Please take a moment to watch the following video before continuing. I find it to be one of the most perfectly executed presentations ever made, just like most of their other videos, so you might want to at least take a look to their channel if not subscribing right away.
What makes TGTSNBN such an interesting case study is the fact that it isn’t a pure tabletop RPG, one that just needs a rulebook with descriptions and explanations. It is so much more: a community game with facebook groups that need their own moderating, a tabletop game that needs crystal-clear rules, an online browser game that has features that affect how players gain experience, skills and resources. So let’s take it step by step and see how the designers tackled each of those three game aspects.
One could accuse me for being overly polite when stating that the facebook group rules were a rushed and – as of the time of posting – incomplete effort. At first there seemingly was no need for them and since the designers were occupied with matters that they considered more important, they just ignored the rules part. It took a surprisingly long 4 month period before the need for group moderation was made apparent to everyone. Offensive language and out-of-game player incidents as a result of in-game behavior taken out of the game context made the atmosphere unbearably heavy to the point that an unofficial two-day pause was made by the players .
Unfortunately those would not be just a few incidents. Along the years more followed and they all unfolded in the same way. A player or group of players would misbehave by ignoring or abusing rule wording, the moderators would punish them with temporary bans from the groups and the designers would then follow up with an announcement stating that future behavior of the same nature would not be tolerated, while also presenting each incident as a great opportunity to test the game’s limits during beta.
And yet more incidents, even more severe, kept happening. Only because strict rules were never adopted as a response to said incidents. Instead of trying to set specific restrictive rules and consequences for breaking them, the designers decided to handle each incident in a case by case basis. No solid rules. No common ground. Group descriptions were changed from time to time but nothing major, nothing that targeted the root of the problem. The changes were never based on player behavior and past knowledge or feedback. Just random decisions that most of the time made no sense.
If group rules were really based on design specifications, then conflicting rules or “game profiles” would not still exist. An example of this would be the fact that it is currently perfectly normal to kill another player’s character during a session, just with an in-game button press, but it is forbidden to even call someone ‘idiot’ in the in-game group.
The aforementioned lack of design goals was also obviously etched to the game’s rulebook. That is after we finally received it. At first we were playing our character’s abilities by basing them just on their names.
The first version of the game guide contained many mistakes that were immediately spotted by players. The designer’s response on fixing those errors and releasing a new version was not so quick though. It was only given to us after two more months and only contained fixes on things that the players offered as feedback and lacked any explanation for new game mechanics that had been introduced in the meantime.
This not only confused players by itself but also raised another level of player annoyance: player favoritism. Errata would be given to players that worked with or frequented places that the designers did. Player A just knew that an errata was needed but when player B told him the errata that was unofficially and privately given to them by the designers, player A would get enraged and lose trust towards not only the designers but the player B too because he and many more kept getting answers, while player A was kept in the dark. What was worse was that these errata were never added to the rulebook, another aspect of the game that sadly was not being kept updated as it should have been, especially for a game supposedly in beta.
And even though most of those errata and fixes became widely known through the community there were some rules that were very important but needed to be known only by few: game master’s training rules. There was no separate rulebook for becoming a GM. Just sufficient understanding of the player’s rulebook along with a half-hour training tutorial given to them by the designers, a procedure that was deemed necessary after almost a year and a half of playing. This tutorial was never given to them in a written form but instead done orally over skype and was usually rushed too. Under those circumstances many of the rules given to them were forgotten or misinterpreted and would at the very least cost even more time to both the GMs and the designers if a GM asked for an official future clarification or reminder, instead of just having those rules written somewhere where one could look them up if needed.
My final point brings us back to the video that I hope you all watched and enjoyed. The online application mechanics that were never explained to anyone. There were no obstacles preventing anyone from abusing system bugs or overusing benefits and the few bug reports that were submitted were never made public so that knowledge would be spread among players. It’s not that difficult math were involved in those systems that include: crafting, castle wars, online missions, but it wasn’t as easy for every player to reverse engineer those systems and few players were in the mood to do so.
This led to players that had a richer video game background to get an edge with their character’s progression through experience and familiarity with similar systems, which in turn led to more problems that arose (lack of scrolls for high level players, mission levels becoming unavailable because of too much players in the same categories, strategies that required only 10 people participating in the castle wars, etc.).
The designers’s approach remains the same to this day, complete lack of info about most application features and refusal to even add to the guide the ones that have been completely understood, decoded and shared between every player. This creates even more pressure to newer players that feel overwhelmed when receiving lots of unofficial info about the game and the way it works.
We create and apply them in order to have fun when playing games, to ensure an enjoyable and fair experience for everyone. Don’t be afraid of them. Even though they can do both harm and good, just like any other tool, it’s up to the creator to use them to the game’s and player’s benefit and success.
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