Ultrablamtacular!

I promised a post about emergent complexity, and this, it turns out, is that post, even though the nightmare I was facing seems to have been at least temporarily averted. 

I started designing this game with a goal of utter simplicity. I eliminated every extraneous item I thought I could – and not just gingerbread like classes, but things that some see as the core of gaming systems, like scores and ratings. I got character creation down to producing a few English sentences. I had one mechanic and one table.

Every rule I’ve added has been added for a valid reason – to directly address something that came up in play or to produce an effect I desired in the game. Yet each new rule has moved the system away from the goal of utter simplicity. More than that, each rule created interactions with other pre-existing rules, many times in ways I didn’t even consider until I started trying to spell out the particulars of the new rule in detail.

I’m a mild-mannered software engineer by day, and this is the sort of thing one sees all the time in programming. Layers and threads of complex interaction built one simple addition at a time turn something clean and simple into something labyrinthine and incomprehensible.

I began to understand that if I had n rules, then adding one more created n interactions at the very least, because some of those interactions would require another rule. But I needed more rules, because the existing ones weren’t getting everything done. So, I gritted my teeth and implemented the required new rules. And their interactions. And the additional rules they required. And their interactions…

In the last playtest, there were so many new interactions that even I was swamped by them – I could no longer comfortably hold the ruleset in my head. I was in trouble, and I knew it. I feared that my beloved system that was supposed to toss out all of the unnecessary cruft accumulated over the three decades of roleplaying was going to end in up a massive disaster – like the FBI’s Virtual Case File project.

It was that experience that drove me to stop and write a rules summary, as I mentioned before. I suspected that I was on the verge of a sort of rules singularity, that all the spreading and branching and speciating of rules was about to end, and it would all fall back into simplicity and order if I could just get a good look at them all in one place.

And it did.

It was incredibly gratifying to see the multiplicities of special cases, conditional phrases, and one-off systems collapse into a cleaner form much closer to my original vision, yet lacking none of the power of the more complex version. Phew.

At the next playtest, I’ll have the summary available for myself and all players. But more important than that, I think I can comfortably hold the entire ruleset in my head again. And that’s what makes it quick and intuitive to play and to run.