originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/767541...
every so often you see a conversation on tumblr that goes like this:
- based story game enjoyer: D&D is a limiting game because of xyz design assumptions.
- cringe D&D fan: actually I changed these assumptions by editing the game to fit my group’s needs. it works pretty good.
- story game chad, closing in for the kill: have you considered playing the perfectly designed game for your scenario that surely exists out there in the indie game milieu? you wouldn’t have to homebrew. you’d be having better fun.
- foolish and wrong D&D incel: but I am already having fun with “modified D&D” and I don’t particularly see a need to do that thing you said.
- wise story game sage, a single tear rolling down their perfectly sculpted face: do you not see that defending D&D, the product printed by Hasbro Inc., by pointing out that you can modify it, is self-defeating? tragic. there is no hope for these people.
42069 notes
along such lines, i saw someone today refer to homebrew in TTRPGs pejoratively as ‘unpaid game design’ and like. my fucking god guys. i don’t love D&D-as-printed either but you’ve lost the plot.
not only is it good to modify the games you play and make them your own, it is inevitable. nobody ever plays TTRPGs exactly ‘by the book’, it’s always filtered through the dynamic of the group. yes, even in those games that literally tell you exactly what to say like the quiet year or whatever.
you will ignore rules and guidelines. you will put your own interpretation on the wording of this or that rule. you will develop your own rhythms and at some point, yes, you can, will, and should change the rules to better fit whatever you’re doing with the game.
the designer may throw up their hands and say “you are no longer playing Sorcerer By Ron Edwards, you are playing some other game! you’re messing up my perfectly tuned mechanism!”
let them. it’s an understandable frustration, perhaps, but once the game is in the hands of the players, the designer has had their say.
play the game you want to play, even - especially - if you have to invent it. use whatever tools you find useful to help you get there - whether that’s a printed RPG book, a blog post, a memory of another game, a story that inspires you. maybe you want to take some existing and familiar system, such as PbtA, and adapt it - awesome (I reckon 95% of indie game designers pretty much do this). maybe you want to start from scratch and make a bespoke system for that one story - also awesome.
‘this book requires a lot of work to adapt into something decent’ is a fair criticism. ‘nobody even plays this game by the book, so it’s a bad game’ is dogmatism. what game do they play? how do they learn to play it? what function is the book providing in that game? if you want to criticise a game, you need to talk about actual practice. there can be plenty to criticise there, for sure. but that’s where you gotta start.
and sure, if someone wants to design a game, particularly to print, I would definitely recommend they look beyond D&D for inspiration. there are some really fucking cool and creative indie games that come up with wild ways to approach ‘making up a story through a game’ that I’d never have imagined. very often it’s fun to follow a designer’s frame and discover something new.
but don’t make a fucking religion of it lmao.
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