When I'm not writing science fiction I write roleplaying games, and I've also designed a couple of card games. As a result, I think about game rules more than most people.
Most games have simple, highly artificial mechanics. You have to assemble a certain set of cards, or eliminate your opponent's pieces by moving your own in highly constrained ways, or move around a board exchanging play money for properties.
The games I like to write — and play — have more complex mechanics which try to emulate some version of reality. What do I mean by "some version of reality?" Well, tabletop wargames, and their mutant offspring tabletop roleplaying games, originally tried to be as "realistic" as possible. Some of the wargames tried to model every aspect of commanding a military operation, down to the minutiae of logistics and morale.
In roleplaying game circles there were tremendous arguments about the lethality of gunshot wounds or sword-cuts, and whether longbows or crossbows should do more damage. Possibly the ultimate example of obsessive realism in roleplaying games is the landmark GURPS system from Steve Jackson Games, which promised complete accuracy, in-depth research, and accurate simulation. It could then serve as the common platform for games in a variety of settings, from an alternate-history Steampunk Europe to future Mars.
However, even as realistic game mechanics were reaching their apogee in the early to mid 1980s, there was a revolution in roleplaying going on. Games like Call of Cthulhu and the Star Wars Roleplaying Game from West End Games abandoned the idea of accurately modeling the "real world" in favor of simulating the reality of a fictional setting. In the real world people don't go mad when they see something bizarre and unnatural, but in Call of Cthulhu characters could lose "Sanity Points" from encounters with unearthly monsters — because that's what happens to people in Lovecraft stories. In the real world being an ace airplane pilot doesn't make you a good race-car driver, but in Star Wars both were controlled by your "Mechanical" ability — because in the Star Wars universe, being able to fly a cropduster means Luke is an expert space fighter pilot.
In short, designers began to realize that the game mechanics should enable players to do the things which are the reason they are playing the game in the first place. If you're playing a "swashbuckling" game of swordplay and derring-do, then witty banter and acrobatic stunts should be a key part of sword fights — which means that the rules should not penalize characters for trying to do other things while fighting.
A corollary of that principle is that characters will wind up doing the things that the game has rules for. If your game has a 50-page section on combat and one paragraph about social interaction, the players will try to solve most problems with violence.
When Kenneth Hite wrote his masterful GURPS: Cabal supplement he included an enormous amount of new rules on how to cast magic spells; as he put it in his designer's notes, he wanted to make magic rituals as detailed and complex as shooting a gun in GURPS. The expanded magic rules meant players would put in the effort, getting their characters into mystically-significant places on auspicious dates to cast their spells, instead of just rolling dice to fire them off. When the rules are detailed, players know this is important stuff and pay attention.
The creators of the James Bond 007 roleplaying game from Avalon Hill understood that principle very well: the game devotes as much space to gambling, car chases, and seduction as it does to fighting. The rules tell the players what they should expect to do.
My roleplaying work has all been setting and sourcebook creation, with rules devised by others. But my card games for Zygote Games were my own invention. Since Zygote Games's mission is to prove that educational games need not be lame, I made it a point to couple the game mechanics tightly to the reality of the subject of the game. In Bone Wars the players are taking the roles of paleontologists, so they do the things paleontologists do: collect fossils, make reconstructions, and argue with each other in the scientific journals. In Parasites Unleashed the players control parasites, going through complicated life cycles to grow, mate, and reproduce. In both cases the rules reflect the reality of the subject, so that by learning the game the players learn something about real science.
So when creating a game, remember that the rules define reality, not the other way around. They tell the players what they can do, and thereby inform them what they should do. Your game mechanics should be linked tightly to "reality" (real or fictional) of the things the characters or players will be doing.
And next time I'm going to explain why all this may be irrelevant.
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