Emergent Complexity
Kapoor thought a lot about game design last night and reflected on World in Flames. Even though it's a monster game that requires 4 square meters of playing space for the maps, comes with 1,400 counters in the basic game, and takes 40 to 100 hours to play depending on the optional rules one picks, the 4 rules systems (air, sea, and land movement & combat, and production) individually aren't that horribly complimasticated. Heck, the five-turn scenarios can each be played over the course of a lazy afternoon.
The complexity of WiF comes from the fact that each player is running one or more major powers' war efforts and economies, and must make strategic choices on what to build & where to send the units. The game's complexity emerges not from complicated rules but from simple - or at least straighforward - rules that interact in complicated ways, and offer the players lots of meaningful choices.
In comparison, consider Advanced Third Reich. Kapoor bought it in the hopes of having a detailed World War II game that one could play in a single day (after WiF Kapoor call this "a short game"). Kapoor read the rulebook and found that the rules went on and on and on and on...
Kapoor likes to be able to boil rulebooks down to handouts of a few pages, so that he can quickly explain things to people with whom he'd like to play the game. He did this with WiF. He could not do this with Advanced Third Reich. Partway through writing paragraph 17 of my rules guide, literally in mid-word, he gave up.
'Open. Unpunched.' Any game designer would feel great sorrow. Someone wanted to play this game, but could not!
Kapoor used to play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, both 1st and 2nd editions. AD&D had a lot of ad-hoc rules. The higher your defense bonuses, the lower your armor class rating. There were five categories of saving throws. There were different combat tables for each class. Combat was resolved with twenty-sided dice except for unarmed combat, which was percentile. Spell ranges were described in inches, which players were expected to translate into 10-yard segments outdoors or 10-foot segments indoors. Players had to roll under a certain target number to use their skills, using twenty-sided dice for "non-weapon proficiencies" but percentile dice for thief-type skills.
This was fine, because AD&D was still a nice way to hang with one's friends, but after a while the ad-hoc nature of the rules began to sap Kapoor's enjoyment. At one point he fooled around with creating his own RPG. Some aspects worked, but the magic system was an unqualified disaster. Just as he gave up, D&D3 came out.
To his surprise, Kapoor liked it. There was a regular progression to combat abilities, saving throws, and other aspects of the game that meant one no longer needed pages of tables - tables were quick reference, rather than essential knowledge. This in turn simplified multiclassing. Skill rolls worked the same as combat rolls. Spell ranges were short, medium, and long, so there were no more "inches".
Reducing the number of ad-hoc rules worked for Kapoor, and he returned to D&D. For the first time he enjoyed being a player rather than a DM. D&D3 still had a lot of rules, but there were fewer arbitrary rules, and they interacted in interesting ways. Eventually Kapoor tired of D&D3's magic system - he found himself dependent on spreadsheets to keep all his spells' properties straight, which was not fun - but to this day he'd be happy to host a low-magic D&D3 game.
After an evening of comparing & contrasting the boardgames (and RPGs) he likes, Kapoor believes it's this property of emergent complexity which holds his interest in a big game. A game can have a lot of rules if they're individually simple. A game can be complex if it offers meaningful choices as a result of how its rules interact. Now if only Kapoor could design a decent game himself.
The complexity of WiF comes from the fact that each player is running one or more major powers' war efforts and economies, and must make strategic choices on what to build & where to send the units. The game's complexity emerges not from complicated rules but from simple - or at least straighforward - rules that interact in complicated ways, and offer the players lots of meaningful choices.
In comparison, consider Advanced Third Reich. Kapoor bought it in the hopes of having a detailed World War II game that one could play in a single day (after WiF Kapoor call this "a short game"). Kapoor read the rulebook and found that the rules went on and on and on and on...
Kapoor likes to be able to boil rulebooks down to handouts of a few pages, so that he can quickly explain things to people with whom he'd like to play the game. He did this with WiF. He could not do this with Advanced Third Reich. Partway through writing paragraph 17 of my rules guide, literally in mid-word, he gave up.
'Open. Unpunched.' Any game designer would feel great sorrow. Someone wanted to play this game, but could not!
Kapoor used to play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, both 1st and 2nd editions. AD&D had a lot of ad-hoc rules. The higher your defense bonuses, the lower your armor class rating. There were five categories of saving throws. There were different combat tables for each class. Combat was resolved with twenty-sided dice except for unarmed combat, which was percentile. Spell ranges were described in inches, which players were expected to translate into 10-yard segments outdoors or 10-foot segments indoors. Players had to roll under a certain target number to use their skills, using twenty-sided dice for "non-weapon proficiencies" but percentile dice for thief-type skills.
This was fine, because AD&D was still a nice way to hang with one's friends, but after a while the ad-hoc nature of the rules began to sap Kapoor's enjoyment. At one point he fooled around with creating his own RPG. Some aspects worked, but the magic system was an unqualified disaster. Just as he gave up, D&D3 came out.
To his surprise, Kapoor liked it. There was a regular progression to combat abilities, saving throws, and other aspects of the game that meant one no longer needed pages of tables - tables were quick reference, rather than essential knowledge. This in turn simplified multiclassing. Skill rolls worked the same as combat rolls. Spell ranges were short, medium, and long, so there were no more "inches".
Reducing the number of ad-hoc rules worked for Kapoor, and he returned to D&D. For the first time he enjoyed being a player rather than a DM. D&D3 still had a lot of rules, but there were fewer arbitrary rules, and they interacted in interesting ways. Eventually Kapoor tired of D&D3's magic system - he found himself dependent on spreadsheets to keep all his spells' properties straight, which was not fun - but to this day he'd be happy to host a low-magic D&D3 game.
After an evening of comparing & contrasting the boardgames (and RPGs) he likes, Kapoor believes it's this property of emergent complexity which holds his interest in a big game. A game can have a lot of rules if they're individually simple. A game can be complex if it offers meaningful choices as a result of how its rules interact. Now if only Kapoor could design a decent game himself.