A Small Tip For Making Changes

Hi new folks! Before I get to the article, I just wanted to say wow; there's a lot of you who have joined — thank you so much! I'm extremely grateful for everyone putting eyes on Seven-Part Pact. Please be patient with me while I fix typos and make adjustments. Currently the game is being dev-edited by the fantastic Avery Alder, and I probably won't put out a new update until she's done and I've integrated her changes. If you want to see what else I've been up to, be aware that a paid membership on this Patreon secures you access to 7 years of game design via the archive. There's some real gems in there — a tactical combat game with 1 trillion HP, several PBTA games in various states of completion, and some really cool and unique designs I hope to come back to someday.

Just so you know: this Patreon is a salary, not a subscription. You enable me to make cool stuff and write about my process (a fact which I am eternally grateful for), but I cannot promise consistency. Sometimes you'll go a month without hearing from me, and sometimes you'll get three updates in one weekend. I'm an ADHD gremlin whose impulses wander with the wind, and so I'm grateful for your support as you stick with me.

Anyway, here's the thing I actually came here to write about:

I described this to a patron in the Discord, and I realized it was a useful enough little process that I wanted to record it here for posterity. I play a lot of games, and when I play games I also often hack them. Bernie DeKoven would argue that this process of hacking is necessary for playing games — it's all a process of interpretation. When I add or remove something from a game, I consider the following little checklist of questions:

• What was that rule doing to the game? (or what was occurring in its absence?)

• How important was that effect on the game experience I want?

• If I feel it was important, what can I do within the game to account for this change?

• If I cannot account for it within the game, what additional hack can I make to account for this change?

So, for example, let's say I'm working on a PBTA game. In Apocalypse World, the dice are balanced assuming an average of +1 to a die roll (2D6). This is a 44% chance of partial success (7-9) and a 28% chance of full success (10+). In my hack, everything is the same as Apocalypse World but I've made the average stat +0 instead.

• What was that doing to the game? With this change, I've made the odds of some kind of success go from 72% to 58%, and nearly doubled the odds of failure.

• How important was that effect on the game experience I want? Pretty important, for me — I don't want failure to be this common. If I felt it wasn't important, maybe I could instead just ignore this change.

• What can I do within the game to account for this change? Well, I could hand out +1 Forwards more frequently, or I could warn players that failure is substantially more likely (changing their relationship to the dice rolls), or I could provide other ways for players to increase their averages on dice rolls.

• What additional hacks could I make? I could change the result bands for partial and full successes (make it 6-8 and 9+ instead), or I could add a new way to get +1 to a result, or I could rewrite the moves so that failure is less punishing and a 10+ is much sweeter.

(This is a major bugbear for me, by the way — the first thing I check when I open any PBTA game is to see if the designer knows how probability works)

This is also a process you can apply to making any change to any procedure, by the way! It's often something I bring up when providing consultation on crowdfunding. For example, if someone wants to crowdfund a game without a cover image, I strongly encourage them to work through a) what was that cover image adding b) how important was its contributions and c) if they insist on leaving out a cover image anyway, how can they compensate for its absence?

At this point, I've internalized this methodology to such a degree that it's second nature for me every time I go to make any change to a game or system. I hope listing it out is helpful for people who haven't ever been presented with this process before!