’re going to make contact with that,
with combat, and with damage more than any other elements. If those gears
grind, you’re going create frustration.
Also consider that the first contact players will probably
have with the system is in character creation. You might have decided to
front-load complexity there, knowing that the actual play will be simple. But
that first process may put the players off. Once a player gets frustrated with
some process in the game, they’re more likely to sense problems later on. Think
about how you make that entry process smooth and/or allow some later editing
and redaction.
CONSISTENCY
I’m always a little frightened to run games online. I know
that my version of the rules can be quite different from another player’s. Some
of that can come from different house rules I’ve come to take for granted. But
other times it can come from divergent readings of the rules themselves. I
played an embarrassing Rolemaster session
at a convention once. We’d been playing for years and I thought I had a grasp
on things. But the con GM had another version of the rules in his head, which
also seemed to hold to the books. Like the Copenhagen vs. Bohm Interpretation
of Quantum Mechanics.
Little changes and difference in approach can have a major
impact.I mentioned before that GUMSHOE explicitly presents a system where you don’t
tell players the difficulty of their check before they roll and spend points. Offering
that info to the players before they roll changes the feel of the game. And
honestly when I read through GUMSHOE the first time I didn’t even notice that
rule. I just assumed it worked like other games I played. It took being called
out on that to realize. Add actual house rules into the mix and you create
another layer of complication to inter-gamer communication.
OVERBUILDING
In the late 1990’s, we were playing a lot of GURPS. I’d just
finished three parallel multi-year fantasy campaigns using the system- plus
assorted one shots. I still liked it, but as with most GMs I also believed I
could do better. And this wouldn’t just be a few tweaks, as I’d done before.
Instead I’d work things from the ground up stealing what I liked from GURPS,
Rolemaster, AD&D, and Basic Role-Playing. I rolled out my massive opus,
called trinity, and ran two parallel campaigns with it. One of them died from
player troubles, but the other rolled on for a couple of years. It rolled on
not from the strength of the rules, but rather the dynamic of the players and
their willingness to play through the story and ignore the awful, bastard
system I’d come up with. Each week I had to tune and tweak, and eventually
simply cut more and more crap out of the game. The system never worked- but the
campaign was fun in spite of that. That’s why when people say “system
matters/doesn’t matter” I have a mixed reaction…I know the game would have been
better if we hadn’t wrestled rules every week, yet we made it through.
For the longest time my habit was to see a problem and
create a sub-system to handle it. New techniques, new mechanics, new ways of
handling things. In practice, in actual play most of these things never
survived. They saw one or two uses before my impatience at the table made me
retool or cut them entirely. My revelatory moment came when talking about how I
wanted to handle and upcoming campaign, how I’d build all of the architecture
onto the homebrew system and add new elements. And my wife asked “Why?”—and I
had an answer, a vague one. But she kept asking why? She made me look at how
the games had run, at the wreckage of the systems, and made me define design
goals. I still make mistakes now- I over did it with the L5R hack I wrote up. I
didn’t need the complex suite of advantages/disads/ancestors I put together.
But generally I approach rules elements trying to figure out what I really
want, at core- rather than a “this would be cool…” approach. YRMV.
If you like RPG Gaming podcasts, I hope you'll check it out. We take a focused approach- tackling a single topic each episode. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes or follow the podcast's page a twww.playontarget.com.
"How much are we dropping, streamlining, and cutting in an effort to make the play work at the table. Is that house ruling? Or is it something else?"
ReplyDeleteI sometimes jokingly refer to it as 'house editing'. It is the single most common form of houseruling I do. I don't add nearly as many rules as I drop or ignore.
On a more granular level, think about all the steps a player will have to go through with a standard resolution in this system. They’re going to make contact with that, with combat, and with damage more than any other elements. If those gears grind, you’re going create frustration. combat arms hacks
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