"Brought my new rules to Historicon; it could have been worse" Topic

I've been working on a new set of rules for a few months now. They were getting better and better and I was excited for Historicon. However, a few tweeks from the last pair of play tests broke the system. As a developer I took it hard. The lead designer says it wasn't the disaster I thought it was but I will say this. There are lessons to be had:

1.) If you stray from tradition, make sure it's clear what the new avant garde is. I broke from the the tradition of base target number at range, +- modifiers = die roll to hit then die roll for damage. I compressed the whole thing into this single lookup table that produce everything. It was quick. It was easy. But… no one got it. It was too cool for the room as they say.

2.) Slowly introduce changes. Bounce them off of people. Playtest them. When you show up at a National convention make sure that any changes have been through at least 2-3 games. New changes are for your local club. Stable releases are for conventions.

3.) After a disaster of broken rules walk away and take a day. Then plot out the fixes. In my case the game was broken not by math or by history but by game theory. Players will choose what is optimal. They did that and so they played the game I designed, but not the one I imagined I designed!

So back to the drawing board. I have a new hybrid game design that is more traditional but solves a problem I hadn't been able to solve successfully in 20 years. The problem of the composite ACW battery performing historically. There just was no easy solution for the scale of game I wanted to run. I knew how guns worked. I did an incredible amount of research. If I was gaming how an individual gun would work that wasn't going to be a problem. However the scales I am interested in I needed a system that accurately works with composite batteries of 4-6 guns with mixtures of guns. If there had not been this disaster that caused me to literally throw out an entire page of the QRS I wouldn't have been forced to rethink this one more time.

From disaster comes inspiration.

Wisdom comes from experience…experience usually comes from bad decisions :/ It's the way of the world.

I agree with 2 and 3.

Not sure I agree with 1 though, even if they didn't get it. Perhaps a bit more playtesting is needed, before tossing in the towel, if you think the system is better, or more streamlined, so worth using.

I believe it really wasn't clear even if it was streamlined. Another streamlined approach can be made that has the same effect and is much clearer. It is clear if I explain it but it is not clear just looking at the system on paper. That is a big hurdle for convention appropriate games.

Yup. Been there, got done to by that.

It can be disheartening to think that you've come up with the coolest of ideas, only to find it just doesn't quite work. I agree with Mako11, though: don't discard your concepts too quickly.

Doug

I usually have to "dumb down" rules for conventions. But it sounds like you learned a lot anyway.

I believe it really wasn't clear even if it was streamlined.

… ah … Clarity … Yes, you will need that, especially for your players. Especially at Historicon, where there are so many distractions …

Also – just my experience – give players as little paper as possible. I find if you give them paper they tend to try to play the game from that rather than from listening to the verbal explanations. The odd QRS should suffice (and maybe don't put those out at the game start, but pass them out as players get the hang of it).

Phil

The problem of the composite ACW battery performing historically. There just was no easy solution for the scale of game I wanted to run. I knew how guns worked. I did an incredible amount of research. If I was gaming how an individual gun would work that wasn't going to be a problem. However the scales I am interested in I needed a system that accurately works with composite batteries of 4-6 guns with mixtures of guns. If there had not been this disaster that caused me to literally throw out an entire page of the QRS I wouldn't have been forced to rethink this one more time.

The ordeal of the mixed battery is not a new one…

Avalon Hill seemed to have the same problem with their Gettysburg game…in the Advanced game the counters have all of this tiny tiny tiny printing on them and when it comes to batteries it comes down to how many of what type of gun it has…Confederate mixed batteries are a pain and you needed a magnifying glass to read them.

Honestly? The issues that came up probably were the best thing to happen. You playtest to not only see "how the rules and game is played", but how the rules can be abused, twisted, bent and broken. You look for problems that develop. It took us over five years of various size playtests to get Gutshot right.
Another idea is to use different playtesters as much as possible. Too often the playtesters are too familiar with things and "know" how things are supposed to work. New playtesters always bring in new ideas, etc…

Good luck with it and keep us informed…

Don't feel bad. The rules sound like they have some interesting ways of doing things. I played in a game at a Historicon a few years ago that is probably the worst game I've ever played in. And the authors were quite proud of the game, not recognizing that there was anything wrong with it. They did "extensive research" on the scenario and rules, they said. But apparently not enough to realize that PIATs and panzerfausts weren't used in North Africa. Among other things. And the rules sucked too.

Yours couldn't have been as bad, and certainly not any worse.

No good set of wargame rules survives the first encounter with the gamers.
VR
James Mattes

Be glad you don't have a warehouse full of print copies of this version to try to sell. You don't, do you?

I have designed games that looked brilliant on paper but were absolute catastrophes on the tabletop. Some things are so obvious that you don't realize they aren't in the rules. Case in point, I was helping to playtest a set of ECW rules that allowed formed pike blocks to operate with absolutely no penalties in woodland and forest. Why? Because " Everybody knows better than to send pikemen into the forest." Gues what happened in playtest….

Steve Jackson once gave the example of an ACW game giving victory to the side that mounted an infantry charge up hill against emplaced artillery. You would never discover this loophole playing only with ACW buffs. Playtest the dumb strategies…

Apply Lesson 3, have a tasty beverage, and then take what you learned and make the next version even better.

I've worked in system design and development for many years.
A ruleset is a system.

Demos have an almost magical ability to go wrong in ways you never saw before.
Always regression test before a demo.
You want as many people as possible who don't already know the system to test before any demo.
Always listen to your testers.
Leave as much time as possible between release and demo.
So complete the phase, stick it on the test server and test it to death before release. Freeze further development in the meantime.
Always have a way back to a previous version.

When making a change, the risk of something going wrong is a logarithmic factor of the change applied.
Rather than a big change make small changes and re-test.
Repeat.

The system is not your baby.
If it doesn't work then you should be keen to identify issues and fix rather than explain how people are wrong.

Stay with it, I have had some rules ideas that I thought were great and when I put them on the table they got shredded by friend and stranger alike at times. I still like to try and hope to someday have a set that people like. I guess if your first effort was an easy success, you might not appreciate it.

Allen

CorpsCommander, it looks like your team broke one of the basic principles of systems design.

Iterative design: After determining the users, tasks, and empirical measurements to include, perform the following iterative design steps:
1.Design the user interface
2.Test
3.Analyze results
4.Repeat
Repeat the iterative design process until a sensible, user-friendly interface is created
Source: link

It looks like you went straight to designing the user interface (first mistake) and then stopped (second mistake).