An Argument for Crunchier Games

The great tool of creation is the knife; do we cut too much?

Ages ago, I made a post arguing for bigger, better games. Give that a read if you want to have a little companion piece to go alongside what I’m talking about here.

For the past 5-10 years, the ‘discourse’ has led many people to think that the only functional, enjoyable game is a smaller, more open-ended, less strictly codified one. Games with 1-2 pages of rules, a rebellion against anything that might result in a ‘build’ or a ‘meta,’ or incredibly narrow avenues of play, have become the go-to for many indie designers.

And why not? We’ve got the likes of the O/NSR darling Into the Odd from such drastic strivings for minimalism, along with its children Cairn and Knave (among many others), each delicate in their approach of forging their own direction while planting their feet firmly in the shadow of their shared ancestor.

On the other side of the spectrum are story games, where the objective becomes about the players telling a good story versus the characters “earning” or “uncovering” a good story (in so much that a group of non-story game characters takes the story “as is” without a lot of input from the players regarding how the story plays out). For the Queen, Fall of Magic, and Lasers and Feelings are good examples.

When you take a bird’s eye view of what I believe are these two big tents in the indie space, you start to notice that at their core, they have more in common with each other than differences:

• They both care about the story of the game being a collaborative effort rather than the bulk of work being performed by a game master or similar role.

• They prefer a more minimal approach to systems and mechanics instead of crunchier ones and an extensive reference to rules.

• “Storytelling” is accounted for by the very nature of the rules.

Where they diverge is in how the story is told. Story games prefer the players to be the judges of the story, which is then told through the characters and world, whereas O/NSR games prefer the characters to be responsible for how the narrative unfolds. The IRL players (including the GM) are surprised about what happens in play.

Narrative games, for lack of a better word, exist between story games and the O/NSR. These games exist squarely at the intersection of what both games expect from their players and the characters created for them. Games like Blades in the Dark and other PbtA hacks fill this space, along with basically any game with “story points” or an equivalent.

These games diverge from story games because they aren’t strictly bound by whatever the players feel is a good story—they enforce a mechanical crunch that wrests some control of the story from the players back to the characters. However, they retain some control for the players and don’t leave everything strictly to chance, often granting them some bennies that allow them to adjust for unintended results in play.

As an aside, you may agree or disagree with the definitions of the terms I’ve used so far. I personally feel (in direct contradiction to many peers and God) that we need some better codification of terms in the TTRPG hobby so that people understand what each other are talking about.

I think a lot of people have kneejerk reactions to classification because they either (optimistically) want to prevent someone from having to read a textbook to understand the hobby or (realistically) don’t want to fall prey to the classic xkcd problem.

But in either case, I don’t think the solution is to just fucking not do it at all. That feels woefully inadequate. So you’ll have to make do with my definitions and just go from there - at least for the sake of this post.

What does any of this have to do with big or small games?

For starters, smaller games purposefully leave many questions unanswered so that the players can determine what makes sense for their group. Sure, there may be guidelines as to how to approach a prompt or Oracle result or whatever, but by and large, these are guidelines in the loosest sense; “tips” might be a better word for them.

Because things are held loosely and undefined, the rules naturally get smaller and lighter. That’s not a bad, unintended consequence - it’s the natural and intended outcome.

Looking at O/NSR games, you see similar results from different approaches. You often get a fairly airtight set of exploration rules that help you track time in a dungeon, but spells are written in a way that requires a bit of conversation between the players and the GM.

This tradeoff often echoes throughout the rest of the rules — only what you will do the most is strictly codified. This is doubly so because one of the cornerstones of the O/NSR approach is to stop looking at your character sheet and start thinking critically about the problems your character faces. This will, like story games, naturally result in smaller rulesets.

But there is another path. One darkly tread by fools and bewitched with madness and hate:

Mechanically crunchy games, or as we’ll be calling them from now on, System Games.

If the O/NSR is character-focused and Story Games are player-focused, system games are system-focused (wow!). Games in this category are vast and diverse, but you’ve likely heard of them. Burning Wheel is one such game, as is Ars Magica.

But the biggest ones you definitely know are Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, I’m not going to defend D&D because:

1. It doesn’t need that

2. It’s not the point of this post

3. It illuminates a problem I find with these types of games that leads to why I think most people find system games inaccessible and develop a dislike for these big games as a whole:

Most of the shit in all the books, across most editions, is pointless. This is especially egregious in 5E.

Yes, technically, you can follow their rules for social encounters, but I’ve literally never met someone who does. Similarly, as the rules describe, you can track material components for your spellcasters, but there’s no meaningful way to actually do that in the rules as written.

D&D, particularly 5E, plays so fast and loose with what is mechanically SUPER IMPORTANT that it often whips past the things meant to support those mechanics:

• There are rules for exploration, but not for tracking time in a way that makes sense.

• There are rules for crafting, but not for what you literally need to make a thing other than money and time.

• There are rules for all the classes, but rarely anything mechanically distinct enough to make a class feel robustly different from another (looking at you, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard).

The game desperately wants to be about the system while pretending it’s the world’s best RPG for telling long-lasting stories. It attempts to have and eat its cake and own all means of production and sale. And these are HUGE books - 300+ pages! But it’s 300+ pages of crunch in all the wrong places.

Most fans of D&D will tell you the new edition isn’t nearly as bad as the previous one. But that seems hardly the point when it’s still a mess of choices that don’t make enough of a difference to feel worth the trouble. Then the goalposts shift, and the argument becomes about how most of the rules presented in the book are ultimately optional, but that feels barely different than saying, “Just homebrew it.”

If we’re stooping low enough to use the Oberani Fallacy, I think we’ve missed the forest for the trees.

This leads me to the point of this whole thing, nearly 1500 words later: systems complexity should be intricately tied to the setting AND the type of characters being made for the game being run. If your game is about people surviving in a post-post-apocalyptic magical setting where the world is dying, everything in the game should wrap around that central premise.

I firmly believe that crunch on its own isn’t bad — it’s probably largely a good thing! The problem stems from boring, consequence-free rules that only take up time rather than significantly altering play. To use 5E as an example, entire chunks of the game, the rules dedicate 40+ pages to don’t matter past Level 10 (things like backgrounds, gold, certain magic items, adventuring gear, etc.).

And I think it’s because the biggest example of a systems-focused game is effectively divorced from the setting (and has been for nearly two decades). This leads many new designers to one of two conclusions: either this is how big, crunchy systems are designed, or big, crunchy systems just aren’t worth the effort.

In the game I’m working on, Ädamír, my goal has always been to make a massive tome of a project where everything in that book is relevant to what a GM or player would want or need in this specific setting. It isn’t meant to be a system in which you run different settings, nor is it meant to be a setting you lift and run a different system through. The two are intrinsically tied.

Things like specific languages you can learn (along with the benefits and detriments to doing so), the specific types of spellcasting (along with who you learn them from, which factions they align you with, and how they long-term affect you and the setting alike), the classes you end up choosing (that are each asymmetrically designed from one another), and much more are going to be the cornerstones for the game.

I already have up to 10 appendices that reference coinage, various types of equipment, vocations, attunements (magic skills), proficiencies, and more.

A lot of people won’t like that, and that’s okay. I don’t think everything needs to be for all people. And at the end of the day, I’m writing this because I want to, and I feel compelled to see every nook and cranny of what’s possible there. I’m making the game I want to play, not the game I’m trying to sell. In terms of design, I’m trying to produce a game where the crunch makes sense and is compelling enough to want to deal with.

Next time, I’ll discuss a few examples of what that looks like in Ädamír and how I think it further merits the need (or maybe just my need) for bigger, crunchier games. But for today, I just wanted to express what I think might be the biggest reasons for not enjoying the crunch — and why I think we can solve those problems easily.

Thanks for reading!

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