One Page Rules

https://www.onepagerules.com/

To me, if a company pisses you off, you leave. I was watching my YouTube channels yesterday and came across a massive outcry of Warhammer 40K players moaning that their entire armies, ones they paid good money for, painted, and played with for years, were banned from official and store play. You buy into that brand, and they sell you things they then get to take away, which is what that company does; this is not new.

Then I see people saying, "Well, we will just go to One Page Rules!"

We will!

I warn you!

See my foot out the door?!

I did not know this existed. An open, 3D-printing-friendly, DIY tabletop wargame community that looks and feels like the classic D6 wargame systems played in hobby shops? You can bring in any model, even 30-year-old plastic Heroquest figures, and have a good time?

And my mind instantly clicked into the mode, "Why aren't you supporting this?"

This can't be used as a threat to make a bad-behaving company do good since it will never work. Walk away en mass like the OSR and do your own damn thing.

Gaming YouTube loves complaining. D&D YouTube is the same thing. They take abuse from billion-dollar companies, complain, and monetize that into cash. They take that cash, buy more of the same, support the abusers, and repeat the cycle. And they sucker you into watching. It is too much fun to see people bitching about hobbies.

But there comes a point when you realize you have wasted too much of your money and too much of your life you will never get back on stupid outrage and supporting companies that bleed you dry.

Great, supportive, community alternatives exist like One Page Rules.

They give away 3D-printer STL files! If you had a 3D printer, you could join the fun and print your armies! That is cool, and it is community-supportive! You could even do your own thing, make your own 3D models, print your own armies to paint, and give them stats in the game. You can even sell or give away your STL files.

Ever want a reason to get into 3D printing?

Here is your chance. Spend your money on that instead of 50-dollar blister packs.

And your 3D prints can be turned into cash.

Could I make a bunch of cool, dirty-dog, 3D-printed motorcycle bikers, give them tiny plastic guns and armor, and play a war game with others? Yes. No company tells me, "Your models aren't supported; sorry, you can't play with other people."

Some companies exist to abuse people, and some people are happy to give them all their money.

The OSR is a beautiful place.

Open Gaming is also fantastic.

Stop accepting the abuse, take your toys, save your money, and walk away. Don't sign up for subscription services to play your game.

And stop buying into this dumb, moronic, YouTube outrage clickbait. All you are doing is supporting the abusers and those who profit from them. Play OPR or OSR, put those games on YouTube, ignore the abusive and clickbait side of the hobby, and be a positive force in the world.

But I get it—there is no money in doing OPR YouTube! Warhammer is where the money is! YouTubers just flock to where the views are. Well, that is also dangerous. It breeds negativity and hate and supports an abusive cycle that becomes impossible to break away from. The major gaming communities on YouTube, Magic the Gathering, Warhammer, and D&D are becoming so toxic that the entire platform quickly becomes a worthless hate-fest of anger and negativity.

I am unsubbing from 5E channels and moving to better hobbies. The same is happening to my Warhammer and MtG subscriptions. The negativity is dumb and a waste of time. YouTube is killing tabletop hobbies.

And there are better, more positive hobbies than the ones talked about there.

Wargames: Talking Cheese

I watched BattleTech YouTube videos, and I came across a few that started talking cheese. And I saw this in Car Wars, starfighter games, Starfleet Battles, and it is a phenomenon that is especially common in wargames where you can design units.

You can design units to cheese the game mechanics, that is, to take advantage of the rules.

And then, when you talk cheese, you try to make those exploits make sense in reality. Especially if the designs are not even militarily practical or make any sense. Let's take the heaviest weapon in the game, put it on the lightest vehicle or mech we can manage, give it a few token points of armor, and field dozens of them when a scenario calls for a balanced force.

Who needs 300 tons of battle mechs in a scenario when you could have 30 ten-ton armored cars with lasers? Just swarm the other side with tons of cheese, multiple attacks by the buckets full of dice, and then say, "If the rules let me do it, this is a viable tactic."

There would be no need for battle mechs in this universe if that was a viable tactic.

Everyone would be doing it.

BattleTech needs a little suspension of disbelief for the universe to work. Given what we know today? Find them with drones and hit the slow, lumbering behemoths with laser-guided artillery shells. Also, in our endgame BattleTech campaign, we did just that, gave up on mechs, and designed cheap ground vehicles one side could field and lose dozens of and watched the mechs get picked apart with massed fire and artillery.

Yes, they were vulnerable to motive hits, but with this many and this cheap, who cares?

You can hide an AFV in a destroyed house or in a group of trees, while a mech is hard to conceal - and it needs to keep moving to survive. And due to the number of units involved, we could use maneuver and send a force around and hit them from the rear while still keeping them engaged on the front flank. Tons of cheap artillery were deadly.

The games were also unfun and slogged to play.

But we "won."

On a side note, some wargames are designed around the cheese tactic of swarming a big unit, and they do it exceptionally well. Steve Jackson Games' Ogre is probably the best example. But this game is designed around this concept, and it is a blast to play that giant, lumbering, slowly disintegrating monster as it trundles towards its objective. It is also a blast to play the defenders and futilely try to stop the beast in its tracks, knowing you can't destroy the beast outright, but target its tracks and try to slow it down or stop it and leave it as a monument of death that could still kill you if you got near.

BattleTech is different.

Yes, you could take a pickup truck, mount one massive long-range rocket, and send it into battle in the real world. Irregular forces do that. But no professional army does. That does not fit into any modern army's order of battle or tactics unless it is an irregular force, and you don't see defense contractors selling them. BattleTech has this code of honor and chivalry, and it also assumes a more ordered and substantial structure to house forces and mercenary forces.

Most military forces field balanced units that can deal with various threats in war. You can undoubtedly cheese the other side if you have perfect knowledge. But these units are often operating in hostile territory, without great intelligence, and need to be able to deal with a variety of threats equally.

When setting up scenarios, I tend to stay away from cheese units and tactics and use the more BattleTech frame of mind and thinking. I want to be in the commander's shoes when making those deployment decisions. The games are typically more enjoyable, and I feel I am more playing in the real universe of mech warriors than I am on some tabletop, wondering how I can cheese the rules to win easily.

Easy to Design, Hard to Balance

I am reminded of some of the games that came out around the original AD&D game's creation, most notably Squad Leader and its successor, Advanced Squad Leader. Games back then existed in the age before personal computers, where the game's rules were written out almost like computer code:

• Run the game turn in phases
• Every rule is laid out in detail
• Structure of the rules was paramount to understanding them

They played like pen-and-paper versions of computer games, because, that is what they were. From Car Wars to Battletech, we had a whole generation of games which required players to run through turn phases, long lists of rules, and players acted more like human computers than players.

We haven't gotten away from this design philosophy much with today's games, especially with the d20-based games like D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, D&D 4, and D&D 5. To be fair, there are plenty of older games that fall into this mentality, such as Aftermath, Rolemaster, Runequest, Space Opera and many others. These are games which draw heavily on the "pen and paper computer game" design mentality, where players are more "computer code interpreters" than "game players."

Combat Conditions

Games need rules, but I feel I am getting to a point where enough is enough. Take, for instance, conditions in d20-based games:

• D&D 5 has about 15 conditions
• D&D 4 has about 16 conditions
• D&D 3.5 has about 24 conditions
• Pathfinder has about 36 conditions
• Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord have 0 conditions

These are all "specially defined rules conditions" which can potentially apply during combat, have special durations, effects, removal conditions, and special rules - in addition to special conditions applied by spells (charm, hold person, etc) or things like death. This is just one area of the game, as there are vast numbers of feats, powers, combat rules, movement rules, and other fiddly and complicated interlocking rules that control how players act and what they can do during a turn.

The more rules a game gives you, the slower it will run. In general, the thicker the book, the slower the game will play. These "big book" games are easy to design since you just keep adding rules and options, but in practice very difficult to balance, and very easy to break.

Old School Games

It is interesting to note there are no "special conditions" in the old-school games, beyond what spells did to you. They are, in general, simpler games where you do not have to worry about special effects being applied to you during a turn. There was a point in d20's history where the Magic the Gathering design philosophy took hold and numerous special conditions were added to the game.

It's like the AC and hit point system felt too abstract and realism needed to be added though the use of conditions to flavor combat, when the old-school games embraced the abstract nature of d20 combat and left things how they were. In an old-school game, if a goblin bonked you on the head, the referee could rule you were "stunned" and lost a turn - if that was important. Otherwise, AC, to-hit, damage, and hit-points were all that were needed to simulate everything that went on during combat - including the millions of possible conditions that could happen during a turn of battle.

Roll a "1" on damage during a turn in an old-school game? Maybe you were stunned, staggered, or weakened during that blow, who cares? Miss the to-hit entirely? Maybe you got knocked down that turn and got back up, who knows, make it up and go with the flow. It doesn't matter what happened during the turn, just the outcome of the roll.

AC and hit-points are intentionally abstract systems, like "money" or "property" in Monopoly. There is a simplicity and beauty in leaving them the way they are, and not over-designing "reality" systems on top of them. Really, once you add "realism layers" on top of abstract systems, all you do is show the weakness of the original underlying systems instead of making them work better.

"Play How You Want?"

Note that this discussion only applies if you want to play the game by the rules as written, any one of these games can be played "fast and loose" by omitting rules, but then again, you are not really playing the game at that point and taking advantage of rules that were written to give you the full experience of the game. A complicated game will always have the line "play however you want" in there because this is the only way the designers of these games have to control complexity, they need to tell players it is okay to omit rules to speed play.

Writing complicated games is easy, since all you have to do is keep piling rules, feats, conditions, special rules, new class structures, new powers, and more options onto the book. Writing a simple game is very hard, because you need to write rules that can handle a lot with a little.

Modern and Old-School Designs

Contrast these games with more modern designs, such as FATE or Savage Worlds. These two alone are very impressive designs, and make the d20-based games feel like flip-phones to play versus a smartphone - at least for our group. To be fair, D&D 5 did try to follow the more modern design philosophy and simplify, but for our group, we felt too much baggage (with specific and single-purpose feats and powers) was held over from the older rules to really place the game into the more modern design style.

Modern designs do a lot with a little. Old school games also did the same, but intentionally abstract away parts of the game which could slow things down. Balance exists in the simplicity of the design, and in universal rules. Special cases are handled through the referee. Are you tied up? You can't act but could struggle out of your bonds, maybe...referee's call. We don't need a restrained condition and a page of rules for escaping bonds, plus feats to support "escape artists," and spells that free people from ropes.

Big book games over-design everything and add every feature and whistle, like Homer Simpson designing a car. Modern designs simplify, and handle many things with a single mechanic, leaving the referee to handle special circumstances. A "gunfighter" in a big-book game needs a special class, powers for that class, feats for that class, and special rules for that class. A "gunfighter" in a modern design or old-school game is likely a skill at using guns and that's it, it is handled the same way as any other attack.

Modern games tend to be more streamlined and handle everything with unified mechanics. Old-school games typically handle one type of action under an abstracted mechanic. It is not uncommon for an old-school design to use parallel but different diced mechanics for different actions (d20 to-hits and d100 thief skills). A modern design would put those all in the same dicing mechanic and unify action resolution.

Great Article: Twilight Imperium Review

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/08/twilight-imperium-a-board-game-with-meal-breaks/

I love this article, especially the content of the "meet the players" section, and around this quote:

Once upon a time, after our first few games, Jim discovered the hard way that a player’s reputation, once lost, is not easily regained. After reneging on a few treaties and making dodgy promises not to invade planets, he soon realized that no one would trust him in subsequent games and ended up as a miserable pariah, a victim of the metagame.

Do you find a player's reputation and play-style in one game extends to later games? This is a fascinating subject, how a player's psyche not only determines strategy (in all play-thoughs), but also how other players treat him in future play-throughs. There are great descriptions of player types in here, the careful, the min-maxer, the long thinker, the dynamic player, the one-true-way player, and others. It is great stuff, and worth reading the article for.

Check it out, another great article today to ponder and sink your teeth into, especially if you are into game design.

Simulation at the Level of Detail

There's a section in Frank Chadwick's classic WW2 miniatures game where he recounts using a squad-level WW2 war game to simulate a massive Eastern Front battle. Squad by squad they played out the gigantic battle, and the by the end they realized the outcome did not reflect reality at all. The battle never came out that way, the squad level individual fights played out, and the entire game kind of fell apart under the weight of improbability.

You can imagine a game of this size, a massive amount of gaming tables, maps covering Poland and Russia, and literally thousands of counters or miniatures tracking every vehicle crew, LMG, engineer squad, field car, tank, and supply unit all being moved in hours-long turns in painstaking detail. Every battle for a farmhouse - simulated. Every meeting engagement on a road - simulated. Each battle for a forest or hedgerow - simulated. Every tank battle - simulated down to each shell fired.

Why didn't it come out just like reality? I mean, it should have, since each man-to-man engagement was handled in painstaking detail, and a result like the one that happened in history should have been the outcome, right?

Part of the outcome of this battle led Mr. Chadwick and his designers to simulate these battles in a larger scale, with larger company and corps level units. They realized that simulating large systems down to the smallest detail does not always provide the best reflection of reality. They found if the smallest unit was a tank company or section, they could get a better overall large scale simulation than if they worried about every gun's ammunition, every broken track, and every individual squad. They could write rules that handled larger groups and simulate the historical real-world happenings of these classic WW2 battles, so thus Command Decision was born.

Of course, we do all this by computer nowadays, so why are WW2 miniatures war game rules important? What does this have to do with tabletop roleplaying?

Because today's pen-and-paper designers still make the same mistakes.

Shouldn't a detailed sectional hit points system with hit locations, rules for slicing tendons, and medical trauma charts more realistically simulate medieval combat? Shouldn't an almost slow-motion martial-arts inspired combat system with half-second turns and action points laid out for every move of the arm, swing of a blade, and pull of the bowstring more accurately simulate personal combat?

If we can simulate that level of detail on a man-to-man scale, then we should be able to put twenty people on each side and get a near picture-perfect simulation of medieval combat, right? Especially with miniatures, where we can second-by-second track line-of-sight, force field-like attacks-of-opportunity, and arrow-by-arrow ammo counts. Spells have interlaced count-down casting times. Weapons have speeds and reaches. It should be perfect!

It often isn't, and again, the too micro level of detail breaks down, and you more feel like you are playing a miniatures gaming rules simulator than you anything remotely realistic. The game doesn't know if it wants to be battle chess, a simulation or reality, or a miniatures combat game. Many games try to be everything and fail at everything. Some adopt a "way of thinking" almost like a war-gaming ideology and shoehorn that mantra-like system onto every action, even if it doesn't fit or should be handled by the referee as a one-off without the rules.

You have to be careful with games that dive into too low level of detail, or that try to simulate reality at too granular a level. There will be tons of individual rules simulating how a dagger cuts through leather armor and how that wound affects movement based on hit location and it will look cool and feel great when it happens in game. It is the same thing as the small Russian squad on the Eastern Front holed up in a snow-locked farmhouse holding off an entire onslaught of German attacks, tanks, and aircraft, becoming the heroes of the Eastern Front. Those are cool moments in isolation (and the latter is a great small scale scenario), but in the context of a larger system, they take up too much time and attention from what should be a balanced and even attention of time and focus upon the large system being simulated.

If the game is about a story adventure, yes, a wounded leg may play into that, but are the rules around getting that wounded leg so heavy they take away from the larger story-based experience the designer wanted to focus on for the game? Are all the characters in the story walking around with wounded legs, hands, eyes, clavicles, sprains, pulled muscles, and bandages covering cuts so they won't bleed to death, and the king and queen of Storyville are sitting there wondering why this group isn't in the hospital because they are in no shape to find out who stole the king's crown? If the game is about intrigue, make it about intrigue, and there is a laudable design goal to de-emphasizing things in the rules that may take away from that experience.

You can't put everything in a game and expect it does everything well. Imagine Monopoly with tax forms, IRS requirements, local zoning ordinances specific to each color group, investment income, random events like hotel fires, slumps and building booms, random economic events, a stock market, union protests, a global economy, industrial development charts, WW2 breaking out, populist elections, political wheeling and dealing, and so many layers of detail that yes - this is how a real real estate economy works, and it should all be in there, right?

After all, a game without this level of detail that focused just on buying, selling, building would be seen as too simplistic and not worthy of a true real estate game, right?

No, that stuff doesn't belong, and the job of a good game designer often lies in saying "this is what my game is about" and cutting the cruft and "cool features" that worm their way in during design. "Too many cooks" is a real problem in game design, as is "the cook doesn't know what he wants" or "the cook is trying to copy the best features of several dishes."

It's a taco with Kung Pao chicken, refried beans, pizza sauce, wrapped in a hamburger, and wrapped in a spicy gordita with cheese melted on top.

You get games that are like that, and you get things like that at taco place. It looks great on the menu, but it is typically something you eat only once if you are crazy enough to buy in. Or you're so embarrassed you bought one you start defending it and selling it to your friends.

But seriously, there is such a thing as focus in game design, and games that know what they are trying to do and focusing every rule - from character design, combat, skill use, exploration, and interaction one that one activity and making the parts that matter...matter. They also eliminate the cruft, pointless small simulation, and unneeded detail, and focus on delivering the core experience in the best way possible. If this game is about dungeoning, then let's focus on dungeoning. If this is a storytelling game, let's deliver the best storytelling rules possible and cut out the rest.

Again, we go back to design. This is what makes great products, from cell phones to role playing games.