Dungeons and Rules Skinnerism

George and I were playtesting another round of his Project Delta fantasy miniatures game last night, and we ran across an interesting observation. For the uninitated, Project Delta is intended to be the ultimate BYOB fantasy miniatures game, and is cool in its own right, replacing the need for many tabletop miniature games, including DnD, Warhammer, and their cousins and extended relatives. More on that rules set later.

Up until now, Delta had been played on city maps, wilderness maps, open tabletops, and all sorts of outdoor locations. Last night's playtests focused on a group of adventurers captured by pirates, and forced to escape a dungeon. Everyone was locked in a central room, and the heroic escape began.

All of a sudden, strange rules arguments started appearing, and even minor actions became huge sticking points. The tight quarters of the dungeon intensified the need for rules covering even minor actions, like listening at doors, disarming guards, and what certain skills could be used for. The close-quarters fight increased the pressure on us to handle everything, write more rules, and make sure every ruling was fair and every situation covered by a rule. A giant pressure cooker had been put around the game, the one-turn-and-you're-dead environment placed a lot of stress on the rules, and the players involved.

Interesting.

I am reminded of B.F. Skinner and his studies of an environment on the role it has in modifying people's behavior. Up until last night, the rules were open and loose, the fights were on large open maps, and the rules could be fast and loose without too many problems. Take that same set of rules, and use it for close quarters battle in a tight dungeon, and all of a sudden you are writing rules for mundane actions, the success of which could be a life-or-death outcome. The intense environment changed the players (and monsters) behavior, and changed the rules we needed to handle those behaviors.

Shift focus to DnD and Pathfinder, and the huge volumes of rules with both games. Seeing what we went through last night, it is understandable these two games are filled with special case rules for all sorts of actions, condition lists covering dozens of maladies and environmental factors, feats covering hundreds of specific combat maneuvers, and all sorts of other minutia. The games seem like collections of years of specific events and special cases, rather than an overall vision and design.

DnD4 tried the 'new design' and rethink route, with pretty good success, but quickly mired down into minutia with dozens of expansion books. The original beautiful design was lost in a sea of expansion product, because the designers could not say no. I will go back to Apple and their design team, and Steve Jobs was once quoted as he was proud of all the things his team said no to, because it would shift the focus of the company, clutter the designs, and make the company a mess of services, ideas, and products.

Back to the dungeon playtest, and what did we do? Well, our rules held up quite well, and it highlighted the need to be clear on a couple sections, such as combat and skill checks. We decided to alter the scenario setup rules to make dungeon scenarios play more like the overland scenarios, and stick to the theme of the game better, instead of dragging down into a detailed man-to-man simulation. We are sticking to our core fun concept, and saying no to turning the game into a simulator.

We will see how things turn out.