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Thursday, December 24, 2020
Change game design
I couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about cheating at solitaire, where I expressed my preference for cheating only when I was playing alone. I wouldn't cheat in a game where I was playing against another player, as that would be unfair. I would cheat when playing against only the game, if that cheating made the game more fun. As I am now playing more board games, this concept is becoming more relevant.
I am not, technically speaking, a game designer. However, I do not only talk a lot about game design on this blog, I also have a lot of experience of designing game elements and watching the results of that design through my Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master experience. A DM does a lot of game design, as typical game design questions like flow of the game or balance are frequently left to him, not the D&D rulebooks. As I have been doing that for decades, I have a pretty good feeling whether a sequence of game events would be fun for the players or not; for example you'd never encounter two identical fights in an adventure of mine (although, come to think of it, it could be fun to use that once, with the players finding themselves in a time loop).
Most board games don't have a DM. It is up to the players themselves to know, follow, and enforce the rules. But once you know a game well enough, you might find that certain rules are not fun for you and the people you play with, and introduce "house rules". A majority of people playing Monopoly have some house rule for the free parking space, although the official rule is that nothing happens there.
House rules become especially relevant in the sort of board game that I am playing, which are cooperative, the players against "the game". I don't believe in there being some higher purpose in beating a game "as intended", the purpose of a game is to have fun. Sometimes game designers just make mistakes, and design something that isn't fun, like that empty no parking space. More often, in the more complex type of games, the designers simply couldn't foresee all possible combinations of group composition vs. scenario rules. You could have a dungeon crawler game in which a scenario is easy if you have a certain character type, e.g. a rogue able to pick locks, but much harder if you don't. When I DM Dungeon & Dragons, I know that I need to adjust the adventure to group composition, so the same sort of adjustments make sense in a board game. You might say, "you need to play a different character for that scenario!", but frankly, even if the game allows for switching characters in and out, that doesn't sound like a lot of fun. Especially if you don't "peak ahead", play the scenario as intended with the group you want to play, fail and find out that you need a different group, and play it again with the group the game wants to you to take.
The most common adjustment, and one that is often actually already foreseen as optional rule in the rulebook, is adjusting difficulty to your personal needs. You want your game to be challenging, but not frustrating; but where exactly that level of difficulty lies is different for different people. Or even for the same people in different situations. Sometimes you might want to spend minutes thinking about each move, like a chess game. In other social situations, a "beer and pretzels" game for fun, you might prefer the game to advance faster, and not be too punishing if somebody then makes a mistake.
In summary, I am not only cheating at solitaire, I also cheat at cooperative games. I'd rather adjust a scenario or rule slightly to make the game more fun for us, rather than treating the game design as some sort of holy scripture. And I know enough about game design to be able to not break essential rules. Pro tip: Leave that free parking space in Monopoly empty if you want a faster game; if you use the common house rule that landing on free parking gives you money (e.g. taxes and fines previously paid by other players due to Chance and Community Chest cards), you increase the money supply in the game, and it takes longer until the game ends because people run out of money. Use the house rule if you prefer to play Monopoly without actually reaching the end, e.g. playing with kids while waiting for dinner. And count yourself lucky if this Christmas you can actually celebrate with family, which won't be possible for all of us in this rather crazy year 2020.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 10:38 AM Permanent Link
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It's a long time since I played Monopoly (which is a terrible game no matter how you might try to fix it) but in my childhood through to my late teens I played it far more times than I would have liked because it's "that game" - the one everyone owns and everyone knows. In all those years I don't believe I ever heard of Free Parking being used for anything. It was always just there.
Then again, I can't imagine any circumstances where anyone playing would have wanted the game to go on a second longer than it absolutely had to so the most useful house rule there could have been would be "anyone who lands on Free Parking is out of the game" (although really that would make more sense as a house rule for Go Directly To Jail).
Personally, my feeling is that all board games should be played exactly to the rules contained in the box and no house rules should be permitted. Otherwise they aren't really games, they're just ways to pass time and occupy your hands while drinking and chatting. Which is fair enough, only then don't call them "games". Role-playing "games", are not, of course, games at all, not in the sense I or probably anyone outside of the hobby would use the word. Calling them "games" is just a handy convention we all follows that saves us having to come up with some more accurate but long-winded description.
Then again, I can't imagine any circumstances where anyone playing would have wanted the game to go on a second longer than it absolutely had to so the most useful house rule there could have been would be "anyone who lands on Free Parking is out of the game" (although really that would make more sense as a house rule for Go Directly To Jail).
Personally, my feeling is that all board games should be played exactly to the rules contained in the box and no house rules should be permitted. Otherwise they aren't really games, they're just ways to pass time and occupy your hands while drinking and chatting. Which is fair enough, only then don't call them "games". Role-playing "games", are not, of course, games at all, not in the sense I or probably anyone outside of the hobby would use the word. Calling them "games" is just a handy convention we all follows that saves us having to come up with some more accurate but long-winded description.
@Bhagpuss how do you handle boardgames that offer different rule options that change difficulty? Is that allowed because it is in the box, even though it is basically what Tobold is doing?
@Bhagpuss that definition doesn't withstand much scrutiny. If we take, say, Solitaire. Every variation was invented by someone who house-ruled the basic game. Are they not games? What magic blessing made them A Game by your definition? Why does this magic apply to Risk, but not Risk-with-house-rules, but does apply to Risk 2210 AD?
If you take Risk, replace the 6 sided die with 8 sided die and then play by all the existing rules, according to you it's no longer a game.
I think a more sensible definition would include something along the lines of 'You have to follow a set of rules, you can't just introduce random ones as you go'. Which is blurred a little in legacy games, but I see no reason why playing a few rounds, deciding to tweak it, and then playing the rest with those tweaks is somehow not a game.
If you take Risk, replace the 6 sided die with 8 sided die and then play by all the existing rules, according to you it's no longer a game.
I think a more sensible definition would include something along the lines of 'You have to follow a set of rules, you can't just introduce random ones as you go'. Which is blurred a little in legacy games, but I see no reason why playing a few rounds, deciding to tweak it, and then playing the rest with those tweaks is somehow not a game.
I think the biggest issue with cheating at Solitaire is that ultimately, you can be cheating yourself of the proper challenge. But it depends on the game. Maybe if the game is good enough you will not be tempted; maybe you should only play Solitaire games that are that good.
It is a thing in certain online games too. Mush is set to die along with Flash, I guess; our current ship is ending with a satisfactory finality - on Day 17, with everything exploding around us, we have four hours left to possibly grab the last starmap fragment for the rare and coveted Eden win. Otherwise we have to go back to Sol which is still a win for the humans but not rare. Mush starts (and frequently ends) as a non-cooperative 'werewolf' style game - it becomes cooperative when the Mush have been found and killed (on rare occasions cured), then sometimes you can go for the endgame challenge. We have a number of 'house rules' that are not enforced by the game, and not strictly enforced by players, but serve to balance things a bit better. But it is very much a game that is only as good as the players, and they have to make someting out of the material.
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It is a thing in certain online games too. Mush is set to die along with Flash, I guess; our current ship is ending with a satisfactory finality - on Day 17, with everything exploding around us, we have four hours left to possibly grab the last starmap fragment for the rare and coveted Eden win. Otherwise we have to go back to Sol which is still a win for the humans but not rare. Mush starts (and frequently ends) as a non-cooperative 'werewolf' style game - it becomes cooperative when the Mush have been found and killed (on rare occasions cured), then sometimes you can go for the endgame challenge. We have a number of 'house rules' that are not enforced by the game, and not strictly enforced by players, but serve to balance things a bit better. But it is very much a game that is only as good as the players, and they have to make someting out of the material.
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