Designing for [Bleep]

It was around 2010 or 2011. I’d been asked to lead the 5th edition D&D design team, but it was very early days. And I was on a panel at a convention. A gamer asked me about a rules issue and how it would be handled. He specifically insisted on telling me how if it and everything else wasn’t explained in excruciating detail in the new rulebook, players would twist the rules and it would wreck the game. He pushed on the issue pretty hard, and finally in exasperation I said, “I’m tired of designing for assholes.” 

Now, could I have phrased that better? Of course. Obviously. I didn’t mean to be insulting. And to be clear, I didn’t mean to imply that the guy raising the issue was an asshole. By assholes, I meant players who don’t care about the intent of the game, or the enjoyment of the others at the table—they just like to argue about rules.

But offensive phrasing aside, it’s a decision that every designer’s got to make. For every table of great players interested in having fun, there’s often one player who insists on arguing about the phrasing of a rule in the book. This player will find (or attempt to find) a loophole or contradiction and exploit it to their own advantage. So you have to decide, do you design for that one player, or for all the others? And of course, for some tables and some games, every player is that one player.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. The issue at hand, however, is how hard you’re willing to work to safeguard your rules from that one player. 

Like so many questions I raise here, there isn’t necessarily a universally correct answer. But it’s a question that needs to be answered, and once answered, the approach needs to be applied consistently. 

Writing extremely tight, extremely balanced rules is difficult, but that’s not a reason to avoid it. In a perfect world, I suppose, rules would always be immune to abuse and perfectly “balanced,” plus they would still be enjoyable to read, easy to understand, brief, encouraging of creativity, and—most importantly—fun. But we don’t live in a perfect world.

A Bit About Balance

Allow me to digress for a moment about the word “balanced.” It’s a far trickier issue than most people who use the word realize. Usually we equate balanced with fair, and from a player’s point of view, “fair” usually means “it’s fair to me.” But are you balancing the player’s character with the other characters at the table? With the challenges the character faces? Those are two very different things.

In fact, the whole issue of balance is probably too large for this simple digression, so instead let me illustrate with a story about balance, as it pertains to writing rules for abusive players.

Long ago, there were old text based computer “RPGs,” like Zork. In these games, the computer would tell you what you saw and would wait for you to type in exactly the right word or combination of words. If there was a door, you had to type in “DOOR” to open it, or perhaps “OPEN DOOR.” You couldn’t type, “PULL THE DOOR JUST A BIT AND PEEK THROUGH THE CRACK,” because the game didn’t know what that meant. It would say, “I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” or something like that. In order to make the game manageable, the rules were limited to very specific, explicitly detailed options. If you didn’t do things precisely the way you were supposed to, the game didn’t work. The creativity you used in the game wasn’t to come up with your own interesting solutions to problems, it was to come up with precisely the solution the designer had envisioned. 

The game was then perfectly balanced because everything about it was specifically defined. Type the correct word and you succeed, and anything else means you don’t. Tabletop RPGs can fall victim to that sort of thing if the designer is too worried about their rules being unbalanced. You can accidentally design out all of the variability and versatility of the game in the name of balance, and end up with rules where everything is so defined that there’s only one path to fun. The characters all take the same actions (because in the end, there’s only one “correct” action), and face similar challenges over and over. The game is just waiting for the players to do the equivalent of “saying the right word” so they can succeed and then move on to the next encounter to do the same thing again.

It’s really difficult to measure, but sometimes the fun of RPGs comes from the little bits that are not quite balanced. It’s probably where game design is more like an art than a science. But that’s a topic for a future column.

Tight Versus Loose Rules

Back to the matter at hand. There’s a give-and-take here between the rules that are resistant to abuse and those that empower creativity, either on the part of the GM, the players, or both. For our purposes here, let’s call them “tight” rules that can’t be abused, and “loose” rules intended to be lighter and more open-ended.

Consider a fantasy game where there is a spell, “boil liquid.” The description is, “Boils 1 liter of liquid.” Seems like a really easy to understand, low-power spell that allows you to make tea, right? Maybe use it  a few times consecutively to warm your bath. But what if a player wants to boil the blood in their opponent’s heart? That’s not what the designer intended, but depending on the ruleset, it might be a legitimate interpretation of the rule’s wording.

The designer started with an intentionally loosely-written spell (because you use it to make tea, what harm is there?), but when players interpret rules in bad faith, loose wording can cause all manner of issues. So the designer tries to tighten it up and changes “liquid” to “water.” The spell’s a little less interesting, but problem solved, right? Well, the same player is going to say that more than half the human body is water, so they’ll just boil the water in the opponent’s lungs. Suddenly it’s an arms race. The designer tries to further tighten the boil spell, adding a lot of extra details to preserve their intent, to counter every possible abuse players might come up with. Now, maybe that’s an okay thing to do, but consider the precedent. If you’re going to devote a long paragraph of verbiage to carefully, tightly design your spell that boils tea, what are you going to do when it comes to much bigger and broader effects? 

If you’re going to design with consistency, you’re going to give every spell, every ability, every weapon, every bit of gear… every rule in the game that same level of detail, each adding guardrails against potential abuse. So now the rulebook becomes a weighty tome where all the corner cases are detailed and the guardrails are up to protect against most of the potential abuses. It’s maybe a little (or a lot) more of a chore to read, but it’s solid. 

Okay, but by taking out the looseness of the game, you’ve also taken away the flip side of interpretation, which is to say, much of the fun creativity. Sometimes the best experiences in the game come from when a GM or a player come up with an idea completely different from what the designer intended. It’s why we’re playing these games and not, well, Zork. 

(Although don’t get me wrong, at the time, Zork was pretty fun.)

Some gamers don’t want a lot of well-defined, tight rules. They want to be able to make judgment calls right at the table to keep things moving more quickly, so there’s not a lot of obsessing over text in a book. They want the freedom to engage with the rules in a different way. 

So the level of interpretation possible within rules is a spectrum, and you need to pick a place on that spectrum—from extremely tight to extremely loose—for the rules you’re working on. Are you writing for the people who will look at a low level spell about boiling liquid and think, well, obviously this can’t be used to boil your foes and kill them—that would be silly? Or are you writing for those players who are salivating for a minor effect that they can exploit to turn them into a god?

And you need to be up front with those reading your rules about what the overall approach is meant to be. If you’re writing loose rules, you need to instruct both players and GMs regarding the responsibility that comes with that. If you’re writing tight rules, you probably need to encourage gamers to rely on the rulebook to define how things work.

And as a word of warning, avoid this trap: Don’t follow up the playtests you have of your rules by just shoring up the holes the playtesters found in some of them. You can easily end up with some rules being quite tightly written while others (the ones your playtesters didn’t mention) are much looser. The end result is confusing. Players and GMs need to know how they are supposed to use the rules, and that is conveyed nicely when you are consistent in the approach.

It all comes down to who the designer has written the rules for. I’m certain that based on the story I started out this piece with, you’d guess that my preference is looser rules that encourage players to apply their own sense of logic, and their own creativity, because that’s the way I most like to actually play. I don’t want to pore over lengthy rules at the table and I certainly don’t want to get into debates over wording. Although I have very much appreciated the appeal of more tightly written rules when they’re done well. 

I’ll also say that I make different choices for different games. The Cypher System is loose, for example, but Stealing Stories for the Devil is far looser. Working on D&D back in the day involved very different choices. The audiences for each game are slightly different—although I’m confident that many of the same people will enjoy any or all, as long as I’ve done a consistent job and have informed them what to expect.

Hey, there’s been a lot of interest in the Cypher System lately. As luck would have it, we’re running a crowdfunding campaign with BackerKit in just a week or so called Adventures in the Cypher System. If you’re new to the system, it will have everything you need. And if you are a fan of Cypher, you’ll find lots of cool new stuff. Check it out!