The Tao of Rules Hacking, Part 3

If you’re just tuning in, go back and read Part 1 & Part 2.

I’m thinking about the takeaway from this rules hacking, and the next steps. Before I present it to any players I’ll have to clean up my verbiage a little bit, and if I wanted to publish it I’d have to do some playtesting to work out any kinks I didn’t foresee when cobbling it together. The real question is, why do I have here? I showed my work every step of the way. I started with Risus and Fate and grabbed ideas from other games, smashed them together in ways that I, at least, find logical. Obviously, it’s derivative. But it is so far distant from the original sources, so much of a mashup, that it counts as original?

My personal ethics say that if I published this system I would at the very least need to acknowledge the influence of those other games. But would I owe anyone royalties for swiping their ideas and assimilating them? No. Copyright law says that an idea can’t be copyrighted, only the expression of the idea. As long as I’m not swiping entire paragraphs verbatim from other games, and putting things into my own words, I’m free and clear. That’s how retro-clone games exist. This system borrows ideas, and combines them in different ways. I just need to change the jargon that I use — something other than “aspects” or “cliches”, for instance — and I’m good. It’s an idea that I find neat, and terrifying, at the same time. Again, my ethics lean toward credit where it’s due, but reality is, I can’t afford to give everyone a cut if I did in fact decide to publish.

What this mashup is, really, is a manifesto. Nearly every game system is a manifesto, a reaction to something else, a declaration of an ideal. Original Dungeons & Dragons said “hey, look, single-unit wargames are possible!” 3rd edition D&D, with the Open Game License, was saying something. 4e certainly was a manifesto in reaction to the Open Game License and the popularity of massive multiplayer games. Savage Worlds was about cheap and easy. Fate was about story over tactics. When you hack rules, you’re writing your own manifesto. You’re saying, “This is what I like”. You’re saying, “this style of play should be emphasized”. Your interpretations of what various games are saying may vary from mine, but conscious choices when into the design of every system, trying to solve a particular problem, push a style of play, model some sort of fictional tropes.

If this system, then, isn’t a Risus/Fate hack any longer, then it needs a name. I’m going to call it ROLPUNK-X. It’s the embodiment of the ROLPUNK Manifesto — play the way that works best for you. What works best for me is this mishmash of existing ideas. I’m not calling it the ROLPUNK System, because according to the very spirit of ROLPUNK, there can’t be such a thing. So I’m calling it ROLPUNK-X because, well, putting an X in there sounds cool, and the X can also stand for 10, as in 2010, the year I made it.I thought about calling it ROLPUNK Prime, but that sounded a bit snotty, and implied that other ROLPUNK systems would be derivative of it. No, as my tastes and my needs evolve, I may build a system out of different parts and call it ROLPUNK Blue, or ROLPUNK Elephant, or whatever, and it may bear no resemblance whatsover to this system. You can follow the ideas and the process I’ve used in this series to build your own ROLPUNK system, taking your favorite game and hanging various bits on it to build what you need, or what you like.

Because what matters, in the end, is that it works for you and that you’re having fun. If you’re not having fun, you’ve discovered the only possible way to do it wrong.