A couple of months ago, I read a post on Signal vs. Noise about the virtue of packing half of what you think you’ll need. They’re generalizing from travel advice like this…
You see that pile of stuff sitting on your bed, waiting to be stuffed into your suitcase? Take half of that stuff and put it back in your closet. Seriously.
…and this…
A good rule of thumb is to pack half of what you need, then take half of that out of the bag.
…to arrive at advice for designing web apps. Here’s how they finally boil it down:
Lay out everything you think your product needs and then cut out half… In truth, you won’t actually need a lot of the things you fantasize you’ll need.
Web apps is what they do at 37signals, but I’m a hammer, and I see nails right here: Pack half and toss the rest is great advice for game design.
“Pack half” is is an especially fruitful area for consideration in light of the recent discussions about core gameplay in my recent Intention post.
Does your RPG need a system for encumbrance?
I’d be shocked.
Does your RPG need a hero-points equivalent?
Maybe, but could you bake their effects in to the regular rules for resolving uncertain events, instead?
Does your RPG need a system for resolving combat that’s different from, or more detailed than, the system it uses to resolve other kinds of conflict?
Sure, a souped-up combat system is traditional, but is combat actually as important as all that in the game you’re working on right now?
Figure out what your game is about—what its core activity is—and then throw out or think again about everything that doesn’t point directly at that thing.
The three examples above are specific to RPGs, but the same kinds of questions apply to board and card designs.
The game I’m working on at the moment (confidential, sorry) is a great example. It’s in the process of ballooning out of control, with funky sub-systems protruding all over the place. At this stage in the game’s development, it’s easy to see why: Upon sighting a problem or opportunity, the easiest thing is to bolt on a new system or rule. And maybe that’s fine at this point, because after all, you can’t toss the half until you’ve laid out a plausible whole.
But eventually, the time will come when the excess needs to be not just polished but thrown out, and the remainder shined to a high-functioning gleam. The time for acts of will and the murdering of darlings is, as with every project, on the horizon and coming closer.
The pack half doctrine suggests that all protuberances must eventually be folded back toward the core gameplay, or the game will be the worse for it. In published designs, it’s usually easy to see which designers made the effort, and which fell short, or didn’t bother. It’s not very hard to think of a designer or three who’s obviously too in love with his darlings.
The same dictum applies, I think, to RPG gamemasters. Interestingly, I think it’s probably more widely known to gamemasters than game designers, because gamemasters are acutely aware that even their best-laid plans are always and constantly subject to the players’ tendency to do what they will, once the game starts. “Pack half,” for gamemasters, amounts to “Stat half (or less); keep the broad outlines of the rest in the back of your mind.”
Being a “game + story” outfit here at Gameplaywright, let’s go one further. I think that the pack half rule applies to stories and storytellers, too.
Screenwriters, by and large, are massively conscious about length. Every minute of a film’s final cut is fantastically expensive, and for the most part, length-of-script translates directly to length-of-film. When film studios fail to hold the line on length, and when they fail to demand focus, we get indulgent crap like Kill Bill, and three endings for The Return of the King. Surely one would have done, in both cases.
Novelists, on the other hand, are free to go on and on. Their publishers have easier outs than making (or even asking) the author to pack half. In most cases, we’re not better off for it. I want to read more 300-page novels. If more novelists got push-back from their publishers for turning in manuscripts longer than that, we’ve have better novels. Ditto for authors of popular non-fiction; I’m sick to death of reading book-length pamphlets.
Pack half: One more tool for your toolbox.
Have a good example of a game, film, or book that did or didn’t “pack half,” and is better or worse for it?
Let’s hear them!
Great post!
I see baggage like this all the time in the games I play, and I tend to get really excited when I find a game that -doesn’t- pack-more-than-half.
A corollary might be: …but don’t forget essentials. Of course, to highlight the corollary might be itself unessential, since you hit the high-points of it in your post here.
Amen, brother.
This is one of the major elements that’s revived my motivation in completing Tomorrow War — I’ve abandoned my misguided notion that it has to do all the generic stuff that RPGs supposedly half to do. I’m stripping it down to just what it does differently and well. In other words, what it’s for.
I’ll pick on my current Game Of The Moment: Android. It’s possible that Android violates this rule by having just a bit too much chrome in its rules. Now, I’m surprisingly cool with this for myself, but the game might have been more accessible (and maybe play a little faster) if some of those edges had been removed.
This is great stuff to think about in terms of designing a game or an RP even in an MMO. I find that I want to hit too many topics or themes in a story–just too bloody much stuff. So how does one “pack half” for a story? What’s the best way to edit oneself?
“The pack half doctrine suggests that all protuberances must eventually be folded back toward the core gameplay, or the game will be the worse for it.” Pack half is a great concept. I know the latest project I’ve been working on suffered from sub-system bloat early on and into the middle of the process. Detailed rules were incorporated for anything we could think of. Then the more we tested it and decided what we liked most about the game, the more things got removed until what was left was the core concept and instructions on how to interpret the core concept in other fashions if needed. Looking at this again I’m tempted to re-evaluate some other non-finalized objects and bring them up for review.
Nice article jeff.
Thanks for the nice notes, everyone.
Marty, my experience suggests that I’m pretty bad at figuring out for myself which parts of a story are the ones to keep. However, I’ve had great luck in giving drafts to people that I trust and letting them help me figure out which stuff is gold and which stuff is simply chaff. I’m sometimes surprised at what some people think falls in the latter category, but I’m also often surprised at how often most people agree about which parts just aren’t all that interesting. So, “Recruit others to help, and then listen to them” is my best advice.
Seth, I heartily concur that Android violates the pack half principle. I think it’s a pretty good game. Maybe a great one, but I honestly haven’t played it recently enough—or even in its publication form!—to make a judgment on that that I’d be comfortable with. But there are at least three games packed in there, and I wonder if the whole thing wouldn’t be better, overall, if one or two of them hadn’t been left on the floor.
For me, it’s always a matter of, as Jeff says, laying too much out on the bed before I pack. I over-write just about everything. For serious (or paying) work, I then cut back.
You want to see some example of packing half in action, though, look at the deleted scenes on some good DVDs. Those are scenes that ended up being unnecessary, and THEY made it all the way through production.
Reading about this has me thinking of this 30-second from Studio 60: