I have always thought that bloggers held the crown of being opinionated: What else is a blog than first-hand opinions and arguments about second-hand news or memes? But now that I've been watching more videos with various people talking about role-playing games on YouTube, I think I'll have to cede that crown. Most of the videos I saw were pure opinions, not marred by anything like logical arguments or facts. The nature of the medium, where editing is obviously more difficult than editing text leads to most videos severely lacking any sort of structure. I was looking for reviews of various pen & paper roleplaying rules systems, and was very disappointed by the quality of what I found. The average blogger is doing a lot better job of reviewing a game in a way that gives useful information than the average YouTube video poster.

If you take a typical basic rules book for a pen & paper roleplaying game, you will usually find the possible races and classes listed first. An lo and behold, many of the videos I saw reviewing pen & paper rules systems like D&D or Pathfinder started with discussing what races and classes the system had, and then never got to discuss anything more fundamental. In my opinion for a pen & paper RPG system the races and classes it has are only of secondary importance. If you come to me and want to play a bard in World of Warcraft, and WoW doesn't have bards, you're out of luck. If you come to me and want to play a bard in 4E Dungeons & Dragons, and 4E doesn't have bards, I say "sure, go ahead!". I'd just take another class and template and give it a new coat of paint. For example for that bard I'd just take the inspiring warlord build, rename the powers without changing their effects, e.g. inspiring word becomes inspiring song, and voila, instant bard.

Pen & paper roleplaying game systems differ from computer games in that the pen & paper rules do not provide 100% of the game. Pen & paper roleplaying is interactive storytelling, is actually about pretending to be different character, and most of that is done by interaction of the players with each other and the dungeon master, and is not part of the rules system. If you want to play an effeminate elf wizard whose spells are all based on summoning birds, you can do that in every rules system as long as the dungeon master is half-way decent. And if you say that this wouldn't be possible in 4E D&D, I happen to have a link to a video of a player doing exactly that with a DM from Wizards of the Coast.

So if it is the players and the DM who ultimately decide whether your game session ends up being awesome, then how do you review a pen & paper rules system? Basically we need to state what the function of the rules is in the first place, and then we can judge any individual system to see whether it fulfills that function. So why do RPGs have rules? Rules have two main functions: First they limit what the players can do, and by imposing those limits create a challenge. If there were no rules, players could imagine themselves being characters of ultimate power, and there would be no challenge. It is the rules that tell you that your character has a limited number of hit points and that he dies when losing them, and it is the rules that tell you how much damage your character can do to a monster. The second function of rules is to create a balanced and fair environment, minimizing needless conflict between players or players and the DM. As players learn the rules, they go from "can I do this?", "can I do that?", to actually doing things without having to worry that somebody constantly tells them they can't do what they want. Written rules are superior to DM rulings in that they are inherently perceived as more fair.

Now of course the DM still has to do a lot of decisions in a game. But it is important that this decisions don't contradict the rules where the rules are doing their job of creating a challenging and balanced game. That is why my instant bard works: I didn't create new powers which would make that character more powerful or less powerful than something that already existed in the rules. A very experienced DM with a group of veteran players can come to a sort of inherent understanding of what is possible in their game and what is not, at which point they presumably don't even need a rules system any more. But for a review it is better to assume new or average players, and see how a given pen & paper system would serve them. And while some DMs might prefer a rules-light system in which everything is decided by the whims of the DM, I don't think that such systems are the best for the players, especially not for beginning and average players.

RPG systems are more than just rules, obviously. So in addition to the rules we also need to look at what else the system is offering, which is often in the form of a campaign setting. The interaction of campaign settings with rules is a tricky one: Sometimes you can switch the campaign setting with only minor changes to the rules. The Zeitgeist campaign setting exists for both Pathfinder and 4th edition D&D, for example. But if you want a horror campaign setting in which players react to seeing a ghost by running away screaming instead of firing a magic missile, you're better off playing a completely different system, like Call of Cthulhu, than trying a to add a horror campaign setting to your Pathfinder or D&D rules. It is safe to assume that people play a game like Vampire: The Masquerade more because of its unique setting than because of its rules. But many fantasy RPG systems are less specific on the setting, and allow a wide variety from high fantasy to low fantasy, so that a review of these systems better looks more at the rules than at the setting.

What do you think the rules of a pen & paper RPG system are for? What criteria (beyond YouTube-style ranting based on gut feeling) would you use to review such a RPG system?