Design and Legacy Systems

Continuing the theme of design inspired by Apple's designers, Apple put out a video describing the reasoning behind the decisions they made behind the new Mac Pro notebook with retina support. You can watch the video over on Apple's side on the product page, but one statement stood out more than the rest.

They talked about throwing out support for legacy items, and redesigning the notebook with a balance of power and lightweight form. They threw out the DVD drive, a Firewire port, the IR sensor, and a bunch of other stuff so they could concentrate on what they wanted:

• Retina Screen
• CPU/GPU
• SSD
• Battery Life
• Lightweight and Thin

The ports were kept to the minimum, they made a next-gen no-noise cooling system, and kept the weight and thickness down to a minimum. There were trade-offs, for sure, but they wanted to make a next-gen notebook, and by all counts, they made an impressive machine.

Apply these principles of design to roleplaying games. You would start the process by asking, "What is important to pen-and-paper gamers?" In my thoughts, they would be:

• Ease of Play
• Creating Worlds
• Customizability
• Character Builds
• Lightweight and Thin

Games deriving from DnD3 and 4, such as DnD4 and Pathfinder are clearly heavyweight games which support every legacy spell, magic item, character build, feat, and power from previous editions. In 4th Ed's case, the system itself spans an entire bookshelf, with a computer program (with patches)  needed to build characters. Both are extremely heavyweight games, following the 'more is better' design mantra. If we just put every legacy VGA, Serial Port, USB 1, 2, and 3 port, mic ports, video out, HDMI, etc - this will be the ultimate laptop. You literally get roleplaying games like Homer Simpson's car, with so many options and comforts the entire design crashes under its own weight.

SBRPG 1.0 was guilty of this too, the game was as large as a phone book. Part of the reason is the game was so expandable, and was meant to cover everything. Part of the solution of this is the Internet, and making that expansion material available online, instead of in the book. Apple talks of moving your data to the cloud, and data for roleplaying games should be free and move online.

Still, there is a larger issue with making the core game simple, stripping out every unneeded subsystem and streamlining the game into a 64-page work of art, like the old TSR box games. This little book is all you should need to play - and understand. The cost of learning and maintaining rules for edge cases and once-in-a-lifetime events better ruled by a referee on the spot is too great, and leads to bloat and collections of books filled with rule after unused rule.

Nobody tells today's game designers, "You write a rule, you have to support it later." Writing games is a lot like writing computer code, and the amount of bugs increases exponentially the more and more lines of code you write. Some games are so large they are unsupportable, and the set of rules as written will never be understood by one person. Being able to understand a game's rules in your head is a critical support item, and something all games should strive towards.

I dream of the day where the next version of DnD is simple like the old boxed games, though it will probably never come. The next best thing is to replace the need for such a heavy game, and build a better mousetrap - or notebook.