The point of having the system before you play is just letting everyone know what to expect on the G part of RPG so they can focus on the R and the P. It kills all momentum to stop and ask, ‘so what system do we want to use’ in the middle of the game. No system is perfect, but it cuts out a lot of work to just pick one and roll with it, homebrewing over the few holes that show up.
This sounds like a personal hell to me.
I mean, it might work if your group is all kind of on the same wavelength to begin with. But if that’s the case, you could also easily start with a system you like and go from there instead of reinventing all the wheels.
A lot of people have only really played D&D and its close relatives. I like to describe that in this metaphor: Imagine someone who has only every seen the lord of the rings movies. They’ve watched them over and over, both cinematic and directors cuts. They know all the lore and all the minutia. And then they sit down to write their own movie. Maybe a sci-fi space mystery to change things up. And this movie? it has horses. Because movies always have horses, don’t they? They’re in like every movie. So when the detective is stuck in the burning theater, his buddy should ride in on a horse and save him.
So I 0%, maybe even some negative percent, want to have to sell a group on “RPGs don’t actually need six attributes” or “you don’t need to have separate rolls for to-hit and damage” for the first time in their lives.
Secondly, most people are bad at design. Sorry. It kind of follows from sturgeon’s law (“90% of everything is crap”). Most people don’t set out to make crap, but it happens anyway. Most people firing from the hip are just not going to make good systems. Especially if, as above, they’ve only ever really played one kind of game. So, no, I don’t want to deal with the guy who’s like “On a natural 1 you should drop your sword” who doesn’t realize that, because fighter types make a lot more attack rolls, they’re going to drop their swords way more often than you’d expect of the archetype. I am reminded of an unhappy time in an old, bad, D&D game where I fruitlessly tried to explain effective HP to the wizard. (Since D&D 5e stops counting damage at 0, there are some weird interactions between initiative, healing, and damage.)
Third, even if you avoid all of that, even if you have a group with a deep and wide knowledge of game design, you’re going to end up with an inelegant mess. Why does intimidating someone mean a simultaneous roll-off of increasingly large dice, but bluffing someone means drawing poker hands? Because those rules were added on different sessions, and Mike was really into poker and convinced people it would be cool. Wrestling someone you flip coins, but knife fighting you roll d4s. Sword fights use this complicated table Joe insisted would be fun, but magic is just a roll off. No thank you.
I’d rather just play Fate, which is already pretty loose about how to interpret conflict and consequences.
There was a whole phase in early “game design” where every game was basically D&D with a bit of a facelift here and there. Genuinely new games were few and far between (and are the celebrated games of the era now). Then the '80s happened and game design went all over the place with wildly creative ways of doing things happening (and like every wildly creative phase in any discipline, a lot of it was a really stupid direction to take things, so withered quickly on the vine).
Then this weird phase happened in the early '90s where people nobody had ever heard of or from came out of the woodwork to tout their “grand new RPG” that “solved all the problems of previous games” … and it was always just another variant of D&D. These were people who’d been playing (usually) AD&D for over a decade building up house rules and then deciding that they would publish these house rules as a “new” game system. And it was clear they’d never even once been in a game store, not to mention talking with other designers or playing other games, over their entire span. Because they would “solve” things by proudly proclaiming the number of classes they had so you could play the character you want. (One game had 114 classes!) Or how you could play any race and class in combination. Or, you know, things that hadn’t been an issue at all since the introduction of Runequest in 1978.
It was always so tragic. These games were amateur in the literal sense: the product of great love. A lot of time, effort, and money had gone into their publication. And they were doomed on impact because while they were, arguably, an improvement over AD&D (the king of the gaming castle at the time) they weren’t sufficiently good to be worth switching to. I had about 20, maybe even 30, of these games on my bookshelf just as a mute testament to what happens if you try to hit a market without even elementary market research.
Ah yes. I believe the term for that is “fantasy heartbreaker”. Fascinating history, really.
Yeah, that was the Forge clique’s term for it, but I try not to use their jargon.
But it was so weird that they popped up in the '90s. In the '70s it’s understandable. But with 15-20 years of good solid design to look back on, to come up with a slightly improved AD&D as “the ultimate game” was astonishing.
Given that almost no games other than D&D, Vampire (and perhaps other WoD games), and *maybe* Call of Cthulhu made it into general public awareness, and that indeed many people didn’t (and still don’t!) recognize that there is an actual category of analog games called “RPGs”, it’s not so weird in context.
I’ll note that the 90s is also when the fight over the term “RPG” between CRPGs and TTRPGs really started causing our hobby problems.
A couple years ago at a bar I was talking to a guy, and he mentioned he’d started playing DND. I went, “oh cool. Which edition?”
He said, “what?”. He didn’t know there were other editions. He didn’t know there were other RPGs. I think about this a lot and try to remember a lot of people aren’t really deep in the hobby. They show up once a week to play a game with their friends, and that’s about where it stops. Which is fine. Totally valid way to spend your leisure time. But very different than where I went.
But these games weren’t published by “the general public”. They were published by people in our hobby. Just people in our hobby who had somehow missed out on every game ever made since the publication of AD&D or AD&D2. I mean I know my general level of obsessive “I gotta know” is unusual, but I submit so is their degree of active avoidance of even basic human curiosity.
Not everyone “in our hobby” is actually deep into it like us, nor do non-D&D games have multi-million-dollar marketing machines so people outside of the inner circle actually understand that these games exist. And remember, this was before it was common knowledge that EVERYTHING has a community online. They might well have honestly thought that if it’s not advertised, it doesn’t exist, and therefore their game was totally the first competition for D&D EVAR (when it absolutely wasn’t).
I’m not sure how you could be in the '90s, walk into a game store to get your AD&D books, and not see at the very least the White Wolf books and Call of Cthulhu. And quite possibly a bunch of other smaller-press books. Even comic shops in the early to mid '90s had more variety and selection in RPGs than modern game shops¹ tend to have.
So there’s “not being obsessed” and then there’s “must be wearing some very heavy blinders”. And the people who published those AD&D fixes in the '90s had to have been wearing blinders with pinholes in them.
¹ In my Summer 2024 trip across Canada I made a point of visiting many game shops and they were shockingly almost all board games with a few minor D&D selections; like not even the core rules of D&D. Ottawa and Calgary were the only two places that had respectable RPG selections in some shops; Fandom II in Ottawa and the Sentry Box in Calgary. In the late '80s and early '90s even a cow town like Regina, Sasksatchewan had three game shops with decent RPG selection.
