Amateurs Against the Wine Snobs...

So last month, a certain (famously cranky) blogger eviscerated The Ruined Abbey of Saint Tabitha.  I don't care about that.  Hell, I requested the review knowing what I'd get.  But he crossed a line when he asserted that we don't understand the craft (wtf) or even our reasons for the choices we make, which is simply bizarre.  Olde House Rules has a mission we've proclaimed vocally from the start.  It's on our website, in the pages of the free previews of all our relevant titles.  It's present here.  Simply put, we make amateur games.

That speaks to the what.  But as to the why, we do it because we happen to think these products engender a style of play not possible otherwise.  Now here's the thing: amateur is more than just poor visual production.  It's what happens when people without advanced tools, a staff of editors, or professional freelance support make stuff anyway because they like it and -gasp! - just want to have fun.  This combination of deliberate and inadvertent elements gives rise to an emergent experience tied up in rulebooks...

Amateur rulebooks represent the initial state of the hobby. This alone lends them a certain historical value, and our attempts to relive the past an enduring legitimacy.  And they're certainly nostalgic for those of us who remember them firsthand.  But they're also quite exotic at this point, because they harken back to a time when the very means of production was fundamentally different.  Manual type?  Actual (physical) cut and paste?  I imagine the older stuff looks like an Egyptian papyrus to those born of the modern internet age.

But isn't this just skin deep?  Probably.  Except that amateur design and production had a material impact on the way these games were approached and played.  Again, we're talking about a fundamentally different experience here.  Their primitive style felt more accessible, like a peer-to-peer exercise.  This burrows deep into one's psyche, which lays the foundation for pretty much everything that follows.  And there's plenty to talk about...

First off, the amateur artwork left something to the imagination.  Do we really need to see everything to the smallest, perfect detail?  Yeah, there's some great stuff out there, and professional artwork helps bring a game's imaginary universe to life.  My gatekeeper's hat is at the cleaners, so I won't even try to say otherwise.  But when people are left to fill in the blanks, informed by their dreams and fears, we get something like true wonder.

Moreover, the earliest games were open ended.  This was most likely accidental, as the hobby was still in its infancy and too new for what would come later.  But often enough, this happened in the absence of experience, not to mention any sort of professional template, meaning the earliest publishers didn't know what to include.  At least not yet.  But deliberate or otherwise, this encouraged the emergent, work-it-out-at-the-table approach that would later come to define what should be recognized as a distinct style of play...

Now to be fair, our cranky friend never criticized our physical production.  But we're well beyond that now.  We're talking about an experience that permeates how a game's disparate elements are actually used.  Modern D&D mechanizes everything.  It absolutely imposes itself upon gameplay at the deepest level.  Amateur rulebooks from the 1970s did the same, albeit in reverse.  Crude art, omissions (deliberate or otherwise), and even the verbose Gygaxian prose brought the players in and redistributed the balance of elements.

Our friend (I like the guy) is free to disagree with this approach.  But he isn't free to pretend we don't have a deep, abiding philosophy behind our design choices.  There's a certain snobbery present in some (not all) modern circles.  Like we're sipping wine at the Cité du Vin instead of just having fun.  This comes with a cold, mechanical precision that shuts out the kind of organic, on-the-fly interactions humans are known for.  There's no wrong way; but we can agree that old-school, fueled by amateur production, is a viable choice...  

And that's what we do.  And why we do it.  We make amateur-style rulebooks meant to bottle an experience worth preserving.  The old days in amber.  It won't appeal to everyone (the reverse is definitely true); but we don't do it for them.  And we sure as hell don't do it for those who see the past as necessary for sure, but best left behind - or worse still, those who only understand the past as a failure to do better.  To them, amateur is skin deep.  But this mixing of ideas, omissions, and outright flaws enables an experience only amateurs can give.