Referees, MAKE YOUR PLAYERS WORK FOR YOU, INSTEAD OF AGAINST YOU

From: rpg@cyberhighway.net (Roaming Panther Game Co.)

Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 00:00:00 +0000

MAKE YOUR PLAYERS WORK FOR YOU, INSTEAD OF AGAINST YOU

Any sort of game is like a miniaturized, self contained world of its own. For a
 short time, as you play the game, you participate in that world.  The rules of
 the game are the laws of nature of that world. Just as in the real world you
cannot act in a way inconsistent with the laws of nature, you can�t
participate in a game world without following the rules. Although the penalty
is usually less in the game. In the real world ignoring the laws of nature can
lead to death or injury. In the game, if you cheat you usually only get kicked
out, (although in some games in Vegas they might break a few bones, as well.)

In the real world, the laws of nature reinforce certain modes of behavior. For
example, people have to eat regularly or they die. Food isn�t usually just
lying around waiting to get picked up. You have to go gather and prepare it.
This simple law of nature has led to our entire economic system and way of
life. If people didn�t have to eat, and didn�t have to work to get food, they
wouldn�t work. Look at an amoeba (or a welfare mother.) If you change the
laws, you change behavior. Since the person on welfare is protected from the
consequences of the law of nature, she is free to act in a way that would
result in death or misery to her otherwise. (Although at the cost of someone
else, I must say.)

Because of this, any decent game designer must carefully craft his rules to
reflect what he wants the players to do. If the game rules reward the attacker
with bonus� and benefits and give no advantage to defense, you should expect
players to attack whenever they can. (The clever ones, at any rate.) If the
designer is trying to model a peaceful world you wouldn�t expect him to
incorporate such features into the design. His rules must reflect his vision
of how the game world should work.

And the rules must work together. For example, a military game where the
attacker always suffered large losses would work fine as long as the
replacement of dead units was fairly inexpensive and quick. This would
encourage players to attack. If replacing your losses  was a slow, expensive
and difficult process, players would tend to sit and defend. Those who
recklessly attacked would soon run out of armies and be destroyed. This is why
the more complicated a game is, the more difficult it is to get to work well.

Players have a tendency to try to maximize their own position. They want to use
 every trick and advantage possible. After all, the most effective and
efficient player usually wins, no matter what the game is. The problem arises
when the players� attempts to maximize their own position conflicts with what
the game designer intended.

In most games, this problem is avoided by extensive testing of rules with
rather limited options. Nobody argues about the rules for go fish or checkers
or Parcheesie or comes up with some loophole to their advantage. There just
aren�t that many rules and they�ve been thoroughly tested. But you often see a
lot of argument about the interpetation of the rules of complicated games
(like Star Fleet Battles, World In Flames or AD&D) where players discover
loopholes which make them invincible (or at least unreasonably powerful) until
they are closed up by the designer using errata or a new edition of the rules.
This is because the very complication and multiple options available to
players makes it impractical for the designer to check out every potential
combination of rules. And the more complex the system, the more combinations
there are and the more loopholes he�s going to miss.

This usually leads to rules which keep changing as the designer closes another
loophole. The same thing happens with the government and the tax laws. And like
 the tax laws, as soon as one loophole is closed another one is created. The
only solution to this is to make the game�s rules as simple as possible so you
can limit the abuse created by the loopholes. After all, if a particular
loophole is available to everyone and doesn�t do violence to the designer�s
concept of how the game should work, he doesn�t need to close it. The best way
to achieve this state of affairs is to set the game up in such a way to make
following the intended concept beneficial to the players. They�re going to do
what they consider best for themselves, in any case.

So often in games I see rules where players are forbidden to do such and so
because it�s unhistorical. For example First World War games where the French
are required to make a certain number of suicidal attacks against the Germans
during the first few turns because that was what they did and that was what
their tactical doctrine specified. It�s stupid, just gets your men killed and
accomplishes nothing, but the rules require you to do it anyway. This is very
annoying. One game I saw did it right. The designer awarded the French player
a small number of victory points for each attack made during the first few
turns. This made the player want to do what the other designers forced him to
do. He had a choice. Make the attacks and lose the units for the gain of some
VP or forgo the points and save the troops. You get a lot less trouble from
players if your rules encourage behavior you want to see and handicap behavior
you don�t want to see.

For example in Fantasy Nations, I tried to design the rules to show that Magic
and the Universal Church were opposites, implacable enemies, sort of like a
medieval-fantasy cold war between Communism and the Free World. As part of
this design the Magic players got various benefits, the typical result of
which was to accentuate their ability to attack. For example,  Magical items,
which gave a bonus in combat. Magic spells which allowed them to damage enemy
military units or economic targets, at long ranges. And magical units, which
while they worked pretty much like regular military units, casualties were
irrelevant (losing them didn�t reduce your potential work force) and they
moved as if you had a road network regardless if one existed or not. Church
oriented players got no such combat bonus� but could recruit heroes (which
could destroy magic items and monsters) and got to build scholarship projects
(like abbeys, libraries and colleges) which could then be supported and result
in the development of new innovations and the increase of technology. The
inspiration for this came from the story of medieval Europe where (in spite of
the typical modern liberal-atheist ew) the Renaissance grew out of the
preservation of the Roman and Greek knowledge by the monks and scribes of the
Catholic Church. All the colleges of the Renasance were founded by clerics,
most for the training of priests. Almost all the eat thinkers of the period
were priests or had been trained by priests. Even S Isaac Newton wrote more
books on Bible commentary than Astronomy and physics. The idea of magic being
incompatible with technology was also taken from historic examples. The
regions of the world where technology has had the hardest time boming
established are also those with a strong magic tradition where the medicine
man is respected and feared. (For example Haiti, West Africa, etc.) The places
ere science and rationality took root easiest were those where magic was
considered evil, anti-social, deviant behavior like Europe, the Islamic World,
China and Japan.

However I built a flaw into my design. I set it up so that a player couldn�t
spend any more establishing scholarship projects than his church spending,
which was limited by his existing church infrastructure. The idea was if you
wanted to build a college and develop technology you had to build up the
church so you could get the priests and scribes to establish the college. The
problem was people would dump the church after they built the college or else
just have a church player build them a college. The Magic oriented players
wanted to obtain all the advantages of both the Church and Magic, which were
supposed to be incompatible. Plus, some of the Church players started to buy
magic items from the Magic players in a  sort of black market trafficking in
magic items and scribes. How do you go about "fixing" such a state of affairs?

Well, some players said not to do anything. "Don�t change the rules. Why can�t
we all have everything?" they said. I didn�t agree because in the first place,
I didn�t want to make a generic fantasy game.  Part of the appeal of Fantasy
Nations was each player got his own equipment list. They were all different.
It was more than the difference between a barbarian or a wizard or a king. You
might be a horse barbarian like the Mongols or a horseless  barbarian like an
American Indian or a sea going barbarian like the Sea Elves or Vikings or some
other type like cannibals. I even had five different types of magic users
(Illusionists, Nercomancers, Sorcerers, Elementalists and Demonology). With
all the variety in the player positions it made no sense to then let everybody
use everything. There might as well be just one generic player type who can
use everything. Why even put limits on scholarship projects, if anybody can
get them. The game would have been a lot easier without forcing them to resort
to the Black market. But that defeated the whole point of the game. So I had
to do something, but what?

The "easy" way would have been to say, "Magic players can�t spend on
scholarship and Church players can�t own magic items. Just forbid it. (This is
usually the government�s solution to loopholes in the tax code.) Well, with
being a libertarian for eighteen years, this solution didn�t set well with me.
Force should be the last resort only when intelligence fails.

So I made scholarship directly equal to the church and added a note to the rule
s indicating that magic items in the possession of a church oriented player
would count against their church budget (which kept the people happy and
avoided rebellion). Rather than forcing them to behave,  this gave players a
choice. They could try for the benefits of both Church and magic and have
trouble maintaining control of their people, or they could just do what they
were supposed to. Any player with sense would choose either church or magic,
not both, because it was in his best interest to. Just as in the real world
the laws of nature encourage some behaviors over others without forcing you to
act a certain way. (You don�t have to work, but if you don�t want to go
hungry, you will have to.)

A simpler game would have avoided the problem. But a simpler game wouldn�t have
 been as much fun to play and would not have given the players the array of
choices available. This makes things more difficult for the designer, but more
rewarding in the long run.

In conclusion, the more complicated the game and the more choices for the
players the more rule loopholes there will be which need to be filled. With a
competent designer the loopholes will get fewer and smaller as time goes on. A
poor designer will simply add more levels of complexity as he tries to fight
against the player�s natural efforts to increase their positions until finally
the game system collapses just like the Soviet Empire collapsed trying to
fight the economic laws of nature. (Unless the players all quit before hand. A
game designer can�t exactly build a Berlin wall and force them to play.)

Design the game so that the rules encourage players to do what you want rather
than punish them for doing what you don�t want. This is a lot easier to say
than to do.