Current mood:	rule-ish
Entry tags:	game design, gaming, house rules, rules

if it ain't broke: thoughts on house rules
The topic of fixing issues in games with house rules has been on my mind lately, after some productive conversations with friends on the subject.

So, lucky you, here's a bit of brain-dumping on the subject of house-rules for games - why to write them, what they're for, what they're not for, and so on.

The first issue that comes to mind is "why does this game need house rules?" I can think of a few options:

• Because it's a bad game
  There are a few variations on this one, but the heart of this is that the game, as written, is flawed in the broad case. There are a number of reasons why a game might be this flawed - (it was designed by someone with more theming than mechanical knowledge, or rushed out the door by marketing, or playtested by weasels on speed) - but we can only speculate on those. Instead, I'm going to subdivide this category by considering how it's a bad game, which should be somewhat objective.
  
  • There are no meaningful choices for the player
    This one's also known to some of my friends as "it reduces to Candy Land" - which, as arkineux will be happy to tell you at length, isn't actually a game, because the player never makes a choice. I'm extending the category here to encompass not only games that have no choices, but also games where there is always a right choice, and the right choice is sufficiently algorithmic that a human can learn to play perfectly. (So, I'd count Nim or Tic-Tac-Toe as falling into this category - the games are solved and the solutions are learnable by a human. On the other hand, even though Checkers is solved, I don't fit it in this category - between two human players of reasonable ability, the game still comes down to heuristic decision-making, not memorization of the algorithm, because the algorithm is too complex for a human to reasonably use.)
    
  • The game is imbalanced
    There are a few ways in which a game can be imbalanced, but the general gist is this: One play position has a much better chance of winning than another. The most common version of this is a factional or play-order difference: the first player is more likely to win, or the player with a specific faction is. I'd also consider a strategic bias to fit in here, if the game purports to support multiple strategies - for example, if a game that permits players to trade-off military spending and domestic improvement strongly favors one or the other of those strategies, then the choice of strategy is a false one, and the game's probably imbalanced.
    
  • Some part of gameplay is irrelevant / The end-game is unrelated to the buildup
    These are two tightly-linked issues, that I think can be considered substantially the same thing. In either case, a large part of what you're doing simply doesn't matter. In Monopoly, this is the part where the game runs for two hours after the winner is decided, while the remaining players hemorrhage money slowly with no hope of victory. In Risk, this is the part of the game where ludicrous armies, fueled by bonus cards, sweep back and forth across the globe until one of the players gets a bonus combo large enough to actually end the game. In Killer Bunnies, this is the fact that the end-game is actually a lottery, and the odds of winning are only loosely related to your performance throughout the game.
    
  • The game lasts too long / moves too slowly
    While this one may seem subjective - after all, Advanced Civilization takes the better part of a night and day to play, and nobody's calling it an objectively bad game - there are some games that simply don't offer enough payout in terms of fun for the time they consume. These are games that could benefit from "tightening" - generally, the issue is not even the length of the game, but the amount of time each player spends doing nothing while waiting for their turn: the latency of the game. The classic Steve Jackson games - Illuminati and Hacker - are notorious for having this problem, as each player goes through a multi-step turn, with just enough need for other players to interact that they can't effectively leave the table. (Particularly Hacker, when the Internet Worm comes out and adds minutes worth of fiddly bookkeeping to every turn.)
  
  I should note that, while I describe these as "objectively bad," none of these can, by itself, kill a game - and gaming groups vary in their tolerances for these. (For example, I find irrelevant gameplay to be absolutely unacceptable - I won't play a game if I know there's a portion of play that simply doesn't matter in terms of the final outcome - but I'll tolerate a lot of latency issues for a game I like some element of, which is why I know so much about what can make Hacker drag its heels.) On the other hand, I think that all of these things are, in some sense, objectively bad - which is to say, I think that nobody would complain if a game had less of them.
  
  I should also note that all of this should be hurled bodily out the window when talking about "party games," or any other game-like activity in which the real aim is to facilitate socialization by providing structure. If nobody really cares who wins or loses, and the real fun of the game is in doing charades / playing Pictionary / watching your co-workers quack like ducks, then a very different set of rules apply, and I'm going to consider that outside the scope of what I'm thinking about right now.
  
  With all that said, on to the second class of reasons:
• Because the game's not quite right for your set of players
  Not every game needs changing because it's bad. There are a lot of ways in which a game might be perfectly good - if some other people were playing it. But you're playing it, and you want to have fun, and that involves fixing the game. A few game/player mismatches I've seen a lot:
  
  • Too much / too little randomness
    Gamers tend to have a sweet spot for the amount of randomness they like in a game. Very few gamers like games that are completely random (remember what I was saying about Candy Land?), but it varies along the spectrum from there. If a game is more random than you like, it tends to feel like your choices are irrelevant: it's impossible to plan, and your skill isn't doing much to affect the outcome. (Lots of people feel this way about Fluxx and the other games from Looney Labs, for example.) On the other hand, if a game isn't random enough, it becomes harder for players of mixed skill level to play together. In perfectly non-random games, there are generally ranking and handicapping systems in place (such as in go and chess), to allow players of different skill to play without the outcome being predictable. Too little randomness, and the game can become less accessible: like go and chess, the game requires significant work before it can be played effectively. Many people would rather have fun than a perfect challenge of the minds, and a game with too little chance just feels like work.
    
  • Too much / too little aggression
    This is another matter of play-style. Some people want to get in the other players' faces, directly opposing them, taking actions to hinder them or knocking them out of the game. Other people prefer more indirect games, where their only conflict may be positional advantage - or there may be no conflict at all, simply a race to achieve victory first, with minimal interaction en route. A game with too little conflict for your taste can feel sterile, as if you're only playing solitaire, and there might as well not be other players. A game with too much conflict can feel bloodthirsty and emotionally draining - fights at the gaming table or recriminations are often a symptom that one player isn't comfortable with the degree of aggression that another player is putting in.
    
  • Too easy / too hard
    This one's very dependent on your players. I mentioned above that checkers was solved, but it's not an issue for most players. It is, however, an issue for tournament-level players, for whom most games end in a draw. So, they added a house rule that the first three half-moves of the game (that's one move, the other player's response, and the next move from the first player) are randomly selected from a playbook, which randomizes the opening enough to make it a viable contest of skills between the players. Regular checkers is too easy a game for them, so they've house-ruled it to be harder.
    On the other hand, I had the opportunity to play a word-making game with projectmothra  a few months back, and he's only four years old, so he doesn't have quite as much command of the language as the game expects of its players. In order to make the game playable for him, we created house rules to loosen some of the restrictions on what words were permissible, until we'd arrived at a game that was just challenging enough to be fun. Most of the time, most games won't be so easy or hard as to be unplayable - but when it comes up, it's prime house-rule territory.
  
  There are others - I'm sure you can tell me some! Play-style mismatch between the players and the game can often show up as a set of rules that never get used, or as a faction that's not as viable as it might be. For example, the Order of the Stick board game is set up as a semi-cooperative dungeon-crawl, with the players bribing one another to help out, but the winner being determined by who has the most treasure at the end. There are abilities to actually attack the other players, but it's by no means required within the game's overall rules, nor have the groups I've played with found a strong incentive to do so. It's clear, however, that the game's balance depends on the players being willing to directly and overtly attack one another. Belkar's abilities are underpowered unless he chooses to fight with other players, while Elan's abilities seem to be a little overpowered if they're not being counterbalanced by players hitting him as a weak target. A mismatched play-style isn't necessarily a bad thing - a group of players that dislikes overt aggression should probably just stay away from Frag, rather than try to fix it - but in the context of house rules, sometimes there are games that need just a bit more randomness, or that could use just a bit less aggression, to be playable by your gaming group. That sounds like a viable candidate for house-rules to me.
  
• Because it's a great game, but you need a change
  I'm not going to bother subcategorizing this one, because this really comes down to one scenario that's pretty common: You've got this game you love, but you've been playing it a lot. Everybody's getting kind of sick of it, because it's always kind of the same - which is a shame, because you love the game. You want to be able to play it some more. Enter the house rules: with a few small changes, you've got a game that's a lot like the one you love, but different enough that there's something new and fresh.
  
• Because there's a small mechanical issue that keeps you from playing it
  This one's good and practical - the game doesn't quite work right with two players, but there isn't a third person to game with. The game as written will sprawl to fill the floor of the room, but you want to play it on the table, because there are animals / kids / Roombas around. Because the game relies on the Fiddly Electronic Bit that came with it and hasn't worked right since someone tried to take it camping and ended up getting it soaked. You need to adapt, because playing a modified game is better than flipping on the TV again.

So, there are some good reasons for wanting to write house rules for a game. On the other hand, if you wrote house rules for every game with a flaw, you could spend a lot of time writing house rules, and not get much accomplished.

So, there's a second part to this: "why does this game deserve house rules?"

• Because it's almost good
  This is a nice, common reason to want to house-rule a game. It's almost - but not quite - balanced, or quick enough, or right for your playing group. A few quick amendments to a few rules and, poof!, the game's everything you wanted it to be!
  
• Because it has a really neat element
  Sometimes, there's a mechanic that you wish you'd thought of first. It fits the game's theming, it's really neat - if only the rest of the game didn't suck! Think of the mechanic as a wonderful gem set in an ugly, ill-fitting piece of jewelry. Sometimes, you just need someone to re-fit it a little, and maybe adjust the design a little - with house rules - to really show off the beauty you know is there. (But sometimes, you need to melt down the rest of the piece and re-set the stone in something more appropriate. Sometimes the right way to save a neat element is to let it inspire you to write a game that sucks less.)
  
• Because it has really cool components
  No, seriously! Some games have the most fantastic bits, high production value, gorgeous little sculpted miniatures for pieces - and the game itself sucks. (This is unfortunately common.) This can get into the space of house-rules that border on a total re-write, but I'm going to consider it house-rules, since you're under the major constraint that everything actually part of the components - the selection of what's available, any stats printed on little cards, funky custom dice - are mostly going to need to get used, one way or another, which means whatever game you're writing is going to wind up being substantially similar.
  
• Because it has a really cool theme
  Sometimes, the theming makes the game. I mentioned Hacker before - now, to be honest, the game components in Hacker are kind of crap - there are about a billion little cardboard chits you cut out in order to play, and none of it's terribly pretty. It was put together by game designers, and it shows. But the theme is just fantastic, and that makes the game as it stands worth playing - so imagine what it would be like if you could just tweak it to play in less than a full evening.
  
• Because it's really popular
  Monopoly has generated a lot of house rules, even though it kind of sucks. (For that matter, some of those rules - I'm looking at you, "money on Free Parking" - contribute mightily to the suckage. But that's a matter for another post that you might be able to bribe me into making.) There's an entire genre of games made by house-ruling chess. When a game is important enough to be a part of the popular culture, as opposed to merely a specialty pastime of the gamer subculture, there's a lot of incentive to play it - and when there's that much incentive to play it, there's also incentive to tinker.
  
• Because it's really unpopular
  Okay, this justification may not work for everyone. But there is a special joy in finding a game that nobody has ever heard of in the bargain bin at some store, or at a rummage sale, or suchlike, and picking it up and grabbing a few similarly masochistic friends and setting out to make something beautiful. If all else fails, at least you get a good laugh out of dissecting the rules as written and wondering what poor sap at a long-since out-of-business game company got pressured to rush this one out the door.
  
• Because it sucks so completely and totally that everyone you know would have to acknowledge your awesomeness if you could dredge even one iota of fun out of this miserable shell of a game
  (It's OK. Really. You can admit it. We all want to do it sometimes.)

So, there you have it - to the best of my ability, the reasons why you might want to house-rule a game.

What do you think? Are there other ways a game might be broken and in need of repair? Other issues of group-style that might need a bit of customization? Other reasons why a game might be deserving of that extra bit of love and attention needed to pull it out of the pit of suck?

I'm interested in hearing from some other gamers on this - I'm planning on doing a bunch of house-rule writing in the near future, and I want to get a good idea of the whys and wherefores before I roll up my sleeves and dig into some broken games.