“What we need to do is to think outside the box.” –Meeting Room Proverb

Thinking outside the box, that is coming up with ideas outside of the established norm, is the battle cry heard in meeting rooms in corporations around the world. The idea is to think past our base assumptions and rules that were established previously. By thinking beyond those assumptions, we can then explore new ideas that may lead to true innovation. As much of a cliche as it in the business world, there is some truth to the phrase.

In gaming, there is a belief that when it comes to rule systems, that thinking outside the box, that is using the rules outside of their initial design, is being innovative. It has been my experience, that when you do that, you create more frustration than innovation…

A game is typically made up of two basic components: mechanics and a setting. The setting is the descriptive part of the game, detailing the campaign world ,the people, etc., or as my friend the Chatty DM is fond of saying; fluff.  The mechanics are the mathematical representation for describing the game world, translating real world actions into numbers and dice. The mechanics are based on a general model of how the game designers have interpreted the world, and based on assumptions that the designers define to describe certain part of the game system.

In D&D 3.5, part of the model of the game is that adventurers will form a party to adventure. One of the assumptions within that model is that a party should have at least 4 members and they should fill the following roles: Fighter, Rogue, Mage, Cleric. The mechanics of the game then build up around the model of the party and the assumptions that there will be Fighter, Rogue, Mage, Cleric.

The assumptions of any game form the foundation for the rules. When you violate the assumptions of the rules,  by ignoring or changing rules, unexpected results can occur. Go back to the example above. If you want to see how strong that assumption, about party composition is, take a group of all Fighters an play a published D&D adventure, see how far you get. You will find that your ability to heal from damage is low, that you are out gunned by magic using monsters and NPC’s, and you cannot pick any locks, nor disarm any traps. Very quickly you will be looking for your Rogue, Mage, and Clerics.

The problem is that after playing the same game system for a long time, there is an urge to start tinkering with the rules of the game; to think outside of the box, and do something different.  Often when you decide to make the game different, you are typically changing one of the main assumptions of the game. In most cases, that change is often made without fully understanding the model and the assumptions behind the mechanics. Then when the game is played, with the new rules, and the base assumption are violated, the game play changes and often with unexpected results, and typically not for the better.

It’s not our fault. After all, most games do not go out of their way to describe the model and the assumptions. So how do we know, that taking magic out of D&D is going to collapse the entire game? It’s not written out in plain letters in the DMG, “Do not remove magic from the game. Or you will have problems keeping pace with level-equivalent monsters, healing, etc.” We gamers are imaginative people, thinking out of the box, comes as second nature to us. We want to tinker with the rules. What we need is for game designers to openly describe the model and assumptions in their material.

In the Pharmaceutical Industry (where I work in the real world), a drug has a document called an Investigators Brochure (IB).  In the IB there is a full explanation of what the drug is, what it does, and most importantly what you should use it for (called an Indication). As an example, the Indication section for Viagra clearly states: VIAGRA is indicated for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.” (quit your giggling).  So you know exactly what the drug is used for, and can use it properly. Sometimes a doctor uses a drug for uses other than what is listed in the IB. That is called an off-label usage. It’s not that, the drug won’t work in the off-label indication, but that it is being used in a way other than the way it was tested for, and unexpected side effects may occur.

What game designers need to do more of, is to create something like an IB for their rule systems. Laying out the model for their game system, and its main assumptions, so that you are fully aware of what you should and should not change before you start to tinker. I applaud game designers who reveal the assumptions in their model the workings of their mechanics. In Burning Empires, Luke Crane, uses three characters, within the text, to reveal various mechanics and assumptions and tells you what is likely to happen if you tinker with it. The previews of the material we have seen for D&D 4e, give you the assumptions for how the various classes are going to be used. The Rogue is describe as, “You dart in to attack, do massive damage, and then retreat to safety. You do best when teamed with a defender to flank enemies.” So I can infer that the abilities and bonuses that the Rogue gets are going to support this design, and that if I want to tinker with the Rogue, I should keep this in mind.

Since most games do not come with their own Investigators Brochure you can get some of the same information by doing a little leg work, or some Google searching.   The best way to learn that kind of information is from the designers themselves. Read designer blogs, post questions in forums, and when possible, attend seminars held by designers. In these places, you can learn what lies at the heart of the rules. From there, you can view your proposed changes with more of a designers eye. Want to remove magic items from D&D?  Well you will have to factor that the model assumes you will have a certain amount of items at each level. That assumption covers your AC (bracers, rings of protection, magic armor), your melee damage (magic weapons, scrolls, wands, etc), your saving throws (cloaks of resistance), your abilty to heal (wands, potions). Knowing how much a part of the game magic items are, you now know what you have to balance when you make your change.

When it comes making changes to rule systems, I also think that there are limits to how far you can push the system before it starts to come apart. Violate too many assumptions and a system does not perform as it was designed, it playability becomes compromised. It would be like taking magic out of D&D. You can do it, but you have to do a lot of patching to keep the system viable; at lot more work than it would be worth.  To see what it would take to remove magic from D&D, look at Iron Heroes, and see all the changes that were made to keep the core d20 system alive, without magic. Large changes had to be made to the Healing skill as well as the creation of the Reserve Pool as a mechanism to recover hit points between encounters.  It is best to really understand the core of the system, learn its assumptions, discover the model that was used to create it, before making serious changes to the rules.

Don’t think that generic rule systems are safe from this either. A generic system like GURPS, can be used in a number of different settings. That again is just changing the setting, the mechanics between different GURPS settings, reamains the same. GURPS, like D&D, has a model and assumptions; just different models. The only difference is a that GURPS is not as tightly coupled their setting to their model. If you change one of the basic rules for GURPS, and violate one of the assumptions, you can break that system just as much as dropping magic from D&D.

My personal feelings are that the mechanics and setting of a game should be left alone as much as possible. Minor house rules are fine, but if you want to make wholesale changes to a rule system, then you should look for another rule system instead. Why work on dumping magic from D&D when you can play Iron Heroes. Why try to add superpowers to Cyberpunk 2020, when there is Underground. A game works best when the assumptions they were built upon, are kept intact.  It is better to find the system that does what it does best, than to make a system perform outside of the box.

What are some of horror stories, and successes with tinkering with rule systems?