I like to joke about two sets of hypothetical scenarios. I want you to read both sets, and compare: in which situations would you personally describe the player as “playing the game” and which would you perhaps wonder if she’d be better off playing a different RPG or making her own?
Here’s the first set:
A Dungeons & Dragons GM runs up to you and excitedly tells you about her new campaign. It uses all the mechanics of D&D but it’s set in a science-fiction world with laser-swords and jedi-wizards casting spells. For each class in the Player’s Handbook she’s invented an equivalent in her new setting.
A Dungeons & Dragons GM runs up to you and excitedly tells you about her new campaign. It’s set in a fantasy world, but she’s replaced the D20 mechanic with a Blades in the Dark dice pool, and she’s replaced the classes with a feat system from Savage Worlds, and she’s replaced initiative with Troika’s bowl of scraps based initiative.
Here’s the second set:
A Yazeba’s B&B Concierge runs up to you and excitedly tells you about her group. They wanted to play Yazeba’s in a high fantasy setting, so instead of “Yazeba” there’s “Mordred the Grumpy Witch” and instead of “Sal” there’s “Dominic the Bard.” The Bed & Breakfast is instead a castle, but all the chapters are otherwise the same.
A Yazeba’s B&B Concierge runs up to you and excitedly tells you about her group. They’ve been playing a new chapter of her own invention, where the residents go on a multi-session long bank heist. It uses the mechanics from Blades in the Dark, and besides its use of Bingos & Whoopsies has no real comparison to any other chapter in the game.
Well these are a lot weirder, aren’t they! In both sets of scenarios, the 1st scenario describes someone retooling the setting of a game-text while keeping the rules of the text entirely the same. The 2nd scenario describes someone retooling the mechanics of the game-text while preserving the setting. What’s interesting for me is that I’m much more open to the 1st scenario than the 2nd when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons (and in fact, when I used to run the game I was very much a 1st scenario kind of GM) but when it comes to Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, I would consider the 1st scenario very strange and the 2nd scenario entirely reasonable.
What can this tell us about where games live? Is there something more essential about the setting provided in the game-text of Yazeba’s, or does Yazeba’s provoke an entirely different relationship with the game text than D&D, or something else? And how does this extend to other games?