Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Old, well aged or obsolete?

[limburger 21709xp 2]

1) At what point does a tabletop miniature game become “old” and what is the difference to a “well aged” system?

Games never become ‘old’ unless the rules suck and new games show how to do similar things better …

And that to me is the difference between ‘old’/’obsolete’ and ‘well aged’
One has rules and mechanics that simply aren’t any fun for the new generation.
The other has mechanics that have proven themselves over the years.

2) Did you ever find any of your games to be obsolete and why?
Yep … mostly because the mechanics were silly and needlessly complex. D&D/AD&D 2nd edition suffered from this.
At first I thought 3rd edition would fix things, but in hindsight it added more things to it that it didn’t really need.
I’ve sort of come to understand why OSR are so popular … and it’s primarily because they get down to the bare bones needed for RPG’s : a couple of stats and lots of imagination.

Do I really need a list of hundred different skills and feats ?
Or do I just improvise by using whatever backstory I got to justify wether or not a character can do stuff ?

I believe a lot of the rules comes from the need of a certain type of player to want to find and exploit loopholes.
And it’s good for business if you can convince people that they need to buy your expansions in order to have a ‘better’ and ‘more complete’ game.

3) Have you ever tried to make your own set of rules for a complete game? So not just some house rules for an existing thing but from scratch? If yes: who do you feel about it today? If no: why not?
Define ‘complete game’ …
Last year I had a bit of an inspiration to make a silly short beer&pretzels type of game.
However other than getting the basic idea/concept on paper I never finished it.
I might revisit it once I got another round of inspiration … because like writing code there is fun to be had in thinking about systems and mechanics.

Biggest hurdle would be finding people who would want to play and deciding when the game would be fun/balanced enough to play at all.

There’s also the challenge of finding and/or making the components, but at a local (board)game convention I saw one shop selling all sorts of meeples and boardgame related materials that were not dice.

I am a believer of simple systems, because  complex rules that force people to do certain things invariably lack fun and are counterintuitive at best which results in them being ignored.

I hope I can get myself in the mood for some hobby time, because I really really should do more than just read (and complain) about stuff. 😀