The ideal TTRPG has no rules at all.
Any rule immediately obstructs the game.
Game design should seek to keep
the total number of rules as close to zero as possible.
We’ve been trying to get a game started and keep it going for a couple of years. We’re on attempt 3 and it seems to be working this time. Attempts 1 and 2 were undermined by unequal levels of player investment, and one obnoxiously self-absorbed player. From what I read online, these sorts of derailments are fairly common.
But struggling with these situations, and struggling to get a handle on D&D, has given me a chance to think about the nature of players, the Game Master, the game itself.
This is my own bias – I’m far more interested in the story than any rules. The sheer volume of rules, player options, expansions, etc, for D&D looks to me like a game design failure, not a success. You don’t improve your chess game by giving one of the pieces extra powers, or saying it can take two hits before removal. You improve by being a better player. Extra (as in excessive) stuff like levels, feats, bonus actions, magic items, don’t improve the game, they just give (players mainly) a way to keep going without getting better – instead of being better players they just overwhelm any challenges.
D&D is based on an acquisition model – players are actively encouraged to acquire more everything, become more powerful, and ultimately invincible. “Winning” D&D is about acquiring.
Acquiring stuff implicitly requires tons of rules to describe and govern the stuff. D&D also becomes about memorization, acquisition of information.
Acquisition of stuff is not inherently antithetical to good play, but it provides a way for players and GMs to focus on stuff instead of story. And D&D is designed from the ground up to encourage that.
The “game of imagination” provides so much stuff (rules, classes, feats, races, sub-classes, accessories, academies, multi-classes, items, etc, etc) that your imagination doesn’t need to do any heavy lifting at all. How true that is depends on the individual, the table dynamic and the GM’s campaign style. But the game itself is a tilted surface, wanting everything to slide towards a place where all you have to do is take what they give you.
It makes sense – they want to sell more expansion books, on-line game options, VTTs, licenced products, and all the other hundreds of consumer items you can buy. Hasbro would likely prefer that you mute your imagination and just buy more stuff, digital and/or real.
I’m interested in a game that asks you to work with what you already have – that imagination thing. Sure, you need a framework for a game to have consistency beyond a single instance of spontaneous playful engagement, like those unknown kids 200,000 years ago. But it should IMHO be designed to keep the game itself small. To put the burden of imagination on the GM and players – not on a game designer. Game designer makes the framework – the GM/players bring it to life. Game design 10%, GM/players 90%. More or less.
Where is this train of thought stopping? I’m not really sure, I’m just watching the countryside go by for now.