D&D General When does the system "work"?

[loverdrive]

So, yeah, the question is exactly what it says on the tin: what exactly the rules should be doing to be considered working? Since I always have an opinion on everything, I'll start. The system works when it prevents bad stuff from happening and allows the table to focus on the good stuff.

That's pretty much it. Huh, I thought I had more to say about this topic. Welp.

 

[Lanefan]

So, yeah, the question is exactly what it says on the tin: what exactly the rules should be doing to be considered working? Since I always have an opinion on everything, I'll start. The system works when it prevents bad stuff from happening and allows the table to focus on the good stuff.

Of course, this depends on what each table defines as "bad stuff" and "good stuff".

Me, I'd say the system is working best when things run so smoothly that nobody really notices the underlying mechanics even though they're in use largely as intended.

 

[cbwjm]

I feel the system works when everyone is having fun. If the system gets in the way of fun then it might be time to move to something new. I guess fun is equivalent to the good stuff.

 

[Yora]

Game rules are good if players don't end up in situations where the context of the scene has them want to do one thing, but the mechanics have them want to take a different action.

In a good system, the mechanics encourage the kinds of behavior that the fiction is supposed to be about. If the mechanics encourage acting in ways that go against the kind of intended fiction, that's a bad failure of the system.

 

[loverdrive]

I feel the system works when everyone is having fun. If the system gets in the way of fun then it might be time to move to something new. I guess fun is equivalent to the good stuff.

I don't think that "fun" is a useful metric. I mean, if the game wasn't fun it basically means that it just plain sucked, and "not sucking" is the lowest possible bar to clear.

 

[Baldurs_Underdark]

You can read the PHB as a rough guideline to a roleplay game where everything is possible and you can weave epic stories. But you can also read it as a precise guideline to a bookkeeping exercise, if you include e.g. detailed encumbrance, upkeep costs, rations and water, travel speeds.

The first is fun to me. The second is awful. And I don't know which of the two comes closer to being "the system".

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Game rules are good if players don't end up in situations where the context of the scene has them want to do one thing, but the mechanics have them want to take a different action.

In a good system, the mechanics encourage the kinds of behavior that the fiction is supposed to be about. If the mechanics encourage acting in ways that go against the kind of intended fiction, that's a bad failure of the system.

I think this is right, though I also think some systems are good at mechanically encouraging players to act in line with creating interesting fiction. In Forged in the Dark games, for example, there are usually playbook-specific XP triggers, like addressing a serious problem using force or intimidation, which might actually be an unwise move for a given heist. That push to play suboptimally (compared to more traditional play styles) is, to me, a pretty neat little innovation. Some players would likely say that those triggers push people to break the fiction, but that only tracks if your idea of the fiction is a meta-story where the players are trying to “beat” the scenario, and the characters have no other motivations or personalities.

 

[Minigiant]

A system works when it is not disruptive.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

The older I get, the more I think a system works when its mechanics reinforce a specific kind of setting, play style and tone. The games I ran the most as a kid/college student were GURPS and Vampire, and as much fun as those were, I think they often whiffed at aligning system with premise. GURPS is great for certain kinds of grit but is nowhere near as universal as intended—who wants to make a cinematic martial artist by assembling 100 different ultra-specific skills and maneuvers? And Vampire talked nonstop about intrigue but only really had rules for superpowered combat, so that’s naturally what you did. Why go to a pure-roleplay masquerade ball when you have all these fighty buttons (Celerity, Potence, claws) on your sheet to push?

I think a lot of games still make the mistake of trying to do everything for everyone, not only forcing the GM to hand-wave things that could be addressed mechanically, or not realizing that they’re actually only incentivizing one kind of play. I also think some systems don’t get the genre or tone they’re supposedly in. Call of Cthulhu, for example, was super formative for me, and I’ll always love it. But having to roll under 35% in a skill to advance the investigation (a pretty good skill rating, btw, for obscure skills) makes for constant roadblocks and missed clues, and doesn’t feel like the fiction it’s emulating. Something like Gumshoe or Brindlewood Bay does a much better job, imo, of making investigation interesting, and not tedious or entirely railroady.

In other words, when the system pushes the premise, setting and tone, it’s working. When it fails to do that, it’s either forcing the GM to become an ad hoc designer to fill in the gaps and “fix” inappropriate mechanics, or it’s just creating yet another murder hobo simulator (knowingly or unknowingly).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think that "fun" is a useful metric. I mean, if the game wasn't fun it basically means that it just plain sucked, and "not sucking" is the lowest possible bar to clear.

Good luck convincing anyone about this. Lots and lots of people will speak positively about a game or system by saying "it's playable" or "you can have fun," as though those were meritorious qualities rather than the absolute bare minimum.

A (published) game that is not even playable does not deserve the paper upon which it is written. A game that is legitimately impossible to have fun while playing is even worse: it deserves to be held up as a warning to the next ten generations of game designers for outright actively destructive game design. I, personally, find it extremely unlikely that any TTRPG is truly unplayable, and do not believe it is possible to design a game that is genuinely, unequivocally impossible to have fun with. Hence why I have such a dim view of any use of "fun" as a mark of a successful game.

Even genuinely awful, unacceptable* games can be fun under the right circumstances or for a narrow group of people. And many, many, many genuinely amazing and wonderful games can fail to be fun if mishandled badly enough.

*I mean outright morally offensive games like MYFAROG, literally a TTRPG incorporating Nazi race theory, or piles of steaming garbage like FATAL. The vast majority of games are not like that.

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As for my own answer to the thread question: A system works when it does what it was designed to do. I don't mean that as a copout, because "does what it was designed to do" means something very specific to me.

A game system is a set of instructions and (typically) mathematical relationships. Game systems are designed to produce experiences, chosen by their designers. Effective game design thus requires designers to: (1) identify the specific experiences the game should produce (and, potentially, those it is not intended to produce); (2) set clear, testable design goals for achieving the chosen experiences; (3) define acceptable ranges of valid results, especially for any elements that involve randomness; (4) collect data and rigorously test the goals from 2, modifying and re-testing as necessary until the mechanics fall within the defined range of acceptability from 3.

Note that this is specifically considering game design as a technology, NOT as an artistic work. That should not be taken to mean that the artistic element is irrelevant. It's just that the artistic element cannot be analyzed like a technology; it can, and should, only be analyzed aesthetically, which works very differently. Aesthetic choice matters for all steps above except (sometimes) step 4.

So, to repeat what I said earlier more specifically: A system works when the rules it contains actually do produce the experiences it was intended to produce, within the range(s) of acceptable results its designers chose. In other words, when the testing part of its playtesting phase was successfully conducted, iterating on whatever parts needed iteration until they produced an acceptable range of results.