Reply To: [unofficial Weekender] One ruleset to… well, rule them all?

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Pledge::

 

Question of the week:

1) Reworking or creating your own rules: worth your time or is there already enough out there?

Answer part 1::  most of the time I just go with the rules as is, until they let me down.  That’s when I change them to ‘fix’ what I think is bad.   Sometimes those changes prove to be not as clever as I had though originally, so I change back to the standard rules.  It’s a rinse and repeat kind of effort.  Of course most rules work fine as is.  A lot of time goes into most rules systems.

What causes me to not like some rules?  Well, most of the time I think it’s a matter of game designers trying to prove how clever they are by making a game too complex.  I know there are players that will dog on a rules system if it doesn’t add levels of complexity. That’s certainly not for me.  Then there are the dreaded “Living Rules Systems” that only exists in digital form and may change on a quarterly, monthly, daily, or even hourly basis.  Who’s got time for all that?  No hobby/crafter/player that I know.  .YMMV.  My personal experience with gamers that enjoy ‘LRS’ are people that buy a generic proxy army, never mod them, never are their minis WYSIWYG and on top of that thier minis are never painted. (there are always exceptions)  Personal I think it’s because they spend all of thier time in the rules reading and looking for killer recipes.  They don’t have any time left for the hands on part of the hobby. IMO

It has been my experience that the average hobby/crafter/player enjoys less complex systems.  They want to enjoy making the models, painting them and playing them on the tabletop.  They’re not, (for the most part), interested is digging into the rules at all levels and finding the nuances that produce the killer army/warband that can dominate the tabletop.  Personally I think it would be very boring to win every game.  It no doubt would lead to folks not wanting to play you very much. .IMHO.   Of course I feel this way became i buy, build and paint what looks cool and makes me happy to look at and move around the table.

I do like games that have the rules split up into Basic, Advanced and Competition levels.  This seems the best solution to me with regards to complexity or not.  That way you can have just the main course or eat that CAKE as well!

 

Answer part 2:: I have from time to time worked on my own rules for games that I’d like to play.

When Star Wars first came out I really liked the Han Solo character and the “roaming the galaxy free” to go where you want and so forth.  I worked on rules for flying, landing and rolling to find cargo to carry from planet to planet.  Smuggling was in there with it’s own section and consequences.  Ship encounters and underworld figures.  I seem to remember filling two notebooks with ideas and then weeding through it all.  Tossing out things and adding others.  Two of my buddies played it and thought it was pretty neat.  (Buddies always have your back).  I don’t have any of those notebooks left.  Most of it is still bouncing around in my head.  I’m pretty sure there are plenty of published games now that cover most of what I had done with my rules.  But it was fun to work through all of it.  Smoothing and polishing.

There have been others games I’ve worked on over the years.

 

My advice to anyone thinking about trying is to, “get in there and give it a go”.