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GeekNights Tuesday - Game Rules
Game rules are the topic of tonight's GeekNights. Tabletop games have rulebooks, videogames have their code, tutorials, and MEGAMAN MEGAMAN, and they're often a deeply neglected part of game design and game play. In the news, the 20-sided store Netrunner returns, this past weekend was a gamefest between Extralife marathons, the Fantasy Flight 2015 World Championships, and Blizzcon (including the Hearthstone championships), and Fallout 4 is out (and we'll buy it when the GOTY edition comes out with all the DLC).
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The way shipping works when someone chooses Captain in Puerto Rico.
You cannot make alliances until you are adjacent in Eclipse.
There are only 8 copies of every VP card in the supply in a two player game of Dominion.
You are allowed to use draft movement to move laterally in Thunder Alley.
Cards may be discarded for an extra die in Yspahan.
You cannot build from unsupplied units in Quartermaster General.
Black dice - not orange dice - grant bonus VPs when shipping in the RollftG expansion.
I don't miss big things anymore, now I just screw up little things that have big consequences.
At least most of the time when you screw up Netrunner rules, you don't actually break the game. You just do worse than you could have because there was something you could do that you didn't realize you could do.
People who fucked the gods shouldn't place for rewards
Free farmer cards are in excess of open farmer spaces
We messed up other things too, but I can't remember the details.
The first time we played Puerto Rico, we didn't remove the prospectors for <5 players.
Diplomacy we played for a few hours, and then ran into a movement situation so complex that we spent more than an hour trying to figure out how to resolve it. The rules did not help.
More to the topic of the show, I'm known as the local pedant. The "teach me the game, I'm not actually going to read the rules" culture is pretty much all their is among the groups I play with. I've played enough games to know when a rule doesn't quite fit or doesn't make sense. I have zero issue asking for the rule book mid game to potentially call bullshit on a teaching fuck up. I'd say it's a 33%/33%/33% between, catching a mistake, discovering a game is poorly designed (that's how it actually works), and just poorly written rules.
Move forward about 2 weeks and the lady in the game above was reading the rules to a game she'd be playing the following week. *fist pump*
Other well written rules games include anything written, designed by Antoine Bauza.
The rules have to be completely clear and in perfectly unambiguous language, you should be able to write it in propositional or predicate logic after reading the sentence once.
Just because your game is a pirate game don't include stupid lore and stories in the middle of the instructions put that at the start and end.
The instructions should not be paragraphs, they must be dot points.
Do put a setup of the board in a diagram on the first page.
If you can include small setup instructions on the game cards or board, do so.
Problems with game designers writing instructions, they may suck at writing, be full of themselves or have poor logic.
People seem to be able to follow the rules in my games, and I'm barely literate. Why is it such a stumbling block for so many? See what they do in the Monsterhearts book? Just copy all those techniques. If you can be a third as good as that, you will be in the top 10%.
About the only thing I disagreed with, and I'm pretty sure it's personal preference, is you recommended having a running example of play next to the rules as you write them down. Shock and Questlandia both do that, and I gotta say I kinda hate it. It feels super artificial and kind of biases things. Like, to be honest, I think examples in general are a crutch and if you Git Good at making your rules clear you shouldn't need them, or you should only need a small number of limited examples to illustrate a practical context for things that are counter-intuitive. Examples read to me a lot like rules commentary in that they betray a lack of confidence in the rules; "No totally, it works like this! This is why this is good!" It feels kinda like a violation of a principle metaphysically related to Show, Don't Tell.
If nothing else if someone where to Google this forum thread they will get plenty of I fromationnon this subject.