Chesterton's fence part 1: RPG house rules and Savage Worlds

Chesterton and his fence

"Chesterton's fence" refers to a principle articulated by the writer G.K. Chesterton, who said in his 1929 work The Thing:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

I find this to be an enormously useful concept that applies (at least in part) to almost any arena. By my recollection, I first encountered the principle in music theory class, when the teacher responded to my inquiries about why there were so many rules of composition by saying "you have to know what the rules are before you can know when it's OK to break them." These days, I apply the principle most often in my job as a mechanical engineer, where my first instinct when looking at an underperforming or problematic system is to say "well obviously the designer made a mistake here and we should clearly do X, Y, or Z to fix this obvious deficiency." Sometimes I'm right. Very, very often... I'm wrong - and often spend more time than is necessary digging into the problem, eventually circling around to the same suboptimal (but maybe good enough) solution the original engineer arrived at. This "small c" conservative principle is also often brought up in politics, most often by "large C" Conservative thinkers but (in my humble opinion) also very useful for those who take a more Reform-heavy view... at least if they want to be effective in their reforms.

It's worth noting that the Chesterton's fence principle does not state that one should never make changes. Taken at face value, it doesn't even state that making changes is generally less preferable than leaving things the same. The principle simply states that one should endeavor to understand an existing system, particularly the rationale behind said system, before making changes to it. 

House rules in RPGs

This brings us, dear reader, to the subject of tabletop RPGs and house rules. Yes, I haven't forgotten what this blog is ostensibly about (not yet, at least). Most people who run RPGs (generally I'll just use the generic term Game Master/GM) loooove us some house rules. Arguably, the entire plethora of OSR systems is an outgrowth of the very simple fact that GMs adore bending and tweaking the rules of our games to suit our own preferences.

I am no exception:

• Within a few months of starting my first campaign (5e D&D's excellent Lost Mines of Phandelver) I had developed a 5 page-long modular ruleset for long-term injuries, replacing 5e's death save system with a d20 x d4 table for wound severity/location, along with accompanying rules for permanent wounds, long-term injuries, and healing. My players quite liked it, so I'd call that a success. 

• To support the continuation of that campaign in the Savage Worlds system as the characters journeyed to mysterious Hot Springs Island, I wrote several self-contained rules modules - conversion of the HSI monsters and hazards to the Savage Worlds system of course, but also 3-1/2 pages of rules to make Savage Worlds more closely resemble old-school D&D (for use with HSI, an OSR setting), a slot-based encumbrance system to replace the default Savage Worlds encumbrance rules, and a zone-based movement system combining the abstraction of theater-of-the-mind combat with the tactics of miniatures play (that last one wasn't a hit, my players just found it confusing rather than tactical).

• Lastly, I currently maintain a 6-1/2 page (and counting) collection of house rules for my Old-School Essentials open table campaign, keeping with the time-honored OSR tradition of hacking old-school D&D into exactly the shape I most prefer.

I love me some house rules, is what I'm saying. I'd anticipate, in fact, that a healthy percentage of the posts on this blog will consist precisely of me presenting a specific house rule or set of house rules for a system, then discussing the reasoning behind it. 

But do you know why the fence is there?

Ah yes. As much as we naturally want to bend and tweak our games, Chesterton and his fence offer a valuable counterpoint to those natural GM instincts for excising every aspect of the game we don't like and replacing them with our own homebrewed concoctions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with changing and reforming systems, whether they be high pressure gas distribution networks, governmental policies, or RPG rules... but reformers would do well to understand the systems they purport to improve before diving in. They'll get better results in the end.

Using some examples from my two favorite RPGs, Savage Worlds and Basic/Expert D&D, I'd like to highlight why, in the midst of all our homebrewing and houseruling, we would do well to take a step back and assess the intentions of the fence's builder every now and again.

Tearing down fences in Savage Worlds

If you spend much time on the subreddit for the Savage Worlds generic RPG system, you'll notice an interesting trend. With astonishing regularity, newcomers to the system will post questions that go something like "I'm reading through Savage Worlds, and while I think the system looks really interesting, I was thinking about replacing the wound system with hit points / removing exploding damage / eliminating the Shaken status effect / giving everyone a Wild Die / decoupling Skills from Attributes. Thoughts?"

Anyone familiar with Savage Worlds will recognize that most of these changes would fundamentally alter the core gameplay experience of the system. It's not that they can't be made - just that making them willy-nilly without understanding the implications has the potential to greatly change the feel of the system, often not for the better. And, indeed, the vast majority of the replies to questions like this are some variation on "don't." or "try playing the system rules-as-written before you change it." Inevitably we then see the proverbial backlash to the backlash as others retort "stop telling people they're playing the game wrong" or "way to discourage a new player by gatekeeping."

Is this gatekeeping? I would argue no. Savage Worlds is a weird system. The best adjective I can use to describe it is "cinematic," but that's fairly imperfect as it conjures up images of narrative-first games such as Powered by the Apocalypse, when Savage Worlds is really an interesting blend of traditional, narrative, and unique RPG ideas. It's very much "its own thing", and the system creates a really fun play experience at the table. Note: the key phrase there is "at the table", because there are a lot of rules in Savage Worlds that just seem weird at first glance:

"Wait, you're telling me all damage rolls explode (roll again and add if you roll the highest value on a die, repeat as many times as that happens)? Doesn't that mean a mighty hero could be instantly killed by the smallest goblin even if he's at full health? That's dumb; I like the system overall but I think I'm gonna take that rule out when I run it."

Savage Worlds is full of these kinds of rules - they sound quite strange at first glance, and a novice to the system (particularly one coming from other, dissimilar RPG systems) might think the game would be better off without them. What our imaginary novice GM above doesn't realize, though, is that although exploding damage means a mighty hero could theoretically be instantly killed by the smallest goblin, players can spend Bennies (a metacurrency in Savage Worlds) to "soak" incoming damage before it happens. Additionally, taking too many Wounds will Incapacitate you but won't kill you unless you critically fail a Vigor roll (read: snake eyes on 2d6). Also, due to the way Toughness and Damage interact in the threshold-based (rather than attrition-based) wound system of the game, certain extra-tough baddies would never be damageable without exploding damage dice. Removing exploding damage from the game without addressing all the other mechanics that depend on and feed from it will result in some things simply not working.

The novice Savage Worlds GM who just starts taking down fences, drastically modifying the system without understanding it, will end up running a game where many of the underlying systems are fundamentally broken. They probably won't enjoy the experience very much, and will conclude (incorrectly) that the game just isn't all that fun. This isn't to say people shouldn't modify the rules - not at all. But the oft-given advice to "try the game rules-as-written before changing it" is, far from being an exclusionary mantra, a vital piece of advice for anyone looking to see what really makes Savage Worlds fun. There's just something about Savage Worlds that comes alive at the table, that creates a unique experience hard to conceptualize just reading the rulebook.

To be continued...

I originally intended to roll right ahead into a discussion of some of the unexpected gems to be found in the more idiosyncratic rules of Moldvay and Cook's 1981 Basic/Expert (aka B/X) D&D, and how the principle of Chesterton's fence can help us not to prematurely discard that which we don't understand, thus missing its value... but this post is already edging towards 10 minute reading time territory, and I'd prefer that anyone checking this blog out for the first time doesn't immediately run into a novella, so I will see you all tomorrow for part 2. Thanks for reading!