"How often should rules get updated?" Topic

How often do you think a good rules set should get new versions?

This is assuming the game is good and the original version was not terribly broken of course.

What triggers the need for a new edition? Some games accumulate an endless list of supplements, variants and expansions while others end up being played far differently than they were written (or intended).

Does it differ if its a tournament game?

Seldom if ever in my opinion. When a system works, leave it be.

Agreed with nnascati. Why should rules be updated if they are working?

The best rules? About as often as chess.

Indeed, I agree with the above posters.

As often as needed, which should be very infrequently. A good set of rules should stand the test of time.

What triggers the need for a new edition? Some games accumulate an endless list of supplements, variants and expansions while others end up being played far differently than they were written (or intended).

To fully answer, what usually triggers a new set is when you get so many supplements and addenda, the rules generally will collapse and break under its own weight. GW is a famous example of the rules reboot. What version are they on with 40K? 7th edition? 8th? That's an extreme example of course.

Errata should be corrected with each printing as they are discovered. This is not publishing a new edition.

A full revision and update such as would be a new edition should happen only when either play has evolved to the point where the old rules no longer work, or new research shows that some correction of modeling and mechanics is needed to better reflect actual battlefield practice and outcomes.

In other words very, very, very seldom.

Here's me going along with the crowd…

Never.

Yup – if you haven't playtested them then don't put them out in the first place.

And if you want to do a radical overhaul; – make it a new set of rules.

never, if the rules are good enough in the first place.

The revered WRG Ancient rules, and of course DBX, had a habit of revising the rules with every new print run.
This forced the die hards to buy the "new" edition. Which made the new print run run out faster which made…..

I think there are lots of good reasons to change rules. Obviously a system with a variety of different opponents with different abilities is not ever going to be completely balanced.

If you have a scenario game you can see where the bias is and correct for it in a scenario. if it is a tournament game you can't necessarily do that.

Take 40k for example. A pretty well balanced system for the most part. But it is far from perfect. In 3.5 or so we had a great time when we mostly had marine or marine-like armies. Necrons, Space Wolves, varieties of chaos, Blood angels all worked pretty well together. Even when we introduced Tau into the mix nobody was getting so stomped that they could never get away from it.

That all changed when a Kroot army appeared in the mix.

The kroot did well against Tau, Chaos, space wolves and necrons but just could not win against Gray Knights. They got killed so fast it just wasn't fair and we stopped using the two armies against each other.

So the system was broken for those two armies.

That was fine with us but doesn't work for a tournament setting exactly.

With a system like that the best version of each army will come to the fore and the tournaments will get stale and boring.

A new edition doesn't make for a perfect system either, it makes for a different system and breaths new life into the game allowing players to try new things and for tournament players that is sometimes the fun of it, coming up with the lists to take advantage of the new rules.

So I don't think that new editions are a bad thing. You don't have to play them. When I play 40k I still use 3.5.

Seldom, unless the latest edition has some major flaw that wasn't revealed in playtesting, in which case the new edition should be produced as soon as possible, which leads to…
It also seems that new editions (at least pdf versions) and/or update material should be given freely to those that have purchased the original rules fairly recently.

A new edition probably means people are actually playing the rules and the author cares enough to fix problems they have found.

How often for new editions? I'd hope that the time between each edition increases as fewer problems are found.

Regards

David F Brown

close to never. Unless its to fix missing bits, badly worded examples, or rules clarification. Or to fix a rule that does not work or has a hole in it.

I can sort of guess the answer but how do people feel about updates that are mostly cosmetic?

A lot of times we see games that look pretty spartan in their first incarnations and then get an update with more polish but very few actual changes.

It seems less common now, than it was 20ish years ago. Back then everybody was playing WRG 7th edition, Empire IV or V, and so on. I remember a game that got released as a 4th edition, and in the midst of its release the author was already writing in magazines about what would be in the 5th edition!

Nowadays there are so many rules releases that nobody's attention or interest lingers on any one of them for long, so there's usually not a need to do a second edition, since people just move on to a new game entirely.

Look at the recent Napoleon's Battles thing, for example. The first edition was 25 years ago and sold 20,000+ copies. The second edition sold several thousand. The third edition sold several hundred. And the fourth edition never got off the ground, having failed to raise the startup money after two Crowdfunding attempts. That's a great illustration / example of the way that interest has fragmented, and how hard it is to sustain interest in a game, just by releasing a revised version.

GW's main games are a good example of reasonably solid rule systems that get broken as new army books/codexes are released. I thought 5th ed 40k and 7th ed WFB were pretty strong systems when all was said and done. It was the army books that made some armies worthless or nearly invincible in both.

Depends on the company's cash flow.

If a rules set has been play tested over and over by a small army of play testers (as the designer notes of most rules say) then the rules should never have to be changed. When I first bought the "Battleground WWII" rules, I thought them perfect, as the designer notes said they had been play tested to death and, consequently, were ready to unleash on the market. What irked me about the BGWWII rules was in their Q&A section, where the game designer's answer to a question about coming across a discrepancy in the rules was "change them". Again, if a set of rules have been play tested to death to where they are ready to sell to the public, then changing/modifying the rules should not be necessary.

Wrt the OP, never. If the rules need changing, I'll do it myself.

I can count on the fingers of one hand where new versions are better than the originals, and mostly they are worse.