Old Versus New

I read a lot of Robert Anton Wilson when I was younger. His book, Cosmic Trigger I, introduced me to a concept that colors my perception to this day. He wrote  (and I’m paraphrasing here) that people are either neophiles or neophobes. In other words, they embrace change or they fear it. A more fair way to parse this might be to say they embrace change or they desire to stay with the tried and true. 

A neophobe might indulge in nostalgia. They might find comfort in the familiar. A neophile (not to be confused with a neophyte, which is a completely different term) gets bored experiencing the same or similar things over time. Negatively speaking, you might call a neophobe “stuck in a rut” and a neophile “flighty, enjoying change for change’s sake.”

Here we are, almost 50 years into the hobby of TTRPGs and these concepts are very prominent ones in game design. Arguably, in the 1970s, it was all neophile stuff. Everything was new. The first RPG. The first adventure module. The first bestiary. The first sci-fi RPG. And so on. Essentially every step that was taken was forging a brand-new path. But now, while there’s still a lot of new ground being trodden upon, there’s a whole subgenre of TTRPGs that focuses on doing things like the old days, or in some cases, how some designers believe games worked in those old days. We still design games around the basic framework put forth in 1974 D&D, with GMs, “adventures,” character advancement, a one-player/one-character paradigm, and so on. But we  break free of those basic premises as well. 

And all that is, I think, fantastic. I love the plethora of options available, the different choices of not just genre but design aesthetic and gameplay styles.

The thing that I wanted to write about today, however, is the choice that every designer makes regarding old versus new. Specifically, making a brand-new mechanic (or set of mechanics) versus building off of something that already exists. I mention this in every column, but I’m not interested in pontificating about my preferences here, or painting one option as better than another. To me, the choice of the options is the interesting part.

Utilizing work that’s already been done can take many forms. You can make a brand-new game but be inspired by some other game that’s already out. You can create a hack of an existing game that directly builds on pre-existing rules (assuming you have the legal right to do so if it’s a game meant for publication). I’d argue that those are actually two very different approaches with two very different motivations.

Being inspired by some creation that’s come before is just, well, the very essence of creativity. Every creator is influenced by the things that they love, the things they dislike, and all their varied experiences. I don’t love the old maxim that there are no new ideas, but at the same time, we are all just the sum of our own experiences, and we’re all standing on the shoulders of those who came before.

A designer might make a hack of an existing game because they love the original game and believe that gamers who enjoy the original will appreciate their hack. So people make D&D into a sci-fi or horror game. Or, they take some narrative-focused storygame and hack it into a dungeon crawler. Or they make a new edition of an existing game—again, assuming they have the rights to do so. Some games, like the Cypher System or GURPS are basically designed to be hacked, both by individual GMs, and by designers, like Shanna Germain who hacked the Cypher System to make an RPG set in the world of the Tidal Blades boardgame. 

It’s compelling to a lot of gamers to not have to learn a whole new rule set to have a new play experience. If the group already plays D&D, it’s easier for them to get a few changes here and there to play a modern Lovecraftian conspiracy game than it is to pick up Delta Green. This is a very neophobe approach, and it’s completely understandable. It can also be a fun design challenge to hack a system to do more than it was originally intended to.

Judging what’s “new” is also highly subjective. Anything a creator does is going to be brand new to someone and  reminiscent of prior work to someone else. In my career I’ve seen games and mechanics inspired by something that I created, just as I was inspired by those that came before me. Rather than feeling copied or cheated, it just makes me feel a part of the much larger conversation.

There are probably two different reasons to choose to make a brand-new game. The first is to shape the gameplay experience toward a specific end. Maybe the designer wants to increase player agency with a new set of mechanics or put some specific tools in the GM’s toolbox to enhance the stories that can be created. For example, in the Cypher System, I put in GM intrusions so that they had the power to interject with a fun turn of events without, well, just seeming like a jerk. GM Intrusions are a mechanic that allows the GM to narratively insert a new challenge or difficulty but award the PCs experience points for dealing with it. So the GM can do what fiction writers do all the time, and have the rope a character is climbing begin to fray and they need to see if they can get where they’re going before it snaps. Stealing Stories for the Devil likewise has a card play mechanic that does a similar thing with Twists and the Turn.

The other reason to create a new game system is when you need to tailor the mechanics to the setting or genre. For Numenera, a game primarily about exploring, I needed to create a game that rewarded that activity more than say, killing things. Likewise, because its setting is science fantasy, I needed a way to have someone with a sword standing next to someone with a ranged energy weapon, handling these very different things without needing different rules subsystems. I needed a ruleset that could handle almost anything, but I also wanted it to be simple so that it didn’t get in the way of the story. For me, Numenera was always more about emotion--wonder, mystery, isolation, and longing--than it was about action or fighting. Complex rules would run the risk of overshadowing those things.

In my view, it had to be a new system. Coincidentally, by creating a system that could easily handle so many different aspects in a story-focused way, I realized that it could be easily adapted to other settings and genres. And that’s exactly what we’ve done with the Cypher System.

However, even though my company has a somewhat “universal” system under its belt, I continue to craft new systems, such as Invisible Sun or Stealing Stories for the Devil. And that is because I felt the gameplay experiences and the settings of these games called for their own systems. Could I hack my own system to create a Cypher version of Invisible Sun? Probably. But it wouldn’t have been able to fully provide the experiences I wanted it to.

And in truth, when it comes to determining if a designer alters something old or creates something new, it comes down to just that: what delivers the gameplay experience that the designer (and hopefully the audience) wants? You hear a lot of different opinions on this topic, from “don’t redesign the wheel every time” to “you’ve got to constantly innovate.” These kinds of outlooks, without any context, are pretty useless. It’s really the experience you want to deliver that matters.