On hacking
Hack a game together. Steal from everything. Never be satisfied with someone else’s rules. -The NSR Spirit, Point 3
Hacking is synonymous with designing an RPG, but to my mind there's a difference.
Where the designer thinks about marketing, community, and getting the game to the table, the hacker has some combination of two main concerns:
- "I wish this game's rules were simpler and more intuitive. The rules are always getting in the way of the fiction and making it harder to teach new players."
- "Um, actually, that's not how medieval armor works. This combat system is all over the place. Surely, I could write better, more realistic rules..."
Both of these are irrational. Humans are not like sea turtles, born with the knowledge to walk into the sea. We learn every rule we know, and we’re good at learning. We are more or less built to adapt ourselves to rules.
Existing rulesets are not inherently over-complicated or incoherent or unrealistic. The hacker (barring disability) has the ability to learn them and get used to them, but simply does not want to learn.
And yet… I miss hacking.
A few years ago, some folks in the NSR scene liked to lament that there were too many systems for anyone to play and not enough adventures to support them.
"When will all you hackers stop hacking and start designing adventures?"
At the time, it felt like that would never happen. The spirit of hacking was too infectious. Everyone had a weird little hack they were working on.
But at some point we all grew up. The #hacking channel on the Discord got renamed to #making-rpgs. Last year, I wrote a message that was pinned to #making-rpgs:
The key to a successful NSR game is a flavorful setting, lots of weird problem-solving tools that players can start with, and adventure support. Good rules are just a nice bonus.
This is about as un-hacker an attitude as you can have, and I think it says a lot about where the scene has drifted.
Back when Cairn was just one of many Electric Bastionland hacks, our emphasis was on how cool EB was because of its rules. Everybody wanted to be the next rules-light innovator on the block, myself included.
Now, Cairn rules the day, and while it still gets pitched to new people on the basis of its ultralight rules, those rules have stopped changing. Yochai made a point of keeping the core rules of Cairn 2E the same as Cairn 1E, so that 2E is more of an expansion than a revision.
Even Chris McDowall has turned away from crafting the perfect rules-light problem-solving game (whatever that means) and toward adapting his existing ruleset to a different genre (knights) and structure (hexcrawling). That's not to say that there's no innovation whatsoever in Mythic Bastionland, but it's much more of a designed game than a hacked game.
I don't even hear about the GLoG folks anymore. I can only hope they're still out there somewhere, hacking away. The Goblin Punch blog still manages to keep the spirit of hacking alive from time to time.
Maybe this is just a cycle we'll all go through. Right now, we're in the Cairn bubble, and eventually it will burst, and there will be demand for hacking again.
Maybe you agree with the old "make systems, not adventures" advice. Maybe you think the games we have are good enough. And maybe they are!
But to hack is to strive for perfection. If you think there's no such thing as perfection... well, you're right, but don't tell the hackers, okay? They always seem to be having fun.