This here’s a load of bullshit. That’s because this here’s my monthly Random Bullshit column. Once a month, I get back in touch with my blogger roots by writing whatever ranty, rambly screed I want. What follows is a load of stream-of-consciousness crap. You’ve been warned.

Today’s ranty, rambly screed is about hacking and why y’all need to stop hacking the hell out of every game you run.

And my current mood is pissed the hell off.

Stop Hacking… Mic Drop

Stop hacking your frigging games.

That’s it. That’s the conclusion. If you’re the sort who just takes my advice on faith, you’re done. You can skip the next 5000 words. But you’re a gamer. Which means you’re a frigging contrarian. Even when you voluntarily visit a website purposely seeking gaming advice from someone who has never once steered you wrong and whose comments and feedback are loaded with remarks like, “man, this shit sounded crazy when Angry said it, but I tried it and within three weeks, my games were infinitely better,” you still won’t trust me.

So settle in.

Like most Random Bullshit columns, this one exists so I can declare myself the hands-down winner of a bunch of fights.

You see, between reading your comments and e-mails and lurking on various forums and Reddits and watching various YouTube channels and just watching my supporters yammer away in the Angry Discord Server, I’m exposed to lots of wrong-headed gamers saying lots of wrong things. And over the years, I’ve learned — finally… mostly — that I can’t waste my time trying to stop everyone from being wrong about everything everywhere on the Internet. Even if I limit myself to just pretend elf crap.

So, like a grungy bath rug, I just absorb that shit. It sinks into the swampy morass of my mind where it gurgles and churns around. Occasionally, some of it clumps together and a pattern emerges. Then, one day, I scream, “If only these idiots just understood this one simple idea; then everyone would stop being stupid about all this stuff!”

And that’s how most Bullshit columns are born.

Actually, there is one more step in the process. A few days after I’ve realized the key to ending a dozen different idiotic gamer arguments lies in one simple idea, I usually encounter someone saying something tenuously related to the whole thing. Usually in my Discord server. And then I’ll absolutely frigging explode at them. I’ll unleash the sum of all my rage and hate that’s been building up for months of my not screaming at every idiot who deserves it.

And when it’s all over and I’m profusely apologizing in a desperate attempt to get the hapless victim to stop crying — or worse, canceling their financial support — someone will point out that if I could find a less abusive way to phrase the whole thing with fewer curses, it might make a good article.

The one simple thing you idiots need crowbarred into your craniums today is that hacking roleplaying game systems is a terrible idea and you shouldn’t ever do it.

And to Angry Discordian Proselus, I’m sorry I made you cry. Feel free to skip this column. You’ve already heard the whole thing.

Three Arguments Down, A Million Billion to Go

This is about hacking roleplaying game systems. And how you don’t get hacking. How no one does. And how if you did, you’d never ever do it.

It’s also about how I came to realize that the word Hacking means something different to all y’all than it does to me. And that just made the arguments worse. Again, sorry Proselus.

But this screed’s a response to three specific things people just won’t stop saying. So, to give this shit some much-needed focus, I’m going to list, specifically, the three things people keep saying that piss me off about this whole hacking thing in the first place.

Angry says you should hack the hell out of everything that doesn’t align perfectly with True Game Master [or your inferior but preferred style of Game Mastery]

This one shows up a lot in comments and Discord discussions. It starts with someone saying something like, “so, I’m running Orcslayer and the initiative system is weird and doesn’t work with the True Game Mastery approach. What should I do?” And then some mouthbreather says, “well, Angry says…”

No. He doesn’t. You’re wrong. And I wish you’d all restrict yourselves to giving your own opinions instead of trying — and utterly fucking failing — to give mine. Seriously, stop speaking for me. The only one qualified to say what I said is me. And you ain’t me.

I know I said at the start of the True Game Mastery series that if the game mechanics ever got in the way of True Game Mastery, you should ignore the rules and run things the True Game Master way, but I wasn’t telling y’all to rip out or rewrite huge chunks of your gaming systems or to Frankenstein in compatible bits from other systems.

Let me be clear, True Game Masters don’t waste their time rewriting their systems. I’ll explain why, and what they do instead, below.

Game designers should justify their designs in the rulebook and provide detailed instructions for hacking their games…

There’s an argument I get into a lot. It goes like this…

Angry: This is the correct way to do a thing and what’s funny is the game designers expect you to do it that way.
Some Dumbass: But that’s not what the rules say. If the designers expect you to do it that way, they should have put it…
Angry: Let me stop you right there. Look on page eleventy-six of your Master Player’s Guide. There in the second column. See that heading that says How to Handle this Exact Thing? It’s right there!
Some Dumbass: … okay… yeah… but what I’m saying is the designers should have explained why the rule exists and how important it is. If they’d done that, I wouldn’t have ignored it.

“The designers should be fully transparent about their designs and tell me how to rewrite the rules to my liking” is basically another version of the same fight. And it’s that argument that came up in my Discord server. Again, Proselus, I am deeply sorry.

Now, I’m going to explain precisely why the game designers shouldn’t write their rules with hacking in mind below. But I also want to address just how impractical — and frankly egotistical — this argument is at its core.

The professional freaking game designers — yes, I know I don’t show a lot of respect for the current crop of overpromoted designer-come-lately hacks running things at certain game companies lately, but even Crawford is a professional game designer and he’s a lot more qualified to design games than two thirds of the gamers on the net — the team of professional game designers that used their years of education and experience to design, test, iterate, and design a giant-ass, complex, interconnected system of rules over several years of development time built what is, to them, in their professional experience, the best damned game system they could under whatever constraints they were laboring under. And some basement dwelling Monday-morning game design quarterback is demanding those designers spend at least as many pages justifying their designs, showing their work, and telling everyone how to rip them apart and ruin them.

With all due respect: get over yourself.

The designers have every right to expect you to play the game they designed. They’re selling instruction manuals. They absolutely should not bloat the page count and double the cost with a bunch of design essays about why they’re right and how to ruin their work. And thinking they can tell you in a couple of hundred pages what it took them years and years of hard work and experimentation to master shows an appalling lack of respect for the delicate art of game design.

If it’s worth putting in the rulebook, it’s important. It makes the game work. If you take it out, the game won’t work. The optional parts are labeled as such. There’s a whole frigging chapter of optional rules in the D&D DMG.

Besides, most of you don’t even read the rulebooks. That’s why I keep surprising you by revealing the brilliant stuff I’m saying is mostly already in there. So it’s not like you’d read two hundred extra pages of design essays.

That said, some of you do actually read this stuff out of interest or a desire to learn. And that’s why most designers have blogs, social media feeds, and YouTube channels. And it’s also why sites like mine exist. The shit you want is out there. But it’s where it belongs. Go hunt it down.

So, I’m thinking about hacking my game…

I admit this one ain’t really an argument; it’s just a phrase. But it’s a phrase that really frosts my ass. Because I know what’s coming next is some dice mechanic or overly abstract game mechanical minigame system or some shit like that.

Why does that piss me off? Well, there’s two reasons…

First, thinking — and talking — about a hack is the worst way to design it. I’ll tell you below the best way to design it. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t involve a bunch of thinking, talking, pontificating, naval-gazing, discussing, and mathing.

Writers say there’s two kinds of people: people who tell you about the book they’re going to write and authors. The same’s true of game designers.

Second, people who claim to be Game Masters these days spend way more time tinkering and puttering in the mechanical weeds than they do prepping and running games. Hell, most can’t even run a simple, homebrewed Encounter without some bespoke mechanical minigame to handle things.

And that shit’s got to stop.

It’s time for all y’all to stop hacking.

Hacking Defined and Redefined

Despite the heading, I’m not ready to tell you what the word Hacking actually means. The definition’s actually an important plot point later. And I assume that all my readers are sophisticated enough to have a vague idea of what Hacking is in the context of tabletop roleplaying game systems.

Instead, I’m going to start by saying that for Game Masters and Scenario Designers — and you’d better know what that phrase means — Hacking is a desperate last resort. It’s the last step in a protracted attempt to solve a problem when all else has failed.

And that’s why Angry did not tell you to hack your game into line with his advice. He admits his advice is sometimes incompatible with some tabletop roleplaying game systems. And he advises that if you like such a system, you should do your best to follow Angry’s advice and just accept the foibles of your system due jury are gonna get in the way. Every system gets in the way sometimes. It happens.

That is also why Angry doesn’t want the designers telling people how to hack their game systems. Designers should not not imply in any way that Game Masters and Scenario Designers are expected to ever Hack a game system. And that’s also why Angry doesn’t want to hear about the Hack you’re working on.

That is also why, by the way, Angry doesn’t hack his own games. He runs his home games pretty by-the-book. And when he publishes hacks and explains hacking on his site, he’s doing so in his capacity as an independent Game Designer. He’s giving you tools and he’s also teaching you about game design. He ain’t in any way implying he expects anyone to hack anything themselves.

To understand why — and to understand what Angry and other True Game Masters do when they run into a problem — Angry — that is to say I — I’m going to take you back to the halcyon days of my gaming youth and illustrate…

The Life Cycle of a Game Hack

Cast your mind back to an age before the Internet. There were no advice blogs, no social media feeds, no YouTube channels, and no accessible marketplaces choked to death with ten thousand pay-what-you-will hacks. Back then, if you had a question for a designer, you sent a physical letter with a thing called a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the address on the back of the book through the actual mail or else you wrote to a columnist in a magazine and prayed that, in two months, when the next printed issue finally arrived in your mailbox, your question would be answered.

Back then, many households didn’t have computers and printers. If you wanted to write anything up for your game, you did that shit by hand. Or a half-hour at a time in your school’s or library’s computer lab and paid a nickel per printed page. Or you borrowed your mother’s mechanical typewriter.

In other words, game content was hard to get, answers were weeks or months away, and writing anything yourself took a lot of work.

Now, imagine you’re running an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition game for your friends one day when suddenly something doesn’t work. The Group Initiative Variant Rule from the Player’s Handbook you’ve been having great fun with suddenly fails. In the specific encounter you’re running, sticking with the rules gives a result that doesn’t make sense. So, you do what any Dungeon Master would do in your position, you overrule that shit.

“Sure, Adam,” you say, “you can skip your turn and take it later in the round because in this particular case it doesn’t make sense you’d go first anyway.”

Done and done. Everything’s fine. Play proceeds and everyone has a blast. But two weeks later, Danielle suddenly says, “remember two weeks ago when you let Adam hold his turn until later in the round? Can I do that here? It’d be really helpful.” And you’re like, “sure, whatever.”

Later that same session, as the party battles a villainous wizard and his goons, you realize the spellcaster could benefit from the same shit.

And so, at the start of the next play session, you say something like, “okay, new houserule, after you declare your action and initiative is rolled, you can hold the action until later in the initiative count. You can’t change your action — there’s no time — and you can’t interrupt someone else’s turn, but you can hold your action until a later count. Got it?”

The rule seems to work for a while, but one day, a question arises about how movement related to the action works — can you delay a charge? — and if you can split the movement from the action. You make a call and then adjust the houserule appropriately. And as questions arise, you keep tweaking the rule. And eventually, you write it down. Maybe you even type it out on your mom’s typewriter like a certain Angry kid used to.

One day, you’re thinking about your Holding Actions houserule and realize it opens up some other possibilities. There’s rules for receiving a charge already, for instance, if you’ve got a pole weapon. Fine and dandy. But anyone should be able to receive a charge if they’ve got a longer weapon than the charger. Maybe without the double damage that pole weapons get. Speaking of that, if you’re an archer and ready to fire, you should be able to react when someone breaks cover. Really, there’s a bunch of actions characters should be able to set up. You can’t beat someone to the punch if they’ve got a better modified initiative than you, sure, but… there’s definitely something to this…

And so, you scribble some notes. Then, you break out the typewriter and the Player’s Handbook so you can get the wording right. Clack, clack, clack…

And that’s how a hack is born. How it’s supposed to be born.

Hacking Undefined

You might have noticed I called out three terms in my characteristic style. I mentioned Overruling and Houseruling and then, at the end, I mentioned Hacking, but only briefly. And that’s because Hacking is a relatively new term for modifying roleplaying games. And it’s swallowed up several other words.

And that’s the thing I didn’t understand.

See, I rail against Hacking a lot, especially when others say, “Angry says to Hack your game.” But whenever I get into fights over it, there’s a language barrier that makes it impossible for me to explain myself. Because I remember a word that no one else does, Houseruling. And everyone else thinks Hacking means everything.

Now, I don’t argue semantics and I don’t lose my shit when language evolves. I understand language is descriptive and not prescriptive. But I’ve also read my Nietzsche and I took him very seriously when he said, “literal language is tired, dead metaphor.” So I do tend to rebel when words swallow up other words and take nuance with them.

Consequently, I’m resurrecting a dead word today, inventing another, and stealing their meanings back from the word Hacking. And if you don’t want to risk excommunication from the Angrican Church, you’ll update your internal dictionary accordingly.

Hacking versus Houseruling

Once upon a time, every Dungeon Master worth his screen had a list — often on notebook paper in a binder — of his Houserules. And they’re precisely what they sound like. “When you play in my house, you will follow my rules.” Houserules were changes that the Dungeon Master had made to his system of choice. And they often got shared around game stores, magazines, and convention floors. Some became so commonplace they provided the basis for official rules in future editions.

Dungeon Masters of a certain age will remember that back in the day, it was deriguer to give freshly-minted player-characters the maximum number of hit points possible instead of making players roll and then live with a character who’d die from sneezing too hard.

The thing about Houserules was that they were pretty organic. Most of them grew from Dungeon Masters getting sick of dealing with this or that gaming bugbear. Often, they started with the Dungeon Master making a call and then saying, “from now on, that’s how shit works.”

Such calls are what I’m now calling Overruling. And that’s what happens when a Game Master chooses not to follow the rules as written in some specific situation. And I’m purposely distinguishing that from Ruling because I want to distinguish between two different kinds of judgement calls. A Game Master makes a Ruling when the rules are incomplete, contradictory, or don’t cover some weird corner case. A Game Master Overrules when they deliberate modify or ignore a rule that exists because it’d give undesirable results.

Consider the young Dungeon Master whose best friend is playing AD&D 2E for the first time and gets disheartened when his starting fighter has just one hit point. The Dungeon Master lets him reroll and he gets another one. Then another. Finally, exasperated, the Dungeon Master says, “you know what, just give yourself 10 hit points; it’s cool.” That’s Overruling.

Most Houserules were just Overrules that kept coming up and were worth writing down and declaring canon. Or that just worked.

That’s just the sort of thing Game Masters used to do all the time. Many still do. They Overrule the game and then write Houserules. And biggest, most famous example of a series of Overrules becoming Houserules is the entire Pathfinder Core Rulebook. The first one. Note Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

See, once upon a time, Paizo Publishing was official licensed by Wizards of the Coast to publish their Dragon and Dungeon magazines. At the time, Jason Bulhman was running a heavily Houseruled personal game of Dungeons & Dragons v.3.5. He’d done a bunch of tweaking, streamlining, and rebalancing. And then WotC released the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons and said third-party publishers weren’t allowed to exist anymore. So Bulhman went to his bosses at Paizo with his big ole binder of Houserules and said, “I’ve basically got a half-written roleplaying game in here; let’s finish it and publish it.”

And that perfectly illustrates when Houseruling becomes Hacking.

When people first started using the word Hacking in the tabletop roleplaying game space, they were usually talking about either large-scale, formalized modifications to existing roleplaying game systems or else full-on standalone roleplaying game systems based heavily on other published systems. Dungeon World is an Apocalypse World hack, Pathfinder is a Dungeons & Dragons v.3.5 hack, and The Black Hack is an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hack.

That said, hacks need not be standalone systems. All the crafting systems and mass combat engines and alternative mana-based magic systems and social combat systems on DriveThruRPG? Those are hacks. Hell, the things I’ve called hacks on my own site are, indeed, hacks too. They’re formalized chunks of actual game-design — amateur, independent, or otherwise — meant to slot into an existing game like a mod into Skyrim.

And it’s the attempt at formalized design and completeness that, to me, screams Hack. It’s the intent to do more than patch over a wonky bit of game, but to formally redesign or extend the design of a game or one of its subsystems.

Hacking versus Homebrewing

I gotta pause here and distinguish another kind of content creation from what I call Hacking. Because there’s another kind of roleplaying game mod you can buy or download pretty readily these days: new races, new classes, new monsters, new spells, new magical items, new feats, new vehicles, new weapons, new armor. And that shit, to me, falls into the category of Homebrew content.

Homebrewing’s writing new game content that’s mostly compatible with a system’s published rules. No modifications required. Homebrewing rarely involves much in the way of game mechanics. Oh, sure, a new class or monster might include a mechanical special ability or a new kind of resource to manage, but that shit’s usually pretty modular. Except when you’re actually using the class or monster or whatever, any mechanics involved just aren’t gonna come up.

And this plays into the important — but fuzzy, descriptive, and totally not bright — distinction between the two kinds of stuff you find in the pages of tabletop roleplaying game books: Mechanics and Content. Mechanics comprise the rules and systems. Content comprise all the classes, races, spells, equipment, monsters, traps, magical items, feats, and skills as well as the encounters and adventures themselves.

Expanding the Official Angrican Lexicon

So now I’ve defined a bunch of terms — in the standard fuzzy, descriptive way all game design concepts must be defined — I’ve defined a bunch of terms to help me explain what I mean when I say y’all need to stop Hacking games and the designers shouldn’t help you.

When you’re running a game and make a call, you’re Ruling or Overruling. And you do that in response to a wonky situation at the game table that needs you to actually be a Game Master and make a call.

Houserules are informal — and usually small — standing modifications you impose on your game. And you do so because you’ve discovered your game just works better with your Houserules in place. And while you usually end up writing them down or typing them up eventually — and you occasionally tweak them — they’re usually pretty informal. And they definitely don’t constitute major modifications or require the invention of major game mechanical systems or subsystems.

Hacks are extensive and formalized modifications to a game’s mechanics. They’re either major modifications of existing game subsystems or they’re entirely new subsystems that interact with the game’s other systems. In some cases, they’re entire, standalone systems. But whatever form they take, they’re attempts at actual, honest-to-the-gods Game Design. They’re an attempt to build formal game mechanical elements.

And that ain’t part of your job description.

Game Masters Aren’t Hackers

I know it’s a shock to hear me of all people take a hardass stance against hacking. Some of you will call me a giant hypocrite because I’ve written all sorts of hacks and I’ve shown you my work. Others will think I’m an elitist jerk telling Game Masters to know their place and leave the real Game Design to their betters.

Look, I’m not telling you, personally, not to hack your game. If you think you’re up to the task and you’ve got a good hack in you, by all means build that shit. I mean it. Hell, I’m begging you to do it. Build that shit. As in, stop talking endlessly about the hacks you’re thinking about, put some frigging game mechanics on paper, and take them to your damned table already. Hack your freaking heart out. I ain’t saying you can’t, I ain’t saying you’re wrong, and I certainly can’t stop you.

What I’m saying is that Hacking is not Game Mastering. It ain’t part of the job. Game Masters aren’t expected to Hack games and they shouldn’t think they are. Hacking discussion should not be confused with Game Mastering discussion. And no Game Master should ever be told that Hacking is the solution to any problem that crops up at the game table.

A Game Master can go through their whole Game Mastering career without ever Hacking anything. And should.

And I say that for several reasons…

Hacking Sucks

Hacking — the formal design of game mechanics — isn’t running games. It’s not what Game Masters sign up for. It ain’t easy and it ain’t fun. Not to most people anyway. And even the people who do find it fun know it’s a different kind of fun from running games.

The simple truth is most Game Masters don’t want to spend their time designing and typing up Game Mechanics.

The current glut of Hacks and Hackers leaves lots of Game Masters — and wannabe Game Masters — thinking that Hacking is part of the job. And the fact that most content creators online don’t distinguish between things like running games, building content, and designing hacks doesn’t help. Nor would it help if system designers started weighing down their books with design essays and hacking tutorials.

It’s reached the point that the first thing most Game Masters hear when they ask for advice is “just hack the game!”

Don’t like the game you’re playing? Just redesign the thing; it’s that simple.

That’s an asinine response and the fact that I’m the only who recognizes it as such just proves my point.

Hackers Make Bad Game Masters

I know I’m gonna lose lots of you here, but the fact is that Hacking wrecks you as a Game Master. When Hacking becomes your go-to solution, then, at best, you waste a lot of time over-solving simple problems and, at worst, you totally lose your ability to handle wonky game situations on the fly.

Am I overstating this? I don’t think so. I’ve had to write the same articles about basic action adjudication something like a dozen freaking times just to convince you that you don’t need mechanical minigames to handle simple chase sequences. Or, the gods forbid, an encounter with quicksand.

The problem is Hackers must necessarily focus on the game’s mechanics and consequently, they tend to overvalue — or at least overemphasize — that shit. Overruling and Houseruling are reactive. They’re responses to in game events and thus represent a Game Master putting the feel and flow of the game over everything else. Even over the game’s mechanics. Which is how True Game Masters think. Hackers though usually think that any problem that arises represents a failure of the game’s mechanics and they’ve got to be fixed.

In the heart of every Hacker lurks the dark belief that if they could just design the perfect set of game mechanics, they’d never again need to make a judgment call. But in the roleplaying gaming space, there is no more toxic belief than the idea that Game Mastering judgement is a bug and not a feature.

Ian Malcolm on Discipline

Y’all remember Ian Malcolm’s best lines from Jurassic Park, right? You can sing along when I say, “life… ah… life finds a way” or “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should,” right? But do you remember the bit about karate masters? Of course not. Because that was in the book. Goldblum didn’t say it, Crichton did.

See, that thing about scientists doing what they could without worrying about whether they should was part of a larger speech in the book. Malcolm argues that acquiring any kind of power should be hard so that, as people acquire that power, they also acquire discipline and respect for that power. Hence, it’s pretty rare for someone who spends their entire life studying karate to lose his temper and kill his wife whereas any idiot who just buys a gun is prone to a fit of violence when he catches his wife cheating.

This ain’t a gun rights thing. Don’t come at me. And it makes me sick that I even have to say that.

The same thing about discipline and responsibility applies to Hacking. Or, more broadly, to Game Design. Because Hacking is Game Design. It’s an art. It’s a skill. It’s a discipline. And doing it well requires experience and practice. Game Masters who stumble into Hacking by turning Overrules into Houserules and then expanding them until they are Hacking without knowing there’s a word for it have actually acquired some crucial skills and discipline in the process. Game Masters who naturally evolve into Hackers learn to consider, first and foremost, the play experience at the table. And they’ve learned to design the smallest, most elegant solutions possible. And they’ve learned to watch their designs in play and to tweak, test, and iterate.

Without even trying, such Game Masters learn some of the most important — and most often forgotten — lessons in Game Design.

Meanwhile, people who just start full-on Hacking tend toward elaborate designs with a heavy focus on mechanical abstraction. They do most of their work away from the table. They think of testing as something to do when they’re done instead of when they’re just starting out. And most of them never quite finish their designs because they don’t know when to stop designing.

Hell, I know lots of so-called Game Masters who spend more time alone at a desk designing Hacks than they do actually running games.

And sometimes, I’m one of them.

But at least I know it’s wrong. When I find myself spending too much in the design lab and no time at the table, I force myself back behind the screen. Because I know I’m a much better designer when I’m designing in response to a game than when I’m theorycrafting based on hypotheticals and tinkering with mechanics.

In the end, that’s why I don’t want the designers filling their Game Mastery Manuals with design essays and hacking advice. And why I want you all to spend less time thinking about your next hack and more time running games and just handling shit. Because otherwise, the end result’s a bunch of really shitty wannabe Game Designers flooding DriveThruRPG with crap while there’s no one left running actual games.

And that’s why someone had to yell at Proselus.