A Good DM Understands The Rules Before Changing Them

There is, perhaps, no more hotly debated topic than Rule 0 when it comes to RPGs. For those who aren't familiar, Rule 0 is the one that's usually stated in the introduction to a game where the creators point out that this is your game, and you bought it. If you feel that certain aspects should be ignored, changed, or tinkered with, that's your decision, and you should run the game that makes you and your players the happiest.

Do whatever, we've already got your money!

This is very similar to the advice that I've seen in a lot of creative writing classes. It goes something along the lines of, "It's your story, write it however you want to. The rules only exist as guidelines!"

While this advice is inherently true, anyone who's tried to read fiction written by someone who thought their story was so brilliant that it shouldn't have to adhere to convention or common story structure knows just how badly awry this can go. Because as I said over on The Literary Mercenary, Good Writers Understand The Rules Before They Break Them, and the same goes for all the dungeon masters out there.

You can change absolutely anything in the game. But you need to understand what you're changing, and the wide-reaching effects it might have, or you could end up chopping off your nose to spite your face. Because you're basically pulling up the files that make the game run, and making your own changes to the code. If you're not sure what you're changing, or all the aspects of the game it can affect, you can do more harm than good.

Wait... Was That a Load-Bearing Rule?

Oh shit... I might have just made things worse...

I've been in a lot of games over the years, and more than a few of them were run by dungeon masters who were more than happy to change rules they didn't like, or to port things in from other games to suit their fancy. Generally speaking, I've found that DMs who understood the game and had a firm grasp on the rules could make this work. Those who had only a rudimentary understanding of the game, though, ended up making things much worse than the so-called problem they were trying to fix.

As an example, I've met several dungeon masters who wanted to take Pathfinder, and run it as a low-to-no magic system. As such they limited, or outright banned, spellcasting classes for players, and made magic items rare-to-nonexistent in their campaign. While this eliminated fully half of the game's playable content (given that a roughly half of the classes and archetypes in the game get some form of magic or magical abilities), that's completely possible to do. However, when these DMs tried to run a game that followed the usual progression of challenge by level, they noticed something straight away... the difficulty curve went vertical in a big damn hurry.

Shit! That's the third TPK this level... what the hell?

The reason for this is that Pathfinder is a high fantasy game, and the progression of threats players face at higher and higher levels assumes they have access to magic. Not just for the purposes of healing (though that is a concern, since taking total rest heals double your class levels in a day, and that means a fighter could be in traction for a month just to get back to full strength from a single mid-level scrap), but just to be able to face certain monsters with any expectation of wining. Damage reduction that specifically ignores attacks not considered magical is very common starting at around CR 5, and it only gets harder and steeper from there.

Now, that doesn't mean you can't run a relatively low-fantasy game using Pathfinder... but you need to understand that just eliminating your players' access to magic is essentially removing half the pistons from your engine, and expecting it to run more efficiently now that there's less weight. You need to consider all of the things that choice effects, from how you expect PCs to heal, to which monsters they can realistically fight, to how that changes the value of certain classes and abilities.

In this situation, it's often just a lot easier to run a system that does what you want in the first place, such as Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of or perhaps Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, instead of trying to twist the core system in knots to do something it wasn't really meant for.

Whether you want to eliminate alignment in a game where it actually has effects on your character actions and the world around you, you want to throw out feat taxes because you think they're a drain on gameplay, or you just want to import a different game's rules for handling grappling, energy resistance, or weapon degradation, you need to be able to see all the ways this change is going to effect the game going forward.

Because if you change something, you're essentially throwing a rock into a pond. As such, you should have some idea of where the ripples are going.

Avoid The Cascade Cock Up

For those fortunate enough to have never experienced this phenomenon, a cascade cock up is when one thing goes wrong, which makes something else go wrong, and it continues on until you realize you've pulled the level on a Rube Goldberg device you hadn't realized was there, and whose end goal you're not entirely sure of.

Oh crap... where's the stop button?

You started with something small, maybe. But that small change had an unforeseen outcome, and now you've got a problem. So to try to fix the first problem you make another change, but that also results in a fresh set of problems. Now you've got to change something else in order to keep your first change valid, but it opens up a whole different can of worms.

There are two things you need to help prevent this. The first is to know the game you're modding so that you understand how all the moving parts are connected. The higher your degree of system mastery (or the fewer moving parts your game has), the better the chance that your changes will work they way you intend them to with minimal side effects. The second thing you need to do is actually run a few scenarios, even if it's just you sitting at your kitchen table and rolling dice, to see just how well this change holds up to the action.

Because when you make a house rule, you're essentially writing a patch for the existing game. You need to make sure your patch doesn't accidentally put your players on god-mode, or end up making your enemies into unstoppable monsters because of an unforeseen complication.

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That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday!

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