Normally, I’d be advocating for working by iterating things gradually. Once you’ve got a rule in place, you just need to be paring away any rough edges and polishing the thing to a nice, smooth shine. It’s an editing process. A feedback and tweak process. A tried and tested process that works.
Most of the time.
Sometimes, there’s another approach you could try that doesn’t get talked about as much, but which you already do, sort of, just earlier in development. I think a variation of it is useful later as well.
When you’re at the start, brainstorming ideas, testing this or that for fit with the whole, then you’re open to things being chucked out and replaced. It feels natural at this early stage, before things gel.
While you could do exactly the brainstorming thing later, and throw out one rule for something entirely different, this isn’t what I’m suggesting. Instead of the whole rule, I’m asking you to consider only discarding the way you’ve expressed it. Let me see if I can explain this clearly.
You’ve got a game on the go, and you have a draft rulebook. So far, so good. When you test it, there’s a bit of the rules that players keep tripping over. You’re sure the rule works in practice, it’s just that it’s hard to explain clearly on paper. We’ve all been there. It’s not the rule that’s a problem, it’s conveying it clearly. Folk might get it when you’re on hand to explain, it’s just that the words on the page alone leave them unsure.
The normal approach would be to edit and tweak until it worked, and this is certainly an option that usually fixes things. However, sometimes you’ll have more success with replacing it entirely. Just take a blank page and write the whole section again from memory. This is important. Don’t refer to the previous version when you’re writing its replacement (they get jealous). There are a couple of key advantages baked into your subconscious the second (or third) time you write a piece:
- You’ve already done this before, so you’re more practiced. Experience helps.
- You’ve seen the objections and the difficulties with the first one, so you intuitively write to mitigate those problems. Probably the critical element here.
Now this idea isn’t a replacement for iterative improvement, it’s an addition, an option. Typically, I use this when I’ve written something, done a few rounds of iterations and editing, and it’s just not settling. So, I rewrite the piece and iterate over that new version. It’s not a guaranteed improvement, though I’d say that for me it’s getting close. And, if it really doesn’t help, you can always try again and write a third version, or simply revert to where you were. You lose very little trying this, and I’ve found it a great help to get a tricky section moving again.
Note that this works with writing stories or non-fiction as well as rules, and it’s something visual artists do all the time. That’s what erasers are for. I expect that it works in music and coding and yodelling and everything else creative too. It’s just the practice of saying to yourself that this isn’t working, so try again. You like the story beat or the visual in your head. Just take another stab at expressing it. All anyone will care about in the end is that the final version is clear. So do what you have to do to get there.
I was using this approach yesterday, on a bigger scale and for a different reason, and it works there too. I’d written a game some years ago, made a prototype, played it, and it was fine. Not terrible, but not great either. That’s not good enough, so it had been iterated and tweaked as you normally would. Still wasn’t happy with it. The game worked and I liked the idea, I just thought it could be better expressed. So, I left it to marinate.
Yesterday, something made me think of it again, so I started tinkering. And instead of going back to my old version, I took the same spark I had originally, the same images in my head, and wrote a new game from scratch. This is the same principle of rewriting a rule or a paragraph in a story, just writ larger.
Now I’ve not had time to make a prototype yet, so it’s not been on the table. I am, however, feeling pretty confident that this is a cleaner and slicker approach than before. To be honest, I can’t remember all the mechanics I used last time, and that’s unimportant. The whole point is to make the end result great, and we do whatever it takes. In this case, I took a tool I normally use for something small and I changed the scale it applied to. I wasn’t replacing a single rule that was unclear, I was trying to express the whole idea of the game in a more exciting and fun way. Time will tell if that worked.
As some of you may be thinking, this is all related to murdering your darlings, which I’ve written about before, though it’s not quite the same. At least, not in my head. Anyway, I hope that’s put some ideas in yours, and that you find it helpful. Let me know how you get on.
Quirkworthy 
This is absolutely brilliant- it would definitely help explaining concepts that designers take for granted because they either wrote them in the first place or just have the experience, but newer players are unaware of.
While I haven’t done specifically that, my adage when playtesting is- if I don’t remember it from memory, that’s bad; and if a quick look doesn’t refresh my memory and I need to read it over again, it’s really bad. Such a rule or mechanic needs clarification as well as more intuitive design that’s easier to remember on the spot. As someone with very trashy memory but decent internalizing skills, it’s really important to put “anchors” in your mechanics, principles to design around that build constructively on one another instead of being un-related subsets of rules.
The biggest, and simplest example, would be a single universal task resolution mechanic. Roll d20+X vs target number Y is the simplest, and honestly it’s way better as a concept than, say, earlier editions of D&D, where attacks were handled one way, but other rolls another, and other mechanics even more different still.
Another example I’ve noticed is now that I’m (Finally) playing warhammer (the old world), it’s very frustrating when some things are roll high while others are roll low, or that Weapon Skill vs Weapon Skill is different than Strength vs Toughness.
So, to come back to the original topic, coming back to an existing rule using memory also means that what sticks to your mind will, more or less, stick to the rest’s minds; the rest, do you really need it?
Thanks Odysseas, and a good point about consistency. If your rules say that rolling high is good, then it’s far easier for a player to remember if that’s always true. And there’s no mechanical reason why it shouldn’t be.
Indeed, I feel like the ad-hoc inclusion of homebrew mechanics that later became “canon” in earlier versions of TTRPGs ended up with some game (like AD&D 2e) looking like an orcish contraption held with duct tape and grot snot.
A relevant question: do you ever visit your old archived works? While I find myself going back to the concepts themselves (at least as an inspiration), I have a very hard time reading through my older iterations of rules for a game.
Over the years, I’ve dealt with a handful of hardware, software, and wetware failures that have lost versions and required me to rebuild things from older saved files. This isn’t creative, it’s just rebuilding what’s been lost.
From a design point of view, I never deliberately go back to read old versions. I just keep them as back ups.
Fair, I can totally see why they’d be necessary. I just had this picture of me going through my old stuff for inspiration, but unless it’s over a decade ago so I’ve totally forgotten about them (and the nostalgia outweighs the cringe), I just find it too hard to do so.
I have hundreds of pages of notes for unfinished projects, and I’ll return to them if I want to work on them some more. But for finished or live stuff, I never go back to old versions.