How Rules & Settings Drive Play Differently

I. Dear Reader,

Games have engines. Like a car, something creates the kinetic energy that keeps the game moving. The GM switches on the car and then steers it, but ideally they aren’t just powering the whole thing, legs secretly pumping under the car, Flintstones-style. 

Sometimes the engine is the rules. Sometimes it’s the setting. In my on-going Wildsea game, the rules aren’t really prompting a lot of the cool stuff at the table –  with the notable exception of Twists. Most of the fun at the table is coming from the setting. Whenever I need to say something cool, as the GM, I look towards the setting and I draw from there. And this has been very successful – we’ve had pirate cities on the back of a leviathan, a ship powered by a giant beating heart, a storm of electrical mosquitoes, and lots more. 

But there is a difference between games that have a rules engine and a setting engine. When you have a rules engine, the game pulls on the players to act. Wildsea‘s Twists are a good example. Whenever you roll a double (two 5s, for example), anyone at the table can suggest a twist, which is any kind of new unforeseen event that occurs. Here, the game is prompting us – specifically, the players – to be creative and make “more game” happen. My players use twists to introduce cool stuff they want to chase.

When you have a setting engine, the GM pulls on the game. This might be before the game or during the session but the GM needs ideas and turns to the game. In my game, when the players are going to set out from a city, I look at the setting and pull up a bunch of interesting places they might want to go to (including “Tortuga but on a giant cactus worm”) and they pick. The players ask me what the weather is like so I look at the weather table and see “living storm” which makes me think of mosquitoes and we get a dense cloud of highly conductive mosquitoes. Whenever I need “more game”, I pull on the setting for it. 

I don’t think either kind of engine is easier or better than the other in some objective way. The downside of letting the rules do the pulling is that it can happen too little or too much. In our last Wildsea session, there were too many twists coming up and everyone was kinda done with being creative and introducing stuff at the end of it. The downside of making the GM pull from the setting is that knowing when to pull, what to pull, how much to pull, that’s all stuff you need to learn. And till you learn it, it’s tough.

But that said, it’s always clear to me when an engine is doing its job: a great engine is one that makes me look like a great GM while I do as much or as little work as I want to. 

That seems fair, right?

Yours generatively,

Thomas

PS. We hit 6k subscribers! It’s been complicated to move away from Substack but we’re still growing and that’s a relief. Big thank you for reading!

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II. Media of the Week

• On the Yes Indie’d podcast, I speak to Sebastian Yue, a game designer who published their first adventure module in 2020 and now works for Hitpoint Press (who make blockbuster D&D 5e projects) as well as freelancing for Evil Hat, MCDM and more. It’s a great conversation with someone who has successfully made games their full career.

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• We inch ever closer to the milestone of 150 patrons! So if you can consider supporting the newsletter on patreon and help make Fantasy Cities Volume 2 happen.
• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

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III. Links of the Week

• Teamwork mechanics! And why Raccoon Sky Pirates, which is exactly what you think it is, has one of the best.
• On Gnomestew, a first look at Shadow of the Weird Wizard.
• On the bastionland blog, dividing mechanics into blunt, deep, niche, and wide. I love a good graph with four quadrants.
• On the Daily Blade blog, Sidney Icarus deconstructs one of the examples of play in Blades in the Dark and explains how its (whelp) wrong.
• On their Monsterhearts blog, Shane looks at three moves: keep your cool, lash out physically and run away. Some great insights into both how the moves work and why they might exist at all.
• Via Rascal News, Lore Library is a catalogue service for RPG product lines.
• Armaan Babu reviews Death of the Author, a new rpg from Anamnesis designer, Samantha Leigh.

From the archive:

• Alexandrian has a nice post about what to do when characters hit a “dead end” when trying to solve a mystery. (Issue 28, Feb 2021)

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Earth: After Death is a brand-new post-apocalyptic dungeon crawler inspired by AD&D, Fallout 1/2, Wasteland, and has been designed as the spiritual successor to Gamma World!
• Trilogy is a PbtA game for epic fantasy campaigns. It features built-in worldbuilding, playbooks built around narrative arcs, neat mechanics to help your game flow, and a high fun-to-preparation ratio.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Cepheus Engine, the Traveller-inspired game, from Moon Toad Publishing.
• Journals of the Traveller’s Aid Society are guides and lore for the Traveller universe.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!