Once upon a time, there was a really really nifty little niche hobby called role-playing games, or RPGs.

Then the companies that made them wanted mass appeal, and as with so many other things that have done that the focus was lost and something new was born, something that bore the same old name but in reality was a completely different animal.

These games used to be written by hobbyists for hobbyists, with the profit being something nice to get out of it.  As the big corporations took over, the focus became making the game appeal to as many people as possible to rake in the cash.

Looking back, the first signs are evident in the history of Games Workshop, as they turned from a few guys making games for a mail-order business into a mass-producer of miniatures.  Just looking at the various editions of their rulebooks over the years, you can see how they turned from interesting little fantasy battles into a sales pitch for their miniatures business.  They’re also quite possibly the party most responsible for turning our related wargaming hobby from a way to fight out an imaginary battle into a competition where the rulebook is king. and are a big proponent of RAW.

Competition. Balance.  I hate those terms as much as Rules As Written.  They have no place in this hobby.  Our roots are in fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings, and Gandalf sure as hell was not balanced with Bilbo.

Over the years, the evil that is RAW has spread to the mainstream roleplaying products.  Once upon a time, the first page of any rulebook told the DM/GM/Judge that this was their game, to ignore any rules that didn’t fit with their group, to make up any others they needed to cover unforseen situations, and that having fun was paramount.  This was our beloved hobby, one where the rules existed primarily to help define the physics of a fantasy world in which we were creating a collaborative story.  When we wanted RAW, we brought out Chess and Monopoly boards.  When we wanted to dive into a world of our own creation, we brought out the RPG rulebooks.

Pick up the latest edition of the more mainstream RPG products, and you’ll probably not recognise them as RPG rulebooks at all.  They read more like instructions for playing a board game, a CCG, or as the system behind a computer game.  Everything is clearly defined.  Some assume you’ll be playing on a grid with miniatures or counters, and don’t even mention not using them.  Some even discourage players from performing actions that aren’t in the rulebook…

It was all done, of course, to make RPGs appeal to the mass market.  Initially that seemed like a good thing – it brought more players into the hobby, and more money.  The problem was, it also changed the hobby from the thing we actually wanted to play.  It’s happening everywhere – just ask fans of Science Fiction what happened to the Sci-Fi channel.  Niche markets just aren’t profitable enough¹, so they’re being pushed aside.

So what about those of us who actually liked the niche market?

¹ – That is to say, the company owner/board/shareholders can see more profit if they drop what they’re doing and do something different instead.  Maybe that’s what business is all about, but if all the toilet paper factories thought they could make more money making stationery we’d all be in trouble, wouldn’t we?

(No, this isn’t a terrorism site explaining how to build a rocket launcher, my apologies if you were misled by the article title. )

First off, go read this for context – http://www.neogrognard.com/article/352/bag-of-feats, as it’s full of good points I couldn’t make anywhere near as elequently.

Leaving feat mechanics aside, I’m going to focus on two specific thing touched on in the article: “the game as imagined vs the game as played”, and “most RPGs are designed with the idea that they are unified theories of what the game world looks like”.

RPGs tend to be written around how the developer(s) believe it should be played.  That’s a fairly obvious and redundant statement, I guess, but there are often people that will poke through the rules, looking for any exploit they can find.  These people usually try and pass this off as “optimizing” (admittedly there’s a grey area between the two), when they’re just annoying the hell out of everyone else.  Well, they’re annoying the hell out of me, and that pretty much means the same thing in my book     You can usually tell when the line is crossed when someone pulls out a rulebook and has to point to a specific rule to back up the incredibly stupid thing they just said they were doing.  Generally, if it doesn’t seem right to the DM and the players, it’s probably not, whatever the rulebook says.

Sometimes, this isn’t such a bad thing.  Sometimes it leads to ludicrous situations such as “druids being ridden by the gorilla animal companions decked out in full plate and a lance” mentioned in the aforementioned article.  However, this is why we have a DM – if RAW (Rules As Written) really was enough, you wouldn’t need someone in the DM role to act as final judge on their execution and to attempt to ensure the game was fun and balanced.

Now, I’m not talking about House Rules here – they’re a great thing, and sit parallel to mods for computer games – they let people play the game they want to play as opposed to the almost-but-not-quite-perfect one they bought.  I’m in danger of going off in a rant here on Rules Lawyers and the ninety-nine best ways to cause them to die painfully, so time to get back on track.

Lets take the other thing I pulled out of that article – the idea of the rules essentially being the “physics” of the game world.  You can go a bit further, and take them as being the physics of a movie set in the game world, because the main characters (the PCs and the major NPCs) are often capable of things normal inhabitants of that world are not and will be focusing on non-mundane tasks.  The rules often reflect this, either directly or implied.

You can see this in the differences between various game systems.  D&D mechanics are geared towards combat, because it’s assumed you’ll be playing combat-orientated stories.   Call of Cthulhu is written more towards the assumption that PCs will be utilising academic skills.   The various Star Trek RPGs over the years tend to have focused on skills for operating starships and various other pieces of technology.

I’ve always loved taking a system and turning it on its head, placing its focus elsewhere than the designers originally intended.  The various D&D versions over the years have spawned unofficial “Sage” classes, for example, that give players the option of a non-combat-orientated character.  This may have been the polar opposite to the direction the game rules went with 4e, but it shows that groups have always been empowered to play the game they want, without having to throw the rules away and play something else.  It’s also why a real RPG will always beat a computer RPG, at least until we have Star-Trek-style holodecks that allow us to give them instructions in plain english to modify the game rules.

The “bags of feats” idea from the article I mentioned at the beginning is a big step towards giving groups their game world, as opposed to the game developer’s one.  I don’t think this actually goes far enough – you need a full “plugin” system of feats, skills, and optional game mechanics (including a “sanity” rule à la CoC is a good example of this) so the game can focus on the type of story the group wants to play.  No matter what you may have been told, a non combat-orientated variant of D&D is not an impossibility.  The more I think about it, the more I think d20/D&D 3(.5) went in the right direction here when you look at some of the innovative addons third-party publishers built into the system (just look at Mongoose’s d20 Babylon 5 RPG for an example), but at the cost of bloat and complexity.  4e is a far neater, organised system, but doesn’t have the flexibility.  We’ve seen both extremes – maybe now it’s time to meet somewhere in the middle?

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