In his essay “System Does Matter,” indie role-playing game (RPG) theorist and designer Ron Edwards argues that GMs waste precious time tweaking various game systems to meet the needs of their players instead of using a system that works for them out of the box. This essay served as a revelation for GMs trying to impose second-by-second combat simulation upon players more interested in dramatic story-telling, and it coincided with a vast proliferation of $15 digest-sized indie RPGs, each featuring a different set of rules for a specific setting or theme.
While some of the variations between indie games probably do improve the chances of achieving the game’s stated goals, many of the differences are meaningless. Do you roll one die or many dice? Do you add the results or pick the best one? Are you describing your characters with cliches, traits, qualities, or catch phrases? Are there modifiers and target numbers or is every roll opposed? Do you call those little counters that represent some meta-game economy “bennies” or “points”?
Many of these indie games are quite similar in the areas that actually matter. The table below summarizes these key shifts.*
Prevalent Shifts in Indie RPGs
|
Aspect of Game |
Traditional |
Indie |
|---|---|---|
| Resolution of | Tasks | Conflicts |
| Authorship by | GM, Pre-Game | Players, In-Game |
| Session Content | Combat, Physical Detail | Character Development, Moral Choices |
| Character Creation | Quantitative | Descriptive |
If the best parts of indie RPGs are all basically the same from game to game, it seems to waste more of the GM’s time to expect her to learn a different system for every theme/setting/goal. The old days of just tweaking a few (or even many) rules in D&D or GURPS to up the “pulp” feeling or adding in a couple elements to enhance the “horror” of a game seem a far cry from the growing shelf of small press rulebooks in the indie GM’s library. Why not use one simple system that collects the common elements of indie RPGs, and then add a couple key tweaks to establish the thematic atmosphere so important to indie games?
While a number of free generic systems exist, not even the most cutting edge ones manage to fully incorporate all the above trends. That’s the idea behind MULRAH, a new indie RPG that you can download for free from my Other Explorations page. MULRAH collects and synthesizes the best innovations from free generic games like FATE, PDQ, and Active Exploits and then adds the indie elements they are missing, like conflict resolution and player narrative control.
* See the Mighty Atom for a more comprehensive list of innovations that I found well after writing this post.
Having playtested MULRAH a couple times, I’ll admit I can see Edwards’ point more clearly now. Although many of the shifts indie games make are similar, how they make these shifts vary, and those variations are very important to the feel of the game. What kind of conflicts will the story focus on? How much and what kind of authority do players have over the story? Neither FATE nor PDQ, the primary inspirations for MULRAH, make the shift from task to conflict resolution, and player authority, though greater than in traditional games, is still quite constrained.
[...] Edwards Is Right: System Does Matter 1 11 2009 In my last post, I proclaimed that, despite Ron Edwards’ argument that “System Does Matter,” an indie [...]