Straight talk post about rules!

Hi everyone, this might be a lengthy post, however if you are able to read the whole thing, you should be able to see some insight as to plans for future Knight Realms rules updates. 

Let me start by explaining the dynamic of rules changes through the decades we have been playing.

(Ver.1.0) In the beginning of time (for KR) there was the original KR rules we sometimes refer to as “1.0”. I worked on them tirelessly for years with the help of close friends. They looked as perfect as they could be and we started playing with them. Insert 100+ players for several years and people start looking at them and saying, it could be better. I give some people my blessings to edit them, some edits are big and some edits are small. All in all, each roll out of changes seem a positive thing. This process continues to varying degrees for about 20 years. 

(Ver2.0) For the 20^th year (April 2018) I decided to let the whole thing have a complete rebuild, almost seemingly from scratch. Extreme and major base system concepts completely rewritten. This endeavor was meant only with the best intentions. In our minds we were fixing a ton of unfixable problems, making everything fair and mathematically equal and also helping to reduce level gap creep. We also developed a stranglehold on large numbers and number inequity. It was meant to be a huge improvement that would vastly increase everyone’s gameplay experience. Moreso than that I personally believed in it. Was it good? In some areas it was and, in many areas, it turned out to be controversial. The fighting about whether or not the change was good or bad was palatable and in your face at all times. I chalked these hard times up to it being necessary to break some eggs in order to make an omelet, but after several years, I started to believe myself that the omelet didn’t actually taste quite right…

(Ver3.0) Sometime after covid ended and we continued live play, we started to steer a little bit away from the hard concepts of 2.0 and back to some of the concepts of 1.0. Simple concepts such as the return of roleplay skills and loosening the grip on the math/equality in favor for fun. The result was 3.0 (July 2021) which is generally where we are at now. Looking back, I feel that there are certain spots in our rules change history where we tried to be something we were not and instead of embracing our niche, we tried to fix it, when in reality some of these things should not have been fixed. Sometimes it’s both the working parts and the broken parts that make us who we are.  In some cases, fixing things took us further and further away from our intended identity. 

Every time we have ever changed a rule, we have believed that change to be positive. Over time however we sometimes make an unfortunate observation. Making an improvement in one area sometimes directly causes a new problem to arise. When that happens, we have to stop and think, which problem is worse, the older one or the newer one? If the older problem feels worse, than in an odd way the change was a success. If the newer problem feels worse, then rules regret starts to set in as we realize the whole situation was better if we had not changed it in the first place. Over the last couple of years, I have been having a lot of rules regret. Fundamental changes that felt great at the time, now feel worse when weighed against newer problems that have arisen as a result. The death system is only one example, but a good example. The older problem was people feeling bad about losing their characters. That was solved with a change to unlimited lives, but the newer problem as a result is the feeling that character death doesn’t matter. Some people did sound the alarm at first, but at that time to me, the older problem was worse than the potential newer problem. After several years of playing with that change, more and more I saw and even felt the pointlessness of character risk, character sacrifice, character conflict, when the stakes are so incredibly low. I’m now at a point where the newer problem feels very clearly worse to me than the older problem. But the death system is just one example and there has been many areas of changed rules where this type of dynamic is currently playing out this way in my mind. 

I’m not mad at myself or any team of rules authors for the changes that we made over the years. Once again, I think we all had the absolute best of intentions and even if a few people claimed that they could foresee the future problems of a change, we still needed to feel the new problems first hand, over time, to truly be able to decide which was better and which was worse. So, regret may not be a fully accurate description and instead I’ll say that I’m glad I am in a place where I can look back on a change that I feel did not work out the way I hoped and am willing to candidly admit it and consider a change back towards the original direction. 

What does this mean? 

We will be periodically making changes to rules that might seem closer to the original KR rules system. We will focus on things that do not require game wide card re-writes, but eventually at some point a year or two down the line, it will be inevitable. We understand rules change fatigue and we will do our best to do things in an order that has the least amount of disturbance. If ever we make a change that affects skills and abilities on your card, we will allow you to re-write as we find appropriate. 

We will not be making any changes that invalidate the existence of the exalted lists. A lot of time and emotional energy was put into those by both rule designers and players and we will not create a situation where they are taken away and we start that process over. That being said, we may make edits to the exalted lists if we find it necessary.

How fast this is going to happen is anyone’s guess and we do not have a defined timeline. Currently I am interested in the death and resurrection system and adjusting priest so it no longer feels like the gods are blended together with all priests,

I would like to say don’t panic, but I know some of you will no matter what and I’m sorry for that. I will say it anyway. Don’t panic. Things will be fine. Game rules in most games are ever changing and we are hoping to eventually shift back into a younger truer version of the Knight Realms rules. This announcement isn’t because we have big things in the works and are about to come down with them all, it’s to let you know to not be surprised when the changes do happen. Each part will happen whenever it happens, I am simply steering the ship in that direction and as most adventurers we will see where the winds take us.