"Crowd-written rules" Topic

I think it's been discussed before, but never gone anywhere, due to no one actually prepared to run it.

Would people be interested in 'crowd-writing' a rule set? I will set up a blog, and anyone could contribute, with voting following the debate. Go through topic by topic- starting with basic concepts, with me deciding what the majority opinion is if need be.

Will it be worth my time starting it?

I was thinking Napoleonic, and calling them in honour of wargamers everywhere

"Scum of the Earth" !

I think you may have a hard time on people agreeing on anything. For example: I like card driven games. A lot of people hate them.

I think crowd-written rules will be like asking a committee to design a horse – ending up with a camel.

I think you need someone to keep the games design focused, whether top-down simple or counting rivets. But hey, give it a try.

I would echo the others. Someone needs to have a final say so or you run the risk of not having a core mechanic or otherwise non-cohesive rules. Otherwise, you're better off tossing out a skeleton set of rules and letting others run with it to customize to specific settings/genres/whatever.

It's a neat idea. I think you would need to have a visible weight given to each idea so everyone could see how the voting went on each. Hopefully that way a consensus would emerge. But people still might hate the end result.

I doubt it would work. People will latch onto various ideas they like, and when the majority opinion goes another way drop the project.

A recent example is DBA 3.0 Phil put out drafts on the Yahoo group to allow people to playtest and provide feedback for him to consider. The result was a splinter group of hardcore player who decided they didn't like the direction Phil was going and developed what is being called DBA 2.2+. What effect this will have on DBA as a game remains to be seen, but would probably be fatal for new game development.

gamerpaint's idea of a skeleton game meant to be developed might work. Plenty of games have been used for periods completely different from that for which they were developed (DBA for instance). A good, modifiable skeleton would allow anyone to develop the specific sort of game they think they would enjoy.

I think you are inviting a disaster upon yourself. There are too may Napoleonic Rulesets out there already and there is a reason for that. No two players can agree. This is both the strength and the weakness of our hobby.

"There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Le Grande Armee they've worked out."

Sounds like chaos.

I think it would start strong and fizzle out and you'd be left doing most of it yourself.
100 guys start off. 60/40 split on the first decision wether the smallest unit will be a battalion or a brigade. 20 lose interest as its not the right level. Next decision 50 say I go you go and 30 say simultaneous movement. Another 10 lose interest. +1 to the French? You lose a few more. More will quit because its going too slowly waiting for people in different time zones or with jobs.

I'm not saying it won't work just that it will be slow, hard work and will probably stop being fun for you after settling your third or fourth dispute. You'll end up with a set that's all over the shop with no clear guiding vision or influence and in which many contributors who helped are not satisfied with as key ideas they had are voted out.

Better off doing it by yourself or with some club mates you think have close ideas on what's fun to you. You can have fun playing testing it or tweaking it and getting it right.

I think a far better approach would be to design the rules yourself and then crowdsource for improvements, playtesting, etc.

Another use for crowdsourcing might be the creation of army lists, which you would of course then have final say on.

Even where there is just one guy in charge, any time you bring together more than 2 or 3 gamers, utter chaos usually results. Gamers are not generally the most astute people when it comes to thinking-through the ramifications of decisions, or the effects of any one change to one system, upon all 28 other subsystems.

Then there's the issue that many people don't make much of an effort to pay attention or make sense. Playtest discussions often end up like:

Project Chief: "You can have either a wagon or a chariot, but not both. The advantage of a wagon is that it carries more stuff, but a chariot is faster."

Dude 1: "I prefer wagons. I like to go really fast!"

Dude 2: "I like chariots better, because I prefer vehicles with wheels."

Dude 3: "I understand that chariots go faster, but for me carrying stuff isn't important, so I want a wagon."

Dude 4: "I agree. We should definitely do both."

It would be doable, but needs a framework and an owner. It will be a lot of effort and you may well end up with a camel as unlike the open source software community, wargamers have very short attention spans.

Why not frame it in terms of voting for various design options? E.b. activation sequence, casualty representation etc

The idea sounds doomed to failure.

But for some reason it sounds so utterly implausible as to be worth attempting to see what actually happens.

As others have said, you might not get beyond a design philosophy.

regards

David F Brown

Were doing crowd control rules for the jousting rules CROSSED LANCES winners of best participation game Derby 2013.

The start of my 'Chips of Glory' rules….<snicker>

C2
Opposing ACs roll for # of Blue/Green chips to be added to the bag at the beginning of each round.

Each AC roll 2d6 discarding the lower die result, and adding the # of friendly chips to the turn bag, given on the high result die.

AC command rating
Great reroll 1s and 2s
Good reroll 1s
Average NC
Poor reroll 6s

If all 4 dice rolled are even, the weather improves. If all 4 dice rolled are odd, the weather worsens.

Sunny- dries mud after 2 turns. Artillery range full.
Normal- dries mud after 4 turns. Artillery range 24" maximum.
Precipitation- produces mud after 2 turns. Artillery fire reduced and range is 16", small arms reduced.
Storm- produces mud after 1 turn. Artillery fire reduced and range is 12", no small arms fire.

Chip types

Blue Chips- all French/Allied forces test to move, shooting, and then conduct movement and melee.

Green Chips- same as above for Anti-French.

Red- All units conduct artillery fire.

White- Rally any MF's on each side, and remove D1 of disorder (automatically) for all units on the board.

Black- End Turn, Army and Force Morale Checks. Roll opposing AC rolls, check Weather and set up bag for next turn. (1 chip summer months/2 fall spring/3 winter)

My experience is two designers on a game is one too many.

Open source could probably work. Make good core rules and encourage others to build variants, army lists, send you ideas for updates, cobtribute illustrations for the rulebook and whatever else can be crowdsoursed, but not so much actual game design. Go Creative Commons.

I think what I had in mind was more like what Martin suggested – a number of options voted on, but with a bit of discussion first to get to those options.

You can do it, but only when keeping strict control.

Design a core that is immutable and not up for discussion. E.g. Whether the game is card-driven, igo-ugo, the basics of movement, that sort of thing.

Other things that add chrome can be crowdsourced.

What's the worst that could happen? Failure?

Those that haven't failed have not succeeded either.

It could be fun!
Is this the model?
You'd decide on what part of the rules eg scale.
Participants would give suggestions. eg Battalion, Brigade Division.
Then everyone would then vote to decide.

"Frankenstein`s Monster"

Ask individual gamers to submit games rules; each person designing a rules section separately, stitch them all together, and with the newly discovered life-giving powers of electricity, upload them to a web site and unleash the strange beast upon the ethers.

Note: Be careful to ensure that the person in charge of the morale rules is not a convicted murderer!

I am for "Scum of the Earth"

Now how about setting up a poll system. Members could submit sections ect.

First no card! Noo Cards! LOL

Lord Ghee

Some guy tried designing boardgame rules on a wiki. Don't know if that worked. Maybe one wiki page per chapter and make sure only a few trusted (or single person) have write access. Could work.

I think you should go for it, it sounds fascinating.

Take a poll at each step (on TMP etc, making sure you publicise the poll to make sure lots of people get involved).
Reserve final say for yourself at all times, but also have a concurrent thread running where all your "advisors" can have input. TMP contains a large membership of very smart and experienced folks who will have great input on what will or won't work within the confines of what you already have, and what poll to run next.

You could call the final product "Napoleonic Zeitgeist" LOL.

Pick another era.

This will not work with Napoleonic gaming.