Rules, Rules, the more you Play the More you Rule – or not

 

I have a love/hate relationship with game rules. I love rules in theory. I hate rules in practice. I have been playing games since the days when the world existed only in technicolor. Things were a little fuzzy back then, almost as if color was trying to find a home and was almost there. I suppose it was better than in the way way back days when the world only existed in black and white, or worse, shades of gray.

I played checkers and chess as a kid. Battleship, Risk, and Monopoly were also some of the early game flavors. My world of gaming shifted when my father started teaching tactics at the US Army’s Command General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth. He once took us to the wargame room. It was huge, and by huge, I mean the gaming table was at least ten feet wide and twenty feet long. It was filled with hundreds of tiny toy metal tanks, jeeps, APCs, BMPS, artillery, and a host of other figures. This is where various strategies and tactics were tested (not really, those were being tested in a highly secretive area of the base, these were more for public display).

My father bought us some games to play. Firefight was one. This was produced by SPI in those way back days. It was a board game with hundreds of chits, maps, and rules for playing squad level conflicts in battles between Soviets and Americans. From that moment, the games I played shifted. I went full board game and continued playing chit-based wargames until the mid-1980s when I could no longer find anyone interested in playing them. I was also introduced to Dungeons and Dragons during this time. Over the years I played that as well as Rolemaster, Gurps, Warhammer, Traveler, and a variety of other role-playing games. 

 

I was enamored with rules to say the least. Advanced Squad leader and Rolemaster were probably the apex of rule’s complication as far as my gaming went. I thoroughly enjoyed both and, as the years of gaming went on, incorporated a variety of rules from a variety of sources into my games. A hefty set of rules I had collected. Then I just quit using them. It was a slow withdrawal but steady so that by the time 3e hit the shelves, I had no more stomach for high complexity, subset rules, interlocking parts, and vast sets of options. I tried to use them but failed. Slowly I just sorta quit using almost any rules and made them up in game. I had my steady ‘to hit versus an armor class’ rules and a few others but most were just ignored because they just dragged down my game or added nothing substantive to it.

Yet, on a deep level, I still yearned for more options and more rules. Castles and Crusades came about in part as a result of the need for rules. Luckily Mac Golden was of the same mind and we hammered out the simple rules for our game. But, as anyone who jabbers with me knows, I want more rules and more complexity and I am constantly devising new rules and testing them in game. Almost all fail to hit the mark. They either ground play down, were unnecessary, or required to many moving parts to institute. 

So, a few years ago I threw everything out and started anew. Two days ago, I had my Eureka moment. Thanks to an errant comment on facebook, a random video about jazz composition, another random video on tension in fiction, and an article on cryptocurrencies an idea flowed into my head, an insight so to speak.

I have my basic rule, my basic structure, my basic algorithm. I can finally begin work on my campaign setting, renamed the Dragon’s Crucible, and the rules that go with it.