There’s an axiom in business that systems are perfectly designed to get the results that they get. If you want a different output, whether it be increased productivity, improved products, a different product, you have to change your methodology. The same is true of roleplaying systems. If a game is designed to do X, and you want to use it for Y, some tweaking will be involved. This is where house rules, or “rules hacking” as I call it, takes place. Whether that X variable is a genre, a setting, or an alteration of a small mechanic, if you’re solving for Y there will be some work.

This got me thinking about rules grafting — taking a mechanic from one game and splicing it onto another game. Replacing the hit points in D&D with the way damage is tracked in, well, just about anything else, for example. Adding Call of Cthulhu-style Sanity rules to a game other than Call of Cthulhu. Taking GUMSHOE‘s investigation rules and patching them on to Pathfinder. You get the idea. Take something specific about one game system, and incorporate it into the game system of your choice.

I think the reason people do this is that they’re seeking a style of play. System obviously matters; if you graft parts of the World of Darkness system onto Shadowrun (to use an example I’ve never heard of, but I’m sure that a dozen people will now write me) rather than convert the game to World of Darkness, it’s obviously because you have some kind of investment in Shadowrun. It does what you want it to do, the way you want to do it, most of the time. You just wished it played like World of Darkness sometimes.

Sometimes there’s synergy between systems and the grafting works. Sometimes, not so much. I love my car, and I like that my car does car things, but sometimes I wish it were a helicopter, so I could put a propeller on top. It probably won’t work as a helicopter, and I’ve likely damaged its ability to work as a car.

Rather than hybridizing game mechanics, we need to look at the styles of play themselves and what makes them work. Many times it’s simply genre tropes — a scary story is a scary story, regardless of the game system underlying it, a hero’s journey is a hero’s journey, and so on. Sometimes it’s the beats of a plot, the techniques used in storytelling, the manner in which the plot unfolds. Can you accomplish what you want to accomplish, within the system of your choice, without having to make up house rules to cover it? Do we need to alter the crunch to support the fluff, or can we just crank the volume on the fluff up to 11 and hand-wave away the crunch? Sometimes yes, sometimes no; it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

What I’m proposing here isn’t just that we look at styles of play separately from game mechanics. I’m suggesting that we look at how the two integrate, so that we can best leverage the strengths of each to come up with the best roleplaying experience. Where mechanics support your goals, use them. Where storytelling techniques support your goals, use them. View them as tools in your toolbox, colors on your palate. Use the bits you need. Design the system that perfectly produces the result you want.

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