Ask Angry: How Many Hacks Is Too Many?

Today, I’m opening my virtual mailbag to answer an e-question. Technically, I have two e-questions to answer that don’t seem to be related, but they are. The second one, I’ll answer in a few days. Together, they’ll let me talk about three of my favorite topics: telegraphing enemy attacks, hacking game systems, and using actual good Game Mastering judgment like a real, adult Game Master because, come on, you’re not a baby anymore, and I’m tired of putting your sheets through the wash every morning.

Incidentally, if you want one of your questions answered, e-mail it to ask.angry@angry.games. Don’t forget to tell me what to call you, and, for crap’s sake, keep it brief. I promise the three paragraphs of context describing your game aren’t necessary. If they are, your question probably isn’t a good one for a published column anyway.

Let’s get to it…

Gandave asks…

… me about a comment I made on the site about not mixing too many hacks in my game. Especially not my hacks. Especially not those hacks.

See, I warned Gandave not to try mixing my awesome, but half-designed idea for combat stances with my awesome, and much-better-designed initiative variant. Why would I say such a thing, wondered Gandave, and how does a Game Master know when enough hacks are too many?

Fortunately, Gandave wasn’t dumb enough to ask me what the firm, correct number of hacks actually is. That would be a stupid question. You can’t just pin something like that down to a number.

The answer, by the way, is one. You get one. One big one. So pick wisely.

I kid. Or do I? You’ll never know.

Let’s talk about hacks, and also, let’s talk about their kissing Alabama cousins: house rules. You see, a hack is just a house rule that someone else wrote and put in a pretty PDF document and maybe charged you a few bucks for on DriveThru RPG.

Of course, my hacks aren’t pretty PDFs. They’re ugly. Some of them aren’t even finished. I hope that’s always been clear. I hope I’ve always been clear enough about the level of design and testing in any hack I’ve published or proposed. The Tension Clock? Rigorous. Tested for years at more tables than just my own. That stance thing? An idea I screwed around with that seemed good, but never did anything more with. Really more of a thought experiment.

Most of my hacks, by the way, are not just me shitting out thought experiments. Most of them start as house rules. What you get is me trying to formalize something I’ve already been doing off the cuff for a while so that it’s usable enough for others.

Key words: usable enough.

Hacks and house rules are the same. They’re just modifications and add-ons to existing game systems. They can vary in size and complexity and polish, but they’re all still just variations of, “Okay, new rule guys…” or “I made crafting; you can crafting now. Here’s how it works…”

The thing is, tabletop roleplaying games are extremely complicated systems. They’re not even games. They’re incomplete. They’re engines and tools people can make games from. Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder are not games; Curse of Strahd and Abomination Vaults are games. My Homebrew Campaign I Made At Home All By Myself (Part 2): Kill The Eyeball Cultists is also a game.

That actually makes tabletop roleplaying game systems more complicated, by the way. They’re toolsets for other people to make games from, and those other people aren’t professional game designers, so the tools have to do a lot of heavy lifting without actually knowing what they’ll be lifting. That’s why they have to be pretty well put-together, balanced, and tested. Yes, even the ones you think are bad are well put-together, balanced, and tested marvels of human creative game design. Even the ones you don’t like. You may hate the current edition of one of the world’s roleplaying games, but, for its scope, complexity, and design goals, it’s amazingly well put-together and works very well. It’s not broken; stop saying that. You sound like a petulant little brat who didn’t get cookies for dinner when you do. Just say, “I don’t enjoy that game,” and play something you do enjoy like an adult.

Even worse, tabletop roleplaying games are absurdly open-ended. Players can do literally anything, right? Further, the game’s world is supposed to react like it’s real. Realish anyway. Those are, like, the key selling points. They make the fantasy work. They make roleplaying work.

“What would I do if I were this character and I found myself in this situation,” only works if you can do anything you can imagine and guess how the world is going to react.

It’s pretty much impossible to pull that off with any finite, functional, practical ruleset, so you need a sentient, conscious, non-artificial brain to make judgment calls. Something is always going to come up that the rules don’t cover, or don’t cover well, or that the rules cover nonsensically. You’re always going to have rules grinding against each other in ways no one saw coming. That’s where your Game Mastering good judgment comes in.

Unfortunately, you are not a professional game designer, so making good calls is hard. Fortunately, it’s just five people pretending to be elves for shits and giggles. There are no real, human lives on the line and cash prizes to award, so the stakes literally could not be lower.

But judgment calls are still a major pain in the craw. If you care about fairness, the good of the game, and your players’ engagement, which most Game Masters do, it’s a heavy responsibility.

By the way, most Game Masters do care about fairness, the good of the game, and player engagement. Malicious Game Masters are stupidly rare. So are malicious players. We need to stop treating them like boogedy bears lurking behind every tree in the Forest of Roleplaying Gamingdom and then trying to build failsafes. Every roleplaying game already has two perfect failsafes here.

1. Screw you; get the hell out of my game room.
2. Screw your crappy game; I’m leaving.

Stop ruining your designs by trying to prevent malice. It helps no one, really, but it makes your designs suck.

Sorry… personal pet peeve. Back to my point.

Judgment calls take a lot out of you, the Game Master, and they pull a frigging drag chute on your game. They halt the action while you figure out what to do. Judgment calls also trade on trust and expose you to social conflict. Whenever you, the Game Master, make a judgment call, you’re banking on your players to trust your judgment over the perceived perfect impartiality of an objective ruleset. Now, you and I know this crap is as low-stakes as it comes, but players care. Actually, the better you do your job, the more they care. If your judgment means the players take a loss, suffer a setback, or make a tradeoff, you can get an emotional reaction that overpowers trust. Especially if you’re running a low-trust game, like, say, a game for strangers on the Internet. Mix in differences in play motivation and flavors of investment, and you have a recipe for conflict even if no one is actually being a dick about anything. You don’t need malice to have a fight.

The fewer judgment calls you, as a Game Master, have to make, the easier it is to keep your game running and the better off you are.

I guess that conclusion is pretty obvious and didn’t need 780 words of supporting argument leading into it, but Game Mastering is the art of overexplaining the obvious to the oblivious, so I’m just doing my job.

Back to hacks and house rules. You see, hacks and house rules pretty much guarantee you’re going to have to make some judgment calls. Why? Because they’re patches and add-ons and modifications to very complex systems whose very nature already demands some judgment calls. If a well-designed tabletop roleplaying game system is one of those clockwork orrery models with all the planets and moons spinning out their precise, balletic, cosmic dance, a hack is basically attaching a painted foam craft ball to a battery-powered LEGO brand Technic motor to represent Nemesis, the Dark Star, and then firing Nerf brand bullet-balls at the whole thing because Nemesis destabilizes the asteroid belt and planetary impacts increase every time it passes by.

“Guys, I made a hack for an evil star that causes asteroids!”

And, look, even if you’re a master of clockwork yourself and can work with orrery models, there is still no such thing as a complete hack. Every hack is going to run into some weird interaction with something. Moreover, as much as I believe most roleplaying games are pretty well-designed, even the ones I hate, I also don’t think they’re actually intricate examples of clockwork wonder made by the master gnomes of Zurich. Roleplaying games are pretty shaky things. Every hack just makes them shakier. Eventually, you’re going to need some duct tape and WD 40 brand spray lubricant.

Now imagine two hacks. Two hacks to the same, already complex subsystem. Each hack is grinding against the original system, and they’re both grinding against each other. If those hacks weren’t designed by a master gnome and designed to work together, something’s going to need some fixing or forcing, and, when it does, it’s going to happen at the table, while the game’s already in progress, and the person doing the fixing or forcing ain’t even the person who made the rules in the first place, and they probably aren’t a master gnome either.

Let’s say, for example, you totally changed your initiative system to let players make strategic choices based on when they go and even impact the initiative system by their choices. Then, let’s say, you also let players constantly shift bonuses around their character sheet by adopting different combat stances to let them strategically prioritize survival or offense. Add both of those to what is already the most mathematically complex and supposedly most precisely mathematically balanced subsystem in one of the most complex mass-market roleplaying games on the market, and there is no telling what’s going to happen. Even I don’t know. But I do know that, when it happens, it’s going to happen while you’re inside of it.

Now, this is all high analysis, in-principle crap, right? Let me balance it all out with some practical reality.

Nothing I said above actually has to matter. Tabletop roleplaying games are literally the lowest-stakes things you will do in your entire life unless you stupidly decide to try to get paid doing them. It’s just something you do for fun with friends. If you’re fine making lots of janky calls to fix interactions between jank-ass game mechanics on the fly, ignore everything I said above. It really doesn’t matter, and probably nothing’s going to go wrong, even with the jankiest of my jank-ass Gedankenhacks. I’m pretty careful about putting electric fences around my interactions.

But fixing jank on the fly is the price of admission for hacking and house-ruling. You’re always gonna have to do it, and the number of times you’ll have to do it increases exponentially with every new hack or house rule. At least when the hacks and house rules rub each other or when they touch the same subsystems.

So, really, ask yourself how many hacks you actually need, and when you ask that question, there are two things to keep in mind.

First, think about what each hack is doing on the broadest, highest level. My awesome initiative hack, for example, and my stance hack actually both do the same high-level thing. Each gives the players an extra kind of strategic decision to make that adds some emergent depth to the combat engine. The thing is that combat is already big and complicated and asks players to make a lot of decisions, at least when it comes to one of the world’s roleplaying games. The problem I’m solving isn’t a lack of decisions; it’s that the players don’t ever have to make a consequential decision between two conflicting, strategic goals. If you read both of those articles carefully, you’ll see me saying exactly that.

Honestly, you really only need one such decision to matter for just a few rounds in most combat. Meanwhile, most players already struggle under the weight of the choices they do have, so how many more do you want to pile onto their plates? One is more than enough.

The second thing to consider when asking yourself how many hacks you actually, truly need is that system mechanics don’t matter much to how the game plays. I know everyone fights me on this because everyone loves one system and hates another, but that’s people not understanding their own opinions and experiences. I can run a great game in any system. I run systems I hate a lot. I don’t want to, of course, because it’s less fun for me to build content and building content is my jam, which is why I homebrew everything, but the worst system I’ve ever run seriously in good faith — Torchbearer — still gave my group and me twelve weeks of good time. And, before you say it, no, that isn’t because I just ignored the system and did what I wanted. That ain’t how Angry do. When I play and run games, I’m lawful-scrupulous. I RAW-dog my players, dawg, as the kids do not now say nor have they ever said.

Systems don’t matter.

But let me put this another way: if a system isn’t already fun to run and play, no hack will save it. If a system is already fun to run and play, no hack is necessary. Hacks are light enhancements to already fun games. They’re sprinkles on top of the ooey-gooey chocolate fudge brownie sundae that already is your delicious system of choice. If each sprinkle comes with that whole judgment call price-of-admission thing, when does the price become too much for some frigging sprinkles?

It always surprises people to learn I don’t hack my own game to hell because I really do love playing with mechanics and making hacks, and I’m pretty flipping good at it. I do end up piling on the house rules a little thick sometimes, but they’re small, isolated things that don’t rub against each other. My combat engine is my system’s combat engine, but maybe for one change, and usually not even that. Apart from some house rule sprinkles I’ve built over a long time and have smoothed out gradually, I use the Tension Clock, Complications, and the various outgrowths of it into Wilderness Mode and Town Mode, all of which I will be sharing with you, and all of which you can trust to work together because of the years of rigorous testing of the core mechanics at lots of tables other than my own, and because they’re all designed to work together.

Generally, if I get the hacking yen, or if I want to test a hack, I’ll add one to my game and go for a few weeks to see how it works. That lets me get the obvious judgment calls made and identify the grindy bits so I can dance around them. Then, once I’m comfortable that my one hack is running as smoothly as a Lego-powered Nerf gun in a planetarium possibly can, I’ll add one second hack. I treat house rules the same. Because all of my hacks are just overengineered house rules created by a former accountant turned jumped-up blogger who thinks he’s a game designer.

Over the years, I’ve built a list in my head of hacks and house rules that turned out to be great tastes that tasted great together, so I’ll sometimes risk dropping them into future campaigns from the get-go. But even that’s kind of rare except for very small things.

You see, I treat every campaign as unstable at launch, no matter how well I know the system and the players I’m running for, and I treat every hack and house-rule like a Lego-powered Nerf gun in a planetarium.

Now, remember everything I said, because in a few days, I’m going to use all this to talk about a hack that isn’t a hack — telegraphing actions — and what happens when you mix it with a crazy-ass initiative system. But that’ll all just be a preamble because, really, I want an excuse to tell you how I approach telegraphing enemy actions in combat, which is the most important non-hack of mine you should absolutely add to every game.

Except the Tension Clock. Isn’t that thing awesome?