Well, I mean who dictates your designs? S. John Ross once told me that if you design to limit abuse of your system, you are designing to limit use of your system. It's something which is not as intuitive as it seems. Putting in a rule which could be abused requires trust in your players. If you know your players, this works uniformly well. A GM knows her players. It is another thing entirely to publish a ruleset with rules which could be abused. A published game designer does not know who will be playing games with his rules. The trust must be blind.
Do game groups merit blind trust? I don't know. I don't know if I merit blind trust. Thing is, I want folks to have the best possible experience they can, and when a good GM and good players get together with trust, it's a beautiful thing to see. I decided some time ago to design for the good players - the ones who see how a rule could be exploited and decide not to. I expect them to use the rule to do cool stuff, not screw with it.
Jesus said "The poor will always be with us." I feel the same way about bad players. If I design for bad players, I limit the enjoyment good players get from my games, and I would rather allow the bad players the ability to push things too far. I put my trust in the groups, and hope they don't disappoint me.
-clash
I agree. Groups have a way of self-regulating. They establish norms for power levels, latitiude with the rules and so on. Power gamers annoying, but I don't think they last long in any group.
ReplyDeletePeace,
Christian
Hi Christian!
ReplyDeleteI don't think they last long in any group where they violate the group's collective taste. Otherwise, I obviously agree with you. :D
-clash
I agree and disagree. I agree that you cannot design for the bad players. I would argue though (not in your case Clash ;) ) that it should not be used as an excuse for a poor rules. You could make a rule that "emulates a genre" that is horribly open so that a player, even a "good" player, cannot help but think I must use it to my advantage. To refine this rule to be useful without allowing abuse is the difference between designers and hacks.
ReplyDeleteSo, allowing the group to set the level of power and allowing for flexibility of the ruleset allows the control to pass to the group once the designer is done writing the game. After all, after the customer buys the game it is his, not yours.
Hi Bill:
ReplyDeleteAs a good designer, I don't allow rules like that, because that is indeed poor design. Where it becomes a judgment call is those cases where allowing the rule would really help the good player and GM but which a bad player *could* take advantage of. If there's any way I can think of to crimp that bad player without crippling the good player I use it. But if not? That's where I generally allow the rule. Where we draw that line, that judgment call, is sometimes a little different between us, but knowing about that line and what it costs we hold in common.
-clash
In general, I design games for me. That's about it. I do things for my groups and how they play things most of the time. That isn't to say I don't think about abuses--oh boy do I, as I've seen people abuse systems of all types and stripes. Simply by not reading the rules and twisting them into something new.
ReplyDeleteI can't control people with rules though, nor would I want to, so at its most basic, I design for what would make a fun game as I see it.
Tim, that is exactly what I do. I design games I would want to run and play.
ReplyDelete-clash
Geez.
ReplyDeleteClash, I've been working on the same game and setting for 25 years. I had better be doing it for myself, to some degree.
Right now, I have 2 guys who have that talent to find loopholes in my playgroups. I don't consider these guys to be problems, I consider them a blessing.
I design a lot of rules to support fluff. So sometimes I miss a technical issue due to me creating a rule that supports a feeling or setting specific/story specific ideal.
That being said, 25 years with a waiting line of players says I am getting SOMETHING right...
-LV