Everything you think about Game Mastering is probably wrong: Part XVIII - Rules Complexity and the Division of Labour
The other week I finally had a chance to play ROOT. It’s a board game about warfare among woodland creatures with that murder-cutesy vibe of things like Mouseguard (and all owing back to Redwall I’d wager). One thing ROOT is somewhat infamous for is its apparent complexity. Often it is compared to the fictional “Cones of Dunshire” and I was a little apprehensive going in. The reality is it's a fairly simple game, a little more complex than CATAN but in the same general ballpark. So where does this fearsome reputation come from?
ROOT is an asymmetrical game. Each player is functionally playing their own individual board game each with their own win conditions (by accruing victory points that are shown to all players). The overlapping goals often (usually) conflict with each other, and of course there can only be one overall winner. As a player though, you only really need to know the rules for your faction and those are relatively simple in terms of board games.
This is where the so-called complexity comes in, and I don’t mean from a strategic perspective of knowing how to thwart the plans of others. Many games have simple rules but immensely complex tactics that can require hours of thought and study to truly master. We don’t usually call those games difficult to learn. We usually use the phrase “easy to learn, difficult to master” as a phrase to be precise and it's a sign of a quality game. The difference with ROOT is a social problem.
When learning a new board game, I suspect many of you have had a similar experience. One person is very much interested in this game and learns the rules to teach everyone else at the table as they set it up. Sometimes you may even get two people in this role, which is no doubt a great blessing to most people reading this who are, by virtue of the market segment that would subscribe to this Patreon, the person who has to explain the rules to everyone else (less flatteringly known as "The Rules Bitch".)
That does not work with ROOT. Each person playing ROOT has to do their own legwork of wanting to play and learning the rules of their faction. “That person” can’t easily learn up to 6 different games simultaneously and teach 5 other people how their own unique game works. The division of labour for that is far too onerous. Everyone playing ROOT needs to be invested enough to be “that person” on their own behalf. When they aren’t, the game seems far too complex to manage. Which is a shame, it's a well designed game.
Sometimes you can’t fix this, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. Insert other platitudes here. What ROOT could have done is been aggressively explicit about this in a couple lines at the beginning. They won’t though, they seem like professionals and that is a very rude and unprofessional callout to put in rules. People trying to run a legitimate business with staff they need to pay the salaries for can't do that, only hopelessly unprofitable assholes can.
That is also why I explicitly call out a similar division of player labour in NGR’s first page in the Introduction chapter. NGR assumes the player taking the role of GM is an impartial Referee and the players taking control of PCs act as the Storytellers who take the scenario the GM is refereeing and make something interesting happen with it using the tools at their disposal (the Character they are playing). It calls the game out as explicitly player lead. If your players don’t want the mental effort of having to plot their own courses (which is fair, some jobs are fucking mentally draining) then NGR is probably not for them and everyone should be aware from the get go.
This goes beyond choosing a game system when getting a group together to play a campaign. Before you start doing all the work to design a campaign you should make sure with your group that they are going to be willing to buy into the concept and play along. If you are going to play a game about merchants seeking trade routes with a lot of logistics management then get the rest of the group to buy into the premise. This isn’t just a case of being nice and acting as their servant, once they have bought into the concept it's their job to stick to the guard rails and make fun happen within the confines of the game they agreed to.
If the game described above is boring because it lacks meaningful logistical hurdles that need to be planned for with risk management, alternate supply routes, and choices between cargo and travel inventory then the GM isn’t doing a good job and should think about stepping back to a different player role. If one or more players find the game is boring because they want there to be romance, political intrigue, and epic high fantasy battles to save the world then they are being assholes to the same degree as someone who suggests putting on a movie at a book club meeting. That starts to get into another point for another day though.
So make sure to split the tasks between who actually needs to do them. Learning rules, scheduling, hosting duties, ensuring everyone has fun, and recruiting new members are not things that all have to fall on the GM's shoulders.