People play games to be entertained, and most people don’t like to work for their entertainment. But one person’s work can be another person’s pleasure.
“A lot of people say, ‘Well, I like a challenge.’ I don’t like challenges. Life is tough enough without any challenges.” Jackie Gleason (a very successful comedian and actor, d. 1987)
Checkmate
When I was 15, I decided to “retire” (as I like to say) from playing chess. Not that I was an exceptional chess player! The point was that playing chess felt to me like too much work.
A lot of that derives from the centuries long study of chess. Most really good chess players have to memorize at least some of the myriad chess openings and read books about chess strategy. That was too much work for me to play chess well. World Champion Bobby Fischer advocated scrambling the back row of pieces, in the same way for each player (360 combinations), for each chess match, so that players had to think rather than rely on those centuries of study, to make the game more like a game, and less like memorization. (Fischer was a master of memorization, but also great at coping with new/unstudied situations.)
Similarly, nowadays I won’t play many video games because they feel too much like work; though in total I spend more time playing video games than tabletop games. I’m not averse to watching replays of video games where someone else is doing the work (which is often athletic, and I’ve never been fast with hand-eye coordination) and I get to see what happens and partake of whatever story is there. I’m a fan of “The Mighty Jingles” replays on YouTube.
In short, the level of work any entertaining activity requires likely varies by the individual. A little work is good — engagement with a medium can keep your attention — but too much work can sap the enjoyment right out of the experience. The reverse can be true too; some pasttimes can be so passive that they aren’t particularly engaging. As Roger Ebert said of the movie Terminator Salvation:
It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it.
So how does a game designer cope with the problem of too much work, whether from the interface or from the rules?
One Person’s Work is Another’s Pleasure
Hobby games involve a large number of diverse groups (target audiences in game designer parlance). A designer has to know what their target audience prefers.
In RPGs, and any sort of game for that matter, as the number of people playing the game type grows, the games tend to become simpler and involve less effort. Hardcore fans will dedicate themselves to a game, often the game master, but players might not. And if a game is to be successful, the easier it is for new players to join, the more likely it is other players will play. In short, a complicated game can be highly rewarding, but it is likely a smaller (and thus less profitable) audience.
We saw this with Dungeons & Dragons, which started out simple and then increased in complexity, reaching the pinnacle with Advanced, only to later be gradually slimmed down and codified to the Fifth Edition rules we know today.
Another way to put this: when a game hobby is relatively small, the players tend to be more active than passive. (See my articles, Active and Passive Players, Part 1 and Part 2). Role-playing games are different from most entertainment in that they require active participation – you can’t just simply watch or listen to fully participate in the game, like you can with a movie (though streaming media has demonstrated that there’s a market for watching/listening to people playing RPGs too).
Wargames vs. Storytelling
Related to this is the eternal dichotomy between “RPG as wargame” and “RPG as storytelling mechanism.”
We can see that wargames tend to require more active players than stories do. Conversely, narrative games require less work on the part of players and more on the part of the GM. Tactical and mechanical rulesets, on the other hand, tend to be significantly more complicated. This doesn’t mean you can’t have story in RPG as wargame; of course you can and do, but it means it’s hard to impose a story on the wargame players because they want to be active, in control of their fate, not relying on what the GM or a commercial adventure has cooked up.
Dungeons & Dragons in particular has struggled with the tension between the two types of gaming; it’s origins were always wargame roots, and indeed the original assumption was Chainmail was the default for larger-scale battles. And as an example, consider THAC0.
To Hit Armor Class 0 (THAC0)
The unofficial term THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class 0) method in AD&D is a solution to an interface problem. Pronounced THAK-oh, what THAC0 did was streamline the calculation of what result a player needed to hit when rolling an attack. The player only needs to know what his character’s “plus” was, and the GM only needed to know what was needed to hit.
THAC0 was not an official term in the core rules at first. The original rulebook Men & Magic had a chart (but no THAC0) as did the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide in 1979 in Appendix E: Alphabetical Recapitulation of Monsters. It listed each monster’s attack capability under a column called “To Hit A.C. 0”, but it was not abbreivated as THAC0 in the rules. THAC0 first made in appearance in tournament adventures in the 80s, but it wasn’t an official part of the core rules for AD&D until AD&D Second Edition, in 1989.
THAC0’s been around for decades, yet I still see people not using it when they play AD&D, taking more time as a result. This method should have been codified in the original rules, and the fact that it wasn’t means many players learned the game without it. Not using this interface or knowing about it doesn’t change how the game works. It just changes how people cope with the mechanics of playing it (interface) and do less work.
Play Hard
As a game designer, keep your eyes on both the interface and the rules themselves. I’ve adopted a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery as my motto, which helps avoid too much work from the rules and from the interface:
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” –
You should be working hard to avoid making the players work too hard to enjoy the game.
Your Turn: What tweaks do you make to your game so it’s less work and more fun?
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