Let There Be Law

[Falseprophet]

I've been agreeing with your thesis for almost a decade now, though have only recently managed to convince my friends of this. We played a lot of White Wolf, where the system has always been less than stellar (especially the LARP rules), and their solution is just to ignore the rules most of the time. That only works if you have complete trust in your GM and you don't mind important results decided by fiat.

Other posters are correct that d20 doesn't seem to work for anything except high fantasy. Spycraft d20 is okay for light-hearted 60s-era Bond romps but gets silly if you try to do a serious Bourne-esque espionage thriller.

Cyberpunk 2020 is perfect for its genre. Best part of the game: anybody, no matter how badass they are, can be laid low by two pounds of C-4. If only the netrunning rules didn't suck so much...

 

[Deacon Cole]

I didn't know they were still writing gaming advice articles for 1980.

There are some pretty seasoned RPGs talked about here. Not that there's anything wrong with that in theory.

Nothing wrong with talking about old games.

What I meant was I'm pretty sure I read an article not unlike this one in an issue of Sorcerer's Apprentice magazine. And Dragon Magazine, sometime in the 80's as well.

I'm just saying I think the main topic of the article had been done thirty years ago, several times, and it's not a topic that bore repeating in my opinion.

 

[Archon]

Heh. If magazines and websites limited themselves to not discussing topics that had previously been discussed, they'd go out of business really fast. Especially Cosmpolitan.

I at least had the good grace to wait 30 years before taking the idea out of the closet again. Cosmo talks about the SAME ARTICLE every month.

I didn't know they were still writing gaming advice articles for 1980.

There are some pretty seasoned RPGs talked about here. Not that there's anything wrong with that in theory.

Nothing wrong with talking about old games.

What I meant was I'm pretty sure I read an article not unlike this one in an issue of Sorcerer's Apprentice magazine. And Dragon Magazine, sometime in the 80's as well.

I'm just saying I think the main topic of the article had been done thirty years ago, several times, and it's not a topic that bore repeating in my opinion.

 

[Norm Morrison IV]

Well,
I think you are spot on.

Vreeg's first Rule of Setting Design,
"Make sure the ruleset you are using matches the setting and game you want to play, because the setting and game WILL eventually match the system."

Vreeg?s Second Rule of Setting Design,
Consistency is the Handmaiden of Immersion and Versimilitude. Keep good notes, and spend a little time after every creation to ?connect the dots?. If you create a foodtuff or drink, make sure you notate if the bars or inns the players frequent. Is it made locally, or is it imported? If so, where from? If locally made, is it exported?


Vreeg's Third Rule of Setting Design,
The World In Motion is critical for Immersion, so create 'event chains' that happen at all levels of design. The players need to feel like things will happen with or without them; they need to feel like they can affect the outcome, but event-chains need velocity, not just speed.

Vreeg's Fourth Rule of Setting Design,
Create motivated events and NPCs, this will invariably create motivated PCs. Things are not just happening, they happen because they matter to people (NPCs). There is no overacting here, make sure that the settings and event-chains are motivated and that the PCs feel this.

I also know that even though I wrote these almost a decade ago, much of this thougt process came from earlier readings. There is naught new under the sun, just often new twists and new spins on it.

 

[Archon]

Vreeg - that's brilliant stuff. Thanks for sharing.

 

[GhostLad]

To flip the argument a bit, having too close a tie between rules and setting leads to it's own share of potential problems, though on balance I find the gains offset the losses, as I mentioned earlier.

Point in case: Exalted, where under some interpretations the rules are not only a gamemechanic abstraction to handle conflict, but present as the actual rules of the land. A mote of essence is a real quantifiable (if you were scholastically inclined) entity in the world, not just a stat to represent power-fuel. A stunt gives you Essence back due to the character in the moment dipping into the reserves of the world to pull off something extraordinary. etc etc.

That can lead to a very strict interpretation of the rules, because to some internal consistency matter enough, that they become rather adamant you not change the "laws of the world". It's nothing that a talk between ST and players cannot fix, of course, but the many interconnected aspects of central concepts (such as essence) can make houseruling suddenly quite complex, if everyone aren't prepared to gloss over the details. You are, in a way, more likely to enter rules-lawyyer territory, than had you used a generic system.

Balance is also a real issue, with this: change how essence-regeneration works (because you want a even higher-powered game where people fling Earthshattering Kabooms around straight from CharGen f.inst), and suddenly some charms go from ok to overpowered. That is always a risk with houserules, but a setting-centric system is likely to have a great deal more of these dependencies, making it a harder thing to do.

 

[Fearzone]

Would be interesting if you could summarize your Harvard law paper for us some time.

 

[ArekExcelsior]

For anyone who doubts that game systems should be at least tailored to the game in question if not altered entirely, look at almost anything Palladium publishes.

Many elements of the system are really great for individual settings. Ninjas & Superspies, for example, simulates burst firing, the dodge-strike-parry cycle of hand to hand combat, etc. REALLY well and is a blast. That system breaks down more for Rifts (not that it's easy to adapt any system to the Rifts world easily), though for Phase World it can actually work fairly well. Similarly, the Robotech game had some excellent ways of doing things... but that kind of mecha combat makes less sense in Rifts. Heroes Unlimited works less effectively than Palladium Fantasy. And so on.

The nice thing about systems like GURPS, Palladium's Megaversal system, Open D20, etc. is that you can have easy conversions. The problem is that conversions are problematic, and not always in obvious ways. Heroes Unlimited characters and Ninjas and Superspies characters, for example, can be astonishingly broken when converted to Rifts in ways that they simply are not in their native continuities.

With Rifts, I am still struggling to find a set of rules, either published or house, that could work as a conversion.

 

[Frozedon]

That is actually very interesting. I guess thinking about it now, there is a big difference with rule types to adventures. Some rules don't work with certain genres. Like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You might be able to cut off the corners, but it still just doesn't go through right.

AlexW

 

[Skullpanda]

Great article, and thanks for some ideas on where to go for other settings. By the by, I wouldn't really declare Mutants and Masterminds anything more than a framework. By following the rules set in both first and second editions, you're probably going to end up with a broken game within four or five sessions (with experienced players). Not to say it isn't fun, though.

 

[Deadlander]

I agree with you that your rules set absolutely has to match up with what kind of game you are wanting to run. However, I think that you left out a few shining examples. The (classic) Marvel system is still the best I have ever encountered for running superhero games (or any kind of game where the players wield godlike powers and the rest of humanity does not). But the (again, classic) Deadlands system is a shining gem which is overlooked by a large number of gamers. Putting aside my opinion that it is hands down the superior example of all the incarnations of Deadlands, I feel that its utility as both a Western system and a Horror system simply can't be overlooked. What's more, having run a good deal of RPG's in my time, I feel comfortable in saying that Deadlands was the easiest to run, and by that I mean the game was created with numerous shortcuts available to the Marshal, in order to make the game run smoother and quicker. Anyone wanting to run a game with horror or western themes should take at least look at this system.