Nothing New Under the Sun

The English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once famously remarked that the history of European philosophy consisted of a series of footnotes to Plato. By this, Whitehead did not mean that Plato had said everything that could ever be said about philosophy. Rather, he meant that Plato had set the terms for all subsequent discussions of European philosophy to such a degree that even those who disagreed with his conclusions were nonetheless thinking within a framework that he had created. I think something similar could be said of RPGs – to wit: the history of roleplaying games consists of a series of house rules to OD&D. 

We can debate the broader merits of this point of view another time. For the moment, my very specific point concerns the extent to which there's any point in creating "new" rules for a roleplaying game. At this point in history, a half-century after Arneson and Gygax forever changed the world, I feel very safe in saying that it's exceedingly unlikely that any game designer, no matter how clever, will come up with a rule/mechanic that hasn't already been conceived by many other designers before him. I'll go even further and state that it's exceedingly unlikely that any game designer, no matter how clever, will come up with a rule/mechanic that hadn't already been conceived within the first decade of the hobby. 

Given that, is there really any point, other than vanity, for a game designer to try and "innovate?" Hasn't nearly every possible configuration of rules been tried before? More to the point, haven't some configurations been found to be easier to learn and employ and thus more widely understood and accepted? Further, hasn't the configuration first introduced by Dungeons & Dragons fifty years ago – class + abstract experience-based advancement – been shown to be, by far, the clear winner in terms of widespread acceptance among players? One needs only to look at how commonplace D&D-derived systems are in computer and video games to see the truth of this.

Which brings me to Secrets of sha-Arthan, the exotic science fantasy roleplaying game I've been working on for the last two and a half years. While I've made a great deal of progress in developing its setting, its rules remain a moving target. Initially, I intended them to be a slight modification of those of Old School Essentials, which is itself simply a restatement of the 1981 Basic and Expert rules of Dungeons & Dragons. However, as I continued to tinker with it, I began to think, as no doubt many game designers before have, that I could reinvent the wheel. Slowly, my small changes to OSE started to become bigger and, with each change, the rules started to become more complicated and farther from the simplicity that has always attracted me to D&D and its descendants and clones.

Now I find myself wondering: should I just return to something closer to Old School Essentials? Certainly there will need to be some changes to accommodate the unique elements of the setting, but, by and large, Secrets of sha-Arthan is a game very much in the mold of Dungeons & Dragons and Empire of the Petal Throne (whose rules are themselves obviously derived from OD&D). Is there, aside from my own vanity, any need for the game's rules to deviate very much from the well-established template of D&D? Over the decades, I've played plenty of RPGs whose rules differed from those of D&D in ways both large and small, but how many of them, really, needed to differ so much?

I should add, by the way, that this critique applies even to many later iterations of Dungeons & Dragons itself, some of which make changes to the structure of OD&D that, to my mind, are unnecessary and even detrimental to play (I'm looking at you AD&D and your initiative system – among other things) but were likely introduced because someone believed he had a "great idea" to "improve" the rules. Yet, at least if my own experience is any guide, very few people ever used the AD&D initiative system as written, including Gary Gygax, preferring instead for the simpler roll-1d6-higher-goes-first of B/X. I don't think such people did so because they were stupid; rather, they did so, because they recognized that speed and intelligibility were more important than some abstract notion of a "better" rule. 

Nevertheless, the urge to tinker, to try and improve on a rules template that has stood the test of time is strong. It's a very difficult urge to resist, yet I am coming close to the perhaps inevitable conclusion that, aside from a few setting-specific tweaks, there's really no point in trying to one up D&D, because I will not be able to do so. Wouldn't my time be better spent in developing the setting and making it as compelling and accessible as possible?