“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” –Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Frenchman, airmail pioneer, World War II pilot, and author of The Little Prince.
Simplify, Don’t Add
When I’m referencing “simple games” I’m specifically discussing games that are simple, but have some depth to them. I prefer to design simple games – games that are fundamentally simple in rules, though not in strategies.
That said, simple doesn’t meant the rules are transparent; that is, games that are easy to see how to play well. A simple game can be deep, and gameplay depth is what I want in most games. Simplification of rules also makes it easier for players to deal with the mechanics, and is usually desirable. But here I’m focused on simplification to solve design problems.
The Complexity Problem
It’s common for designers to start with something simple but keep adding things to it, until (we hope) they realize that they have weighed the game down too much and need to go back to being simpler. When I see a problem in my design, I try to find a simple solution rather than add something to the game, but too many designers end up adding more and more to “fix” a problem. Those additions can eventually make a system rules heavy. You’ve often heard of the acronym KISS (“Keep it Simple, Stupid!”) and that applies here, though I prefer not to imply designers are stupid for not making things simple.
In role-playing games, a game master has to know the rules often better than the players, and thus complexity means more cognitive load for the GM. The more rules there are, the more the GM has to learn and remember, the more room for “rules lawyers” and squabbles over rules. Mastery of the game becomes much more challenging.
Consider combat in Dungeons & Dragons. What started out as combat highly complicated by weapon modifiers (there was an entire chart dedicated to Speed Factor for each weapon, potentially changing turn order), was gradually to a much simpler system: hit points, a to hit roll, and a damage roll. Other systems had even more complicated combat, including hit locations, armor absorption, even defenders rolling to block an attack.
This is not to say that D&D combats are necessarily simple. But the game has streamlined the core mechanics to allow complexity during the game itself, both on behalf of the GM and players with their multitude of options. This spreads out decision-making so a player’s proficiency in the game is not solely reliant on understanding the rules; a fighter can just swing to hit, while a wizard can use a mechanically complex spell, and both players hopefully have fun in the same game despite their different understanding of the rules. Core simplicity allows layers of gameplay for players with levels of experience with the rules.
How to Simplify
So how do you simplify a game? I discuss this at length in my book Game Design.
First you must prioritize the elements of the game in order to decide what’s least important. Make a list of the prominent elements of the game, say about 20 things. By the time you’ve done that, you may realize that there are elements you can leave out, thus simplifying the game. If not, then you need to break them into four priority groups, from top to bottom.
If you have active playtesters you can ask them to do this, or even to make the list of elements in the first place, so that you can see what they think is important. When you finish, you’ll know that the fourth group of rules are the targets for elimination, while the other groups can be considered for simplification less urgently.
If there’s a specific problem to fix, the groupings can help you decide how much or how little you want to change a particular element of the game. Presumably the most important elements are the ones you should be wary about changing, if the game is otherwise in good shape. In any case, harmony should to be one of your guides.
In the next article we’ll discuss some ways of achieving simplicity.
Your Turn: How simple do you prefer your role-playing game systems?
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