#11 - Making the Rules Work for You.

At the Con last weekend I spoke with a player in my upcoming RPG. It will be set in the Soviet Union and part of a series of games we've formed through compromise. I would say we've had success in designing our own rule sets for our unique adventures. Last year, we has the post apocalyptic "Fallout: Twin Cities" game, and more recently finished the Yukon Horror. These I play with some of my good friends from the "JB's Games" over there on the website. Both of those games and my Soviet one will have homemade rules. The character details in this adventure have been quite bare bones.

While discussing the rules at the Con, I tried to clarify my rules on "Perks," a way to give certain special abilities to heroes. My player, Erik, wanted his character to have a competitive athlete perk. Which would bolster his efforts for physical performance when he had someone to go up against. That sounded great and would be a good addition to the shared fiction. But, I wasn't sure what that would mean for the game. If you recall, our rules are sparse.

The game has only 3 types of character details, Attributes, Skills, and Perks. I was explaining to my fellow that I didn't want Perks to merely be an increase to the other two. If a Perk is a simple increase to another Attribute, it doesn't make that Perk special at all. So too if the Perk was too much like a Skill. For a few minutes I ran some ideas past Erik to think of other ways to convey his Perk. I wanted something qualitative, something more creative than the simple increases above.

But, Erik wasn't satisfied by any of this. Instead he reminded me that he needed the rules to work for him, and in this case he wanted a concrete reliable increase. He wanted something quantitative, something numerical.

Eventually, her persuaded me. Then, I made some notes for how his competitive athleticism will impact the game. Don't worry it will be a fixed quantitative boost.

The larger story here today is to illustrate why we have the rules here in the first place. As a child you might have pretended to have a tea party and in your young bustling imagination anything goes. Whatever sort of tea you wanted you had, every flavor of jam tasted great on plastic toast. In the shared fiction of a role-playing game it gets more contractual. Erik's character is a great athlete, this could stand on its own. But, when he goes up against another star runner Erik's hero will need a measurement of how fast he is. We have rules, character sheets, attributes, and skills to keep track of these things.

In a tea party everybody can be a princess. In an RPG it often necessary to know exactly what that means.

Some games have more rules than others. Some rule systems ignore different things. A hero's social class is not relevant in most D&D adventures for example. In some games being a Duke and not an Earl might have a big impact on the game. Rules can change the way a game plays out and the way the character's behave. Ultimately, leaving things in or out is up to you, and the other people you are playing with.

My quick advice is that if it is worth measuring it is worth a rules notation.