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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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  • I endorse everything Rym says about Undertale at the start of this episode ;]

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  • Some of the issue with tabletop Kickstarters is the playtest circle-jerk. People aren't playtesting with their friends, they are playtesting with their second-tier connections: other people who are also trying to start their own tabletop companies. This leads to nobody wanting to say bad things, as to not stir the pot or make enemies. Lots of surface-level criticisms to give the appearance of providing valuable playtest feedback. Events like Metatopia and UnPub were stood up in an attempt to get fresh blood into the mix, and they've worked to some extent, but I'm still super wary about most indie tabletop KSers.
  • My failures-to-read-the-rules in chronological order, including omissions:

    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.
  • Oh god, I couldn't bear to list every rule I've screwed up.
  • Netrunner, the king of fucked up rules.

    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.
  • We messed up Amon-Re in multiple ways over many years. I remember two of the more serious ones:

    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.

  • Apreche said:

    Netrunner, the king of fucked up rules.

    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.

    Did you know that if you run archives and use Eater, you still flip over all the face-down cards even though you don't access anything? This probably only matters if you play bad IDs (Industrial Genomics) like I do.
  • The worst rules fuck-up I can remember, that was purely my fault, was completely blowing the rule about old factories degrading in Martin Wallace's Automobile.
  • Matt said:

    Some of the issue with tabletop Kickstarters is the playtest circle-jerk. People aren't playtesting with their friends, they are playtesting with their second-tier connections: other people who are also trying to start their own tabletop companies. This leads to nobody wanting to say bad things, as to not stir the pot or make enemies. Lots of surface-level criticisms to give the appearance of providing valuable playtest feedback.

    This is not something I've been doing. My first playtesters were friends and people I know who'd tell me if it sucked or not. I've slowly brought more acquaintances on board slowly. I've gotten good and bad feedback along the way so I think my playtesting, slow as it's going, is at least being done correctly.

    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.
  • pence said:

    Apreche said:

    Netrunner, the king of fucked up rules.

    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.

    Did you know that if you run archives and use Eater, you still flip over all the face-down cards even though you don't access anything? This probably only matters if you play bad IDs (Industrial Genomics) like I do.
    Yes, I know all the rules for that scenario because we had a large discussion about all the possible scenarios amongst the NY runners.
  • My friends from my old weekly game group are all fairly hardcore in their tabletop gaming, so I expect them to read the rules, but I did shed a symbolic tear of pride when I noticed that at least two people from my more casual circles will now immediately ask for the rulebook once the explanation is done, so they can thumb through and read some passages for themselves.
  • Yeah. It's a good habit. I was going to play Grand Austria Hotel so I read the rules ahead of time. I was half paying attention while the teacher was teaching the other 2 people. They gave me shit for not paying attention so I taught the rest of the game to them without the rule book. Showed them, I did.

    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*
  • Do the food convention. There's so much about food history, innovation, food trends, food photography/framing, and food science that you guys could talk about wonderfully. Especially when you get into foods that can be multi-utilized like apples or corn. (Or Almonds, in the case of baking. Have you tried macarons? That shit is Level 60 Difficult to Make)
  • It appears that Metatopia talked about this topic this past weekend.

  • I agree with the Glory to Rome rules being a good benchmark.
    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.
  • The number of indie RPGs that have super rough rules language because the authors clearly cared more about their bullshit settings saddens me greatly. You can seriously tell in a lot of these things that they worked out the rules in the same file that eventually became the final draft for publication. It is not hard to make a game whose rules are clear and easy to follow. Pretty much just don't do that.

    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.
  • I'm impressed you guys got through that whole show without a single "fuck you I broke the rules, you broke the rules....rules....rules"
  • It appears you have apt timing since this was shown to me as of today.

  • edited November 2015
    FIX protocol, the game. It's a CTF. It's not out yet. It'll be at starfighters.io.
    Post edited by Starfox on
  • I'm impressed you guys got through that whole show without a single "fuck you I broke the rules, you broke the rules....rules....rules"

  • So this is part two to the video I posted earlier.



    If nothing else if someone where to Google this forum thread they will get plenty of I fromationnon this subject.
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