how i think about rules

i think of rules as jewels, treasure, or trading cards.

Pharaoh's Treasure 

when i was a little girl there was a tiny little seven eleven near my home, on the way to my grandpa's house.

they had packs of duel masters cards on the counter, in a clear plastic display.

the packs were so shiny and had monsters on them and i wanted them.

i do not think i ever got any of those base set packs.

they had a manticore, and an angel, and an elephant man on them.
i don't recall seeing the blue demon thing.

from an ebay listing

i've loved yu-gi-oh, duel masters, any kind of trading cards - since i could cogitate.

the foiling on the packs and cards, the mystery of not really ever knowing what cards existed or how they worked or if i would ever have any. 

when i was five a neighbor gave me a purple plastic box of yu-gi-oh cards.

thank you jonathan.

years after that gift in middle school, i bought a small collection from a older kid named vincent.

i paid him twenty dollars and then he brought me his cards in a white walmart bag, jumbled and almost spilling out.

i hid it in the locker room maybe, or i might have smuggled it through class, i don't recall.

but it was wonderful, all kinds of different cards to sort and examine.

in early high school i bought a tin off a kid for twenty dollars, full of yu-gi-oh cards.

my friend mohammed gave me his collection to safeguard, in a red wooden box.

garage sales and trading with friends and the odd card or two bought on ebay - years and years of cards.

so innocent and simple is my love of them.

i like pictures of monsters, that is the extent of it, in some ways.

but something about the separation of them is fascinating, and goes beyond the childhood obsession.

i get to pick and choose and make a stack of the monsters and traps and magic that i think are cool.

i never really played yu-gi-oh or understood it when i was little.

i just had some monsters and i liked them.

i still don't know how to "play" it now, i only know the basics, and don't have a "real deck".

but i still loved it - even though i did not know "how" to play back then.

something about the separation followed by grouping is fascinating. 

this is how i think about rules.

it's pick and choose and each one can be pretty - each rule, it can be interesting.

each creature can have a picture and some words and do something different.

that spirit of mine i hold so dear, of not knowing what's out there, what cards actually exist - i felt that about unearthed arcana.

that was how reading unearthed arcana was for me as a little girl - same as encyclopedia magica and fiend folio and lotsa modules.

i really did not know what it meant or what all was out there, it was a big mystery.

i always coveted my dad's polyhedral dice.

always read the modules, scary, weird, unknown - even when my dad told me not too.

that basic human curiosity about forbidden or mysterious things.

just the juxtaposition that new rules, old rules, rules in general possess - that mixture of individual parts becoming a cohesive machine.

it's such a simple small droplet in the bucket.

the concept of - this is a thing, and here is my group of those things.

here's the rooms, the tables, the bestiary, indexes and maps - neatly sequenced.

all split up in chunks and stacked.

each thing pretty, different, varied, designed.

the idea of emergent properties, the whole being far greater than the sum of its parts.

synergy between cards, a deck, with a plan or strategy - a pile of gems being breathtaking in aggregate - and rules all working towards a shared purpose, creatures and items and rooms forming some fully-formed thing.

there was a collection art show in community college and i submitted my bootleg yu-gi-oh collection because what the cards do doesn't matter by necessity, it can be optional - the art or value of the cards can be the simple fact that they are a collection of things, with variety and structure. 

i have had many dreams of digging up yu-gi-oh cards, crawling under bushes and digging with bare hands, pulling treasure from the soil.

here's one of my absolute favorite trading cards to have ever been.

Terror Pit!

the design inspired this blogpost - it is breathtakingly simple.
in order to fully explain it's elegance, i must briefly explain the rules of duel masters:

you begin the game by taking the top five cards of your deck facedown in front of you, with neither player looking at them - these are your shields.

when a creature attacks a player, it breaks a shield, one of the cards in front of either player.
if the player has no shields, and is attacked - they die.

when a shield is attacked, it gets broken - which does one of two things:
it goes to the hand of it's owner - or, if it has shield trigger, the owner may cast it immediately for no cost.
this design is super simple - as you strip your opponent of their defenses, you also give them more cards to work with, and perhaps trigger cards that swing things back to even, or even back to their favor.


so, terror pit takes a lot of mana - 6 mana, and all it does when played is destroy an opponent's creature.
but if it is a shield - and gets broken by a creature - then it's owner may cast it for free and destroy a creature.

and this is just so satisfying - this is so beautiful - it is a pit trap, in card form - and i absolutely adore it.
put 4 in your deck and you are more likely to have it in front of you as a shield - and it can absolutely swing games from winning to losing - as the opponents creatures step right into your pit trap.
it is just so unbelievably satisfying to me, the design of this card.

this is how i want rpg rules to work as well - i want a very simple thing, and for it to be a shortcut towards an effect, something that comes up plenty.

i want it to be easily resolved - because i think that simple rules lead to complex interactions, whereas complex rules lead to simple interactions.

i want it to be concise and evocative and something to be considered by players and referees during play - not as an afterthought but an axis to rotate play and decisions around, but also a guidepost for how to potentially resolve anything that is not covered by the rules.

i want the rules to be separated and choppable, able to be transplanted, but individual - and altogether a greater thing than a simple sum of the rules.
 

Pack wrappers I opened on a Christmas as a child