The Patterns Of Games That Disappoint

Failure Starts With Wrong Ideas About What The Hobby Is

broken tabletop game

There are discernable patterns in the many products that I profiled as Games That Disappoint. All of these patterns arose in the design process because the designers accepted a set of presumptions that, when acted upon, guaranteed that the product would not be able to fulfill the promises that its marketing made.

The end result is that it became acceptable to push broken, dysfunctional products into a commercial marketplace and then demand that the end-users perform labor to fix the unusable products into the useable state that was promised to the user at the time of purchase.

Time to take a look at this pattern.

1. The Get-Along Gang: The designers presume that all players operate together as a unit, and therefore their mans do everything together.¹ All opposition is run by the Referee, and players are either forbidden or dis-incentivized from defecting away from that presumption.
   
   This turns the game’s design into one long Player vs. Environment exercise, but it also turns the gameplay experience into one where only what the players encounter is “real” and nothing else has substance or means anything.
   
   Rules such as 1:1 Timekeeping make no sense under this presumption because it penalizes the entire group for the actions of one member, so that rule gets tossed out. As a result, there is no sense of consequence for actions taken- good or bad; the play experience starts feeling like a videogame over time, such that recent designs either make this connection explicit or don’t even recognize it at all and can’t comprehend the question.

2. Buy The Supplementary Product: The designers presume that the players—in reality, just the Referee—will purchase all of the products in the line. The first set of purchases are the manuals that (in theory) teach you how to play; the rest are the not-at-all-discretionary additional toys (classes, races, items, powers, etc.) to throw into the mix or (and this is a big one) ready-made playable content scenarios (i.e. modules).
   
   Because of this presumption, which I refer to as “lobotomizing the game to make room for commercial viability”, the designers omit designing the tools requires for the end-user to generate their own gameplay scenarios through playing the game as intended.
   
   This gets expensive for the Referee, as he’s the only one buying this stuff², and the result is that there are severe diminishing returns over time. This is known as “The Supplement Treadmill”, and it is why Edition Churn is a thing; it is also why announcing new editions is held off for as long as possible, as that instantly kills sales in (now outgoing) Current Edition products.

3. The Rules Don’t Matter (aka “Who’s Game Is It Anyway?”): The designers have no idea that what makes a game a game—what gives it substances—is the rules itself. Therefore they feel no duty of care towards their customer, the end-user, to see that the widget that they designed actually does what they claim that it does.
   
   Not only that, but they have no feeling for the duty of care to sell them a complete turnkey product. “Just house-rule it!” is their sincere belief for anything wrong that occurs due to users using the product that they designed and sold as intended, and they accordingly disclaim any responsibility to make whole what their negligence left broken.
   
   We do not tolerate for this any other product category. No, not even software, as notorious as that is for the same issue. They promise us a complete product, ready to use out of the box to fulfill the promised gameplay experience when used as they directed.
   
   They then take offense when their failure to provide that product is put before them. Press them long enough—and this has happened more than once, by more than a few, over the years—and you will get “The rules don’t matter!” as their final line of defense.
   
   ”Then why did you sell me a product if you had no intention of fulfilling your end of the bargain by providing the means by which to operate the product to achieve that result?”
   
   Put it that way, and watch them completely fail to comprehend what you just made them out to be: charlatans selling snake oil.
   
   It is one thing to tell the customer that this is a developer’s kit; that’s what you get with GURPS and HERO. That is not Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, any edition of Star Wars, TORG, Spycraft, RIFTS (or any other Palladium product), Exalted (or any other White Wolf product), and so many other products clogging up the shelves.

If the rules don’t matter, everyone does everything together, and you’re expected to CONSUME PRODUCT to keep the game going, it is no surprise that so many that were drawn in by the promise soured on it in favor of alternatives that delivered: boardgames (e.g. HeroQuest), cardgames (e.g. Legend of the Five Rings, Shadowfist), and especially videogames (and have been a superior choice since the days of Rogue for some, Ultima/Wizardry or Phantasie for others).

There is a reason that so few tabletop Fantastic Adventure Games are actually games. Almost none of them are complete products, nevermind games suitable for play in the Clubhouse³, and long before we get to fixing errors in mechanical design or technical writing there needs to be a rectification in the axioms held by those making them.

False presumptions are the cause for Games That Disappoint. After that, other errors are just different additions to the trash pile. The only reason that this has gone on for so long is that, unlike board or videogames, it isn’t immediately apparent that you’re playing a broken product that doesn’t deliver on what it promises.

This hobby requires better. It is long past time to start insisting upon it. Sucking is not acceptable.

1. If this sounds like the Geek Social Fallacies, you are not wrong.

2. Not even disputed. Every publisher has said so many times over the last 30 years online; Wizards of the Coast specifically confessed this as the reason for wanting to push Official D&D into a Live Service business model- to finally get players to pay up equal to Referees.

3. Yes, that is a real distinction. As I have time, and thus ability to dig deep into old titles, this will become more obvious.