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When Systems Matter

In some sense, you don’t care about your washing machine. You have no clue where that powder comes from, or where those particles go after the wash. But you care a great deal when your washing machine breaks down.

When to Blame the System

When combat drags out for 45 minutes

the system has failed. Even the purest of action films don’t have fight-scenes that last over 10 minutes.

Rather than making the game ‘full of combat’, this actually limits combat substantially. If a fight lasted 5 minutes, then 10 fights would take a total of 50 minutes from the game; but when one fight lasts 45 minutes, then the game needs 1.5 hours to have just two combat scenes.

When the Rules Drag the Narrative into a Ditch

it really fucks with the entire genre. I once played a game of Dark Ages: Vampire where one character played a Kuldonic sorcerer, with Earth-Magic. One power allowed him to have the earth reach up and trap victims by the leg. As a result, he disabled one victim per round, as the rest fought, and once all of them were constrained, the rest dispatched their immobile targets easily.

The game had lost something of the genre - almost every combat problem could be solved with a single trick. I never wanted this change in genre, but it was too late - the player had the book. This left me with the option of adjusting the flow of the stories, or wrecking the narrative by saying ‘yea, nah - the spirits no longer let you do that thing, because it’s too much’.

When the Rules Leave Players with Nothing to Do

then they have abandoned that player to boredom. When a PC falls, nearly dead, it leaves the player with nothing to do. When a ritual spell requires 3 rounds to cast, it leaves the player with nothing to do. When everyone sends ‘the social character’ (with the highest Charisma Bonus) to do all the talking, then it leaves all the other players with nothing to do.

Systems can easily leave people with ‘nothing to do’, which promotes long periods of players staring at their phones.

When the Rules Leave Rulings up to the GM

then the designer has abandoned their responsibility to provide easy, objective, results.

The Illusion of Subjectivity

Rule systems can be compared in objective ways, if we can only clean out some confusion on the matter.

Your GM determines when the table has fun

but that doesn’t invalidate the time wasted on bad rules - it only serves as a distraction. So the question of the GMing skills may be more important than rules, but should also be ignored when rules are on the table of discussion.

A good ruleset may not help a bad GM, but it can certainly bring down a games night with any GM.

Some people prefer fantasy

and clearly the preference cannot be wrong. Clearly rules are involved with representing fantasy or sci-fi, so the choice of rules seems subjective.

But this line of thinking has missed the exact point when rules are chosen; they come in after the subjective decisions have ended. A game designer’s choice of emulating Star Trek or the Witcher comes down to individual preference, with no right answer.[1] To find when the system has gone wrong, we wait until after someone wants a genre, and look at how well the selected system emulates the genre. I’ve never played an RPG which emulates Star Trek, but if I do, I want to be able to set my phaser to stun. And if the system says ‘when setting the phaser to stun, it deals fewer HP damage’, then the system has failed, because this makes the stun setting on a phaser strictly worse, and draws out combat; it provides a clear disincentive to stunning opponents.

The GM can ignore the rules

but this threatens everything that the rules were brought in to avoid.

When players know that the GM will adjust everything for ‘common sense’, they can no longer plan by thinking about what the game will facilitate, they will have to plan by thinking about what the GM will ‘let them do’. The plot will also fall from whatever the GM thinks should happen narratively, which removes exactly the thing we play RPGs for - an emergent narrative, with unexpected twists.

Where the Objectivity Lies

Where two systems give the same result, but one resolves in half the time, that one makes a better game. And if two systems resolve at the same time, but one provides richer information, that one makes a better game. Where players commonly understand one way a rule is phrased, but not the other phrasing, then the first is objectively better. And whenever rules give the table a surprising, but totally genre-appropriate result, the system has done its job well.

For a more positive analysis of systems, read what systems do[a]

[a]

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[1] To put this another way, the answer to ‘which genre?’ is always correct, because people are describing what they want, and being wrong about what one wants is rare, even if being confused about how to get it is very common.