Inside me are two wolves. One’s favors hyper–minimalist rules, just this side of “let’s play pretend.” The other has been working on-and-off for years on a game with 7 ability scores and over 70 character upgrades. This wolf is wanted dead or alive by the Free Kriegsspiel Revolution.
I can’t help it; I am creature of duality. I do not ascribe to astrology, but I am quite obviously a Gemini.
As a GM, I appreciate that my friends trust me to take care of the rules and so that they can describe what their characters do. As a player, I enjoy that style of game, too—but I’ve also enjoyed quite complex games over the years. I especially enjoy building characters and picking among many upgrade options during advancement, and get really into that part of video game RPGs. (And I love coming up with interesting character abilities and upgrade options when I make tabletop RPGs, which is why I favor long lists of “profiles,” “alterations,” and “backgrounds.”)
Most of my RPGs are quite short, which helps ensure I don’t go too overboard in writing rules. 2400‘s format deliberately reins in my impulses. Wastoid runs quite a bit longer. I’m not sure how long yet—it’s a labor of love by a parent with a day job—but the character options alone are several times longer than any 2400 game, let alone items, creatures, factions, and locations. The underlying design principle is similar, though: both are meant to be modular games, relatively familiar, approachable, and easily expanded, once you set eyes upon similar games.
Since Wastoid is so much bigger, I found myself going down design rabbit holes at times, forgetting to keep it simple. I found it helpful to write a rule of thumb in my notes so I’d stumble upon it later. It got me unstuck an embarrassing amount of the time. I called it The Opt-In Rules Principle:
Not every play group will need every rule you come up with. Don’t expect them to use them all.
Instead, provide affordances to engage with or ignore as they see fit.
In this game, those may take the form of character options, unique items, and modular procedures.
In practice, this looks like avoiding global rules exceptions outside of very deliberate exceptions, shunting those exceptions onto things groups may or may not ever engage with.
Consider, for instance, Wastoid’s combat rules:
Roll Observation to attack with ranged weapons.
Roll Strength to attack with melee weapons.
Roll Agility to defend.
I always loved how The Black Hack lets players alternatively roll Strength to defend with melee weapons. I weighed writing that into the rules here, too—then bumped into Opt-in Rules Principle reminder. Now, in the equipment list, handheld shields note, “Can defend with STR.”
There’s an obvious follow-up question, of course—why not simplify even further, or much more dramatically? Why split ranged attacks across Observation and Agility, rather than collapsing into one of those? For that matter, why have seven ability scores at all, rolling these three for combat? (Plus a fourth—Endurance, defining health/hit points—also relevant to survival.) Most of my favorite games get away with three ability scores, or perhaps two, or none at all.
Clearly, I enjoy those kinds of games too—but those aren’t this game. Where to draw this line is a judgment call around the aforementioned “very deliberate exceptions.” I haven’t explicitly thought of what I was doing in terms of “The Opt-in Rules Principle” in designing other games before, but I’ve followed something like it, on some level, anytime I’ve designed a game for 2400. Each one is explicitly super-simple and modular; the core is just more spare.
This has led me to rethink how I approach a number of things in Wastoid. I didn’t remove things, per se—just made them optional. Rephrased things and took the weight off subsystems so that if you decided you didn’t want them, didn’t need them, the game would still function properly. Simple sounding, but profound in implications—especially as I realized I needed to reconsider what happens when players don’t care to engage with subsystems for “the entire economy and crafting system” and/or “combat … like, at all.” When I manage to rework stuff like that so it’s still available to those who want it, but no longer load-bearing or hard to access, that’s how I know I can stop fiddling with it. That’s how I know it’s sufficiently “modular.”
Pretendo Games 