Rules Aren't Knots

[This post exists for Josh to be able to cite. Feel free to do likewise.]

This is actually one of my favorite passages in a 5E text and I want to explain why:

Like, first of all, this is kind of a cute rule, right? Like oh hey that's clever, instead of a binary pass/fail, the result of your check becomes the DC to untie the knot. That's smart. You can think of it like a "delayed contest," not unlike how Stealth vs Perception typically works. And you reassign Sleight of Hand to the Intelligence attribute instead of Dexterity because it makes more sense. That's a nifty bit of design.

But more importantly, it's not actually included because 5E thought you needed a mechanic for this. It's an illustrative moment to remind you that 5E was intended to be a game that thrives on "rulings over rules," that you should be thinking of creative ways to apply the core mechanic on a case-by-case basis. This idea is stated outright in the PHB and the DMG both, but then also again right here in Xanathar's Guide. They felt the need to include a reminder doubling down on it, by way of a good example.

Rules aren't knots. Rules are rope. A good DM should know how to use rope, because DMing is an adventure in itself.

-Dwiz

Crunch Criteria

I'm gunna be a little self-indulgent and quote myself.

Every piece of crunch you add has a cost. A cost in how much brainpower it takes to learn, to teach, to remember, to use. The essential tradeoff is to make sure that crunch is able to add something really valuable to the game in spite of that cost. I try to only add crunch in the parts of the experience that I think have the most potential for interesting decision-making.

This isn't just talk. I actually have a set of standards I apply when it comes to "justifying crunch" in a system. It's a hierarchy of three levels.

The Least Interesting Type of Crunch

As I'm sure you well know, not all crunch is the same. It can be broadly useful to know if you generally prefer less crunch or more crunch. But it helps a lot to feel out the nuance of the issue. I myself don't often identify as preferring "rules lite" games anymore because I have to admit that there's actually some very crunchy games I love. My own design certainly leans lite, but I know confidently that I'm no true minimalist. I can sink my teeth into rules and procedures, so long as they're the right kinds. But I think I've discovered the one category of crunch that I find the least interesting overall. And I'm sure many of you out there will vehemently disagree.

Rules, resources, and procedures that complicate basic task resolution do basically nothing for me 99% of the time. I cannot get excited over this sort of thing. And the worst part is, this is also the focus of, like, 75+ percent of all RPG design discussion. Just go onto reddit.com/r/RPGdesign and see how much of it is literally just talking about dice mechanics.

Don't get me wrong. I'm well versed in this area. I can talk about it for fucking days. Right now, off the top of my head, I can name and explain at least 20 different core mechanics from RPGs I've seen or read or played. I can tell you all about the strengths and weaknesses of d20s, d6s, 2d6s, d%, or whatever. Binary pass/fail? Variable difficulty or static difficulty, then? Or what about noting margins of success? Or if you're a PbtA fan, gradations of success then? Please. Roll-under or roll-over? How about roll-under blackjack? Hell, some games exclusively use contested rolls for all checks. And yet, others have exclusively player-facing rolls. Dice pools are cool, but you know what's cooler? Measuring attributes in die sizes themselves. But I'm sure some of you enlightened ones are about to preach the gospel of narrative dice, or FUDGE dice, or Zocchi dice. And how do we feel about modifiers? +/- X is a bit clunky, but we could go back to matrices. Advantage/Disadvantage is pretty slick, but have you heard of Boons and Banes? Personally, I really like Momentum from the 2d20 engine. Effort dice to deal "damage" to a task is cool, too. But sometimes you just gotta go for exploding dice, right? And yet, is anything more elegant than two attributes sharing a single stat, as in Lasers & Feelings? We haven't even touched criticals and fumbles, either. Oh Jesus Christ how the fuck do you begin to explain FASERIP??

And yet... I don't give a shit. I just don't care. If the most interesting part of a game is its dice mechanic then I probably won't be able to get into it.

I recently tried looking up "gimmick mechanics" in RPGs. Y'know, little pieces of design that aren't exactly foundational or revolutionary, but which still make you go "oh that's cute." I love gimmick mechanics. I wanted to collect a list. On occasion I'll revisit it, and maybe consider bolting one or two of these gimmicks onto whatever project I'm working on that week. And the list is coming along okay. But you know what I found in my search? Almost exclusively fucking dice mechanic variations. Things that just interact with the probability of success or failure at basic tasks.

• D&D 5E has inspiration. Do a cool thing, DM gives you inspiration. Spend it to get free advantage to one die roll. Only 1 inspiration at a time, so you better use it.
• Fate has fate points. Everyone starts with a pool of fate points they can spend to either get +2 on a roll or to re-roll, whichever would be better. But to spend it, you need to invoke one of your traits and make it relevant to the fiction somehow.
• Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition has the Computer Dice. It's the one die you always get to roll in your dice pool no matter what, but gets weird if it rolls the computer symbol. You gotta erase a point of Moxie and see how Friend Computer intervenes, which could be helpful or harmful.
• Savage Worlds has the wild die, exploding dice, and bennies to spend for dice re-rolls. Do I have to explain all three? Go look it up.
• Blades in the Dark has the "devil's bargain," where the player can add an extra die to their dice pool in exchange for a narrative complication.
• Kult: Divinity Lost has relation inspiration. You have certain character relationships that are valuable to you. Then, whenever you can invoke the power of one of these relationships during a roll, you can get a bonus on it. Lifting a car to free someone underneath is difficult, but it's less difficult if the person is your own child.
• Lots of Free League games include the "push" mechanic. Take some damage for the chance to re-roll some dice.
• Troika! has an attribute called Luck. It's used in all sorts of places, usually just to see if things "go in your favor." But every time you test your luck, it lowers by 1 no matter what.
• Call of Cthulhu has both a spendable Luck stat and a "pushing the roll" mechanic, which cannot interact with each other!
• Every Star Wars RPG has had some kind of metacurrency. The 80's WEG one has "force points" The 00's WotC one has both "force points" and "destiny points." The 10's FFG one has "destiny points." All of these work differently. All of them are something you earn by being cool and you spend to make things work out better.

I'll admit that Dread really did something special in this area. But it's a rare sort of innovation.

The folks at Critical Role are currently coming out with a new game of their own. You may have heard of it. It's called Candela Obscura. Here's a video of a developer explaining the basics. I watched it. It seems like a fine game to me. I'm sure lots of folks will have a blast. But I just can't get past how much shit is involved in basic task resolution. To recap:

You have a score from 0-3 for each Action, determining how many dice you get in your pool when you roll that Action. Actions are nested in categories called Drives. When you roll an Action, you can also spend points to add extra dice from the pool attached to its parent Drive. You refresh Drive points by using one of your Gilded Actions. When rolling a Gilded Action, you replace a die in your pool with a Gilded die and can choose to take its result instead. Even though it may be worse, it at least restores a Drive point. And you also have Resistances, which you can spend to re-roll dice when you fail a roll.

Dear god that is so fucking boring. What could justify this degree of overthinking dice rolling?

I think one thing I've found during all my years running and playing games is that I want basic task resolution to be as quick and seamless as possible. I get unreasonably annoyed even just when one of my players takes 10 seconds to find the right die to roll, or they're struggling to type out the exact roll command on a VTT. Hell, I announce difficulty classes out loud when I call for a roll in the vain hope that I can maybe get the player to skip a couple steps and instead answer me with a simple "I succeeded" or "I failed."

I'm not an FKR purist, mind you. I enjoy that style of play, but I do prefer the uncertainty that dice can add to the equation. It's a crucial piece of design for me. I am pro-dice. But it's an ingredient of the design where I firmly believe that less is more.

Every piece of crunch you add has a cost. A cost in how much brainpower it takes to learn, to teach, to remember, to use. The essential tradeoff is to make sure that crunch is able to add something really valuable to the game in spite of that cost. I try to only add crunch in the parts of the experience that I think have the most potential for interesting decision-making. And in my opinion, "will I be successful at the thing?" is one of the most shallow questions to ask for inspiring decision-making opportunities.

-Dwiz

Not All Balance is the Same

Artist Credit: Wayne Reynolds

This is a spiritual sequel to a previous post about crunch. Everyone uses the word "balance" in reference to something in RPGs but they frequently use it to refer to different things. Sometimes completely unrelated things. And yet it's become intensely emotionally-charged despite being, essentially, a non-word.

So while you very likely have strong opinions about this word, it might be useful to take a closer look. In this article, I'm going to examine six ways that the word "balance" commonly comes up when discussing RPGs, and why it's important to recognize that they are indeed distinct.

As usual, I will mostly be making reference to ol' D&D as my primary example, but don't mistake that for meaning that this only carries relevance to D&D alone. All kinds of gaming philosophies might benefit from a little bit of thought about these six different meanings for the word "balance," even if there are some that you can safely dismiss. So yeah, balance matters to other crunchy games like GURPS and Lancer and Genesys-system stuff of course, but it can also come up in your rules-lite games, story games, FKR games, lyric games, and so on. If you want to design a Star Wars game and you aren't sure about how to handle the Force, or if you're going to be running a Call and/or Trail of Cthulhu and are crafting a mystery for your investigators, or you're making a random mutation table for a Mothership adventure you're writing, then there's likely something in this post that you should be thinking about. It just might never have occurred to you before because you're only ever thinking of one possible definition out of many.

Not All Crunch Is the Same

A lot of people put all games on a simple spectrum of "less crunch" to "more crunch," where the amount of crunchiness is measured roughly by "the number of discrete rules you can point to in the game." The more rules a game has, the crunchier it is, and that's that. While it is good to have an idea of whether you're the kind of gamer who generally prefers more crunch or less crunch, I see a lot of shallow and misleading discussions happen where people are turned away from games they may have otherwise quite enjoyed. And that tends to happen because the game was reduced down to "too much crunch" when that's just a dishonest way to represent what it's actually like.

I am definitely guilty of this, in case anyone wants to call me out.

Look, there are lots of ways in which a game can be made complicated. Rules can play many roles. The devil is in the details. It is genuinely worth it to sometimes take a moment to look under the hood and see what kinds of rules are in the game before dismissing it.

Some games have lots of rules but they're fairly intuitive (once you know how spellcasting works in Ars Magica you can start using it quite naturally). Some games have relatively few rules but they are difficult to master. Some games have lots of rules but they're all built using the same core ingredients, so once you learn the "Rosetta Stone" mechanic then everything else falls into place (most universal systems rely on this, like Savage Worlds or FATE. I would argue D&D 5E does it pretty well. It's very "rulings over rules" friendly). Some games have a ton of rules that are all disconnected and are each a subsystem that you have to learn separately and it's a pain in the ass (sigh... Fantasy Craft).

However, I want to put the spotlight on very specific types of mechanics that, yes, are all more rules than you would ordinarily need if you were just running something like B/X D&D, but aren't necessarily all equal in how much they truly complicate or restrict the game.