Bringing it Together

Everyone gets together around a table to game for different reasons, and there's no real rhyme or reason to which bits certain people prefer. There does seem to be this strange dichotomy that shows up in design though, and working with a couple friends of mine on a Savage Worlds setting and building some special rules for it kind of brought this out.

Now let me say first that I cut my teeth on AD&D. You know, the one with all the blue text and the knight. I'm not as aged as some gamers, but I started in early at 14 once Magic the Gathering became too expensive for my measly $30/wk paper route to sustain.

My main compatriot for this came in a bit later, 3rd edition D&D, and he was a big proponent of 4e.

We had a discussion about some of the designs I had for this setting, revolving around the concept of a character archetype who, in a rather Lovecraftian fashion, sacrifices some of their humanity for the sake of humanity, becoming a monster of sorts in the process. They would slowly go crazy, eventually becoming something nonhuman mentally as well as physically.

My fellow disagreed with this concept on a number of levels, but most interestingly was his use of "grognardy" to describe something that was unnecessarily hard for the sake of being hard. While I was falling in with a Call of Cthulhu mindset, he seemed to be coming at the design from D&D4e. At first I was offended, until I realized I actually want people besides me to play this.

Eventually we banged out a working design that was fairly well balanced (we're still testing at the moment), and difficult without being a heinous albatross around a character's neck. It's not anywhere near as difficult as I originally envisioned it, but it keeps the archetype as a viable choice. It was over the course of about a week that we scratched our heads over it, and the whole time I was now thinking of designing this thing with "is it fun?" in my head instead of "this fits the original concept". I added some portions in the gamemaster section of my document towards the ends of making things even more difficult, but they all remain suggested options and not RAW.

I found this meaningful because I think a lot of designers forget to try and make things more broadly fun, in the way that gamemasters occasionally treat plots like fenceposts, and they panic when things have gone off the rails. You have to move outside your comfort zone a bit, and try to find the common enjoyment instead of sticking to your "one thing."

Players, too, should keep this in mind. All too often we find people dragging their fetishes into games, or building "twinked" characters, and the ubiquitous brooding "lone wolf". Everyone wants some spotlight, but it shouldn't come at the expense of other's enjoyment.

Essentially, "what is fun for us?" Instead of "what is fun for me?"