Ok, thought experiment:
You have two TTRPGs, Adventures & Aberrations, and Brigands & Bloodshed.
A&A has a well-known, glaring flaw in its rules as written, which results in critical hits being worse across the board for every player character, always, despite the rules presenting critical hits as particularly damaging. The solution is well-known and a standard house rule the entire community knows about.
B&B has the exact same rules, except that the critical hit rules have been fixed.
In both games, you are instructed that you can change the rules if you wish.
Is B&B a better game than A&A, or does the fact that you can houserule away the difference mean that they are equally good games?
Suppose, for the sake of the thought experiment, that "I like when critical hits suck" is an incorrect opinion for these games.
My personal opinion, except my opinions about ttrpg design are always correct (obvious /j there)
B&B is better. Here are the reasons:
- A game βinstructing you that you may change the rulesβ is frankly irrelevant because you can do that with any tabletop game. Nobody asks Hasbro if they can play Uno with stacking +2s and +4s.
-Not everybody that plays a game is a part of whatever nebulous βcommunityβ exists around it, especially in the modern era of TTRPGs where you can buy a game online and play with your friends while never speaking to a single other person about it. Those players are deprived of the house rule, especially if they are not adept enough at game design to fix it themselves.
-Fundamentally, a game which more competently achieves its design goals is a βbetter gameβ if we are trying to assess something as subjective as game design by objective standards.
TLDR: if I buy a game and itβs not a playtest draft, I shouldnβt need to go on reddit or join a discord for it to function properly.
