Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #643: Breaking Rules

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

In this podcast, I discuss when rules should and shouldn't be broken in Magic design. It involves a bunch of talking about planeswalking and puppies.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today's podcast was inspired by my blog this weekend. Okay, so today's topic is, when do we break the rules? So it's about talking about why we have rules and when and how we decide to break them. So let me first get into the conversation this weekend on my blog. So there's a character named Jing Yangu, and he is one of our, we made two planeswalkers for a special Chinese SKU. We were trying to, well, we were making an introductory product for China.

Part of it involved creating two planeswalkers. They were in the Global series. And then Yangu is actually in War of the Spark. So the reason we bring Yangu up... By the way, in China, the familiar name is the second name, not the first name. So I'm calling him Yangu. Jing Yangu, because

that's the familiar name. So Yangu has a dog named Mao. And he travels with Mao. Now, you might think that's not such a big deal. It's cool. A boy and his dog traveling the planes, planes walking around the multiverse together. But it turns out there's a rule that on my blog I've stated multiple times

that we planeswalkers are only, planeswalkers are the only means by which you can travel the plains, although I guess the Eldrazi have a weird exception, and they cannot bring with them any organic material. For those that are following the main storyline, you know, Bolas needs to get the Eternals there, and the planar Bridge can't do living tissue, so he's getting zombies and coding them in Lazatep. And anyway, a lot of issues there of getting the zombie horde to Ravnica for the war. But anyway, we have a rule.

And the rule says, hey, as a planeswalker, you can't bring anything living. You know, a living biological thing with you. And so people were like, wait a minute. How can he bring his dog? That dog is living. That breaks the rules. And so what I was saying was, oh, yeah, it breaks the rules. We did that on purpose.

We thought, you know, magic is a game that breaks its own rules. We thought that that would be a cool character and so we made an exception and a lot of people were like, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa why is this an exception? and what I found was, it's the same in general what often happens is I spell out rules on my blog I often will explain rules

these are the rules we follow. And then at some point we do something that doesn't follow those rules. And people are like, wait, wait, wait, you said these are the rules. How are you doing this? So today I'm going to talk a little bit about when and how. I mean, we are a game that breaks its own rules. Like clearly we set up rules and say, this is how it works, you know. Like, for example, you know, when you play a creature,

you can't attack with it. It's got summoning sickness. You can't attack with it the turn you play it. But, if it has haste, yeah, you can. Haste breaks the rules

that you can't do that. We are a game that sets up rules and then creates things that break those rules. That is the nature of us. But the reason I want to talk about this today is it goes a little bit deeper than that. You don't want to be breaking rules for the sake of breaking them. The shock value of breaking the rules is not the reason to break the rules. So what do we look at? How do we care?

So the first thing is, let's talk about why we have rules. Why do rules exist in the first place? Why don't we just do whatever we want? Why even have rules? And the answer is that rules do a good job of helping create definition for what you do. If you never had any rules, things would just be all over the place, and there wouldn't be, like, in general, humans like order, and like some sort of, you know,

that there's some reason for things. And so a lot of the point of making rules is that we want the game to function, or we want the story to function. So let's talk about planeswalkers. I'm going to talk about this very issue. Okay, why can about planeswalkers. I'm going to talk about this very issue. Okay, why can't planeswalkers bring living things with them? And the answer is, we want planeswalking to be special. That the idea that you can go from one world to another world, we just don't want that being commonplace. And it's interesting, there's a phenomenon that happens in comic books that happen in magic

and what that is is you start your comic book about something unique something special for example, Superman was the last remaining the last living person from the planet of Krypton the last Kryptonian right?

and then it's like well we introduce Supergirl and she's from Krypton and the we introduced Supergirl, and she's from Krypton, and the bottle of Kandor, and they're from Krypton, and the criminals in the Phantom Zone, well, they're from Krypton, you know. And at some point, it's like, oh, it just, it isn't that special anymore. You know, he's not really the

last living Kryptonian. He's like, well, yeah, there's like, you know, many thousands of Kryptonians. He's one of them, you know. And that, one of the things they did when they did a revamp uh there's a DC that company that makes Superman every once in a while was sort of revamp things and there's a period where they revamped and they said you know what that's it nor the Kryptonians he's the Kryptonian um and they relaxed that a little bit but yeah or uh X-Men did something similar where like, okay, we have mutants.

And like early on there just was a handful of mutants. And then eventually there was a bunch of mutants. And then there was like a city of mutants. And there was like a country of mutants. And then just at some point there was like a million mutants. And like, you're not that special if like, if a million

people on the earth are this. That doesn't make sense. And so they did a whole event where they basically took away, you know, they demutified most of the people. You know, they got it down to some small number of people because what made it special was there weren't a lot of them. So early magic did something similar where it's like, oh, well, we have planeswalkers. They travel the planes. Oh, but also there's planar portals.

You know, you can travel a plane through a planar portal. Or there's things like the weather light that can travel. You know, there's just a lot of different, you know, and so all these people that weren't planeswalkers were traveling planes. It's like, oh, we're really kind of missing what makes planeswalkers special. These are like the core identity of our game

are these planeswalkers. These are people that can, they're the ones that can walk between worlds. And like, when everybody could walk between worlds, that wasn't particularly special. So in the mending, what we did is we said, okay, we're going to shut this down. You know, we're changing sort of the nature of the universe.

Now you can only planeswalk if you are a planeswalker. And part of that was saying, okay, well, if a planeswalker just carry other people, then that's just another means to get, you know, that's just another means to say, oh, I'm not a planeswalker, but here's how I planeswalk. So we drew a rule and said, okay, you know, the portals don't work anymore. You know, the only way to planeswalk is to be a planeswalker. And planeswalkers can't take anybody with them.

So the only people who can travel between worlds, the only people are planeswalkers. Okay, so that's the rule. And the reason we made it was we wanted to have something special about our planeswalkers, right? We wanted them to be unique. Okay, so then the question comes up, well, what about this? Why would we break this rule? And so the answer is, we weren't trying to undercut what made planeswalkers special. The point of us breaking this rule, in fact, was making a special planeswalker. We said, okay, well, what if one planeswalker was so bonded to his dog that, for reasons we're not, you know, we don't explain per se, because a lot of times, you know, midichlorians and things, explaining why things work isn't always the best thing. For some reason that we're not

going to explain, he can planeswalk. Not with just anybody. With his dog. That's who he can planeswalk with. And we're like, okay, does that undercut the specialness of planeswalkers? No, in fact, the reverse. It allows us to make a very special planeswalker that just feels different. And, you know, Mawu, the dog, being able to be with him, okay, in some level, it's an extension of the character. Like, Yangu and Mawu are just, that's who you see together. And it's not as if, you know what I'm saying,

like, the whole point of it was trying to make planeswalkers more special, not trying to lessen what makes planeswalkers special. So a good example there is, okay, we broke the rule, but we broke the rule as a means to do something that is not undermining the reason for the rule. And that's a big thing about rule breaking is you have to understand why are you breaking the rules that you have set up? What's the point? And usually the issue is understanding the underlying reason the rule exists. Because the goal of rule breaking is not to disrespect the rule. It is not to say this, you know,

for example, let's take summoning sickness. Why is summoning sickness in the game? And the answer is that Richard thought that the game was more robust if you could choose to do things before or after attacking. Now, at the time, we didn't call it this, but there's a main phase, there's a combat phase, there's a second main phase. If creatures could attack when you played them, then you would always play creatures during the first combat phase. And Richard wanted you to have the opportunity to play them after. them, then you would always play creatures during the first combat phase, and Richard wanted you to have the opportunity to play them after. So he said, okay, well, what if I just, what if I say that creatures can't attack the turn they're played, they get to be defensive for the first turn, it doesn't sort of force your

hand when you play them, you can play them before, play them after, it doesn't matter, you know, you have the option to do what you want. hand when you play them. You can play them before, play them after, it doesn't matter. You know, you have the option to do what you want. And then, the idea was, if I really need a creature that I want to be able to attack right away, that could just be a special ability of the creature. I could write that on the creature. So Richard made a choice and sort of, well, for the overall good of what I want the gameplay to be, I'm going to make the default that you can't do this. But with the idea of, hey, there's times you do want to do this, and then hey, you can do that.

Now, Haste showed up, I mean, the mechanic itself, not the keyword, but the mechanic shows up in alpha. Interestingly, on a black creature that comes from the graveyard. But the idea that, oh, this is something they can attack right away

showed up in alpha. But we didn't name it for a while. Um, it was an ability we used a lot and eventually we gave it a name. We, I forget when we called, we started picking that up, but at some point we said, okay, we're going to call it haste. And that's the ability. And then once you name an ability, you tend to use it more as kind of the nature of keywords. Um, but the point is the rule existed for a function. And then the idea is, I mean, well, I guess there's a couple questions.

Number one is, is this rule supposed to be an absolute, or is this rule the default because it's how you want the default to work? If it's something in which it's not that, like, you're not undermining anything by breaking the rule, it's just a rule for cleanliness and order. thing by breaking the rule. It's just a rule for cleanliness and order. Like, one of the things about the game of Magic is, look, we break almost all our rules, you know, mechanically speaking. Why? Why bother having rules? Because it just makes it easier to learn the game. It makes it easier to understand the game. If you know the defaults and say, okay, here's how the game works, and if it's ever going to break this, we'll tell you. The card will tell you it's breaking it. But it allows you to learn things. Like, if I

was teaching someone how to play Magic and I said, play a card, and then some of the time this and some of the time that, it would be confusing. But I'd say, okay, when you play a creature, unless it tells you otherwise, you can't attack with it. Just having the rule built in makes it cleaner. Now,

let's say some of the time you did one, sometimes you did the other, then you'd have to spell that out every time. It makes more words, it makes it more complicated, but having defaults, which are, hey, the vast majority of the time, this is what happens, makes the game more elegant, easier to learn. It just simplifies things. Other rules are made because they're structural foundational rules for example the color pie the reason the color pie exists is we want in a trading card game it's important that you divvy up things otherwise the best things would just all go on the same deck. But by having different colors, oh, well, I can't easily play all the colors. So if I want to play the black card and the blue card, oh, maybe I'm not playing the red card. It's an important

part of delineation within the trading card game. And in order to sort of make the colors have identity, they have strengths and weaknesses. They have things they can do, things they sometimes do, things they never do. And so part of understanding the color pie is, it's a definitional foundational thing. Okay, there's reasons not to break that rule

because, you know, if a color has a weakness, you don't need to make that many cards that undermine the weakness and it no longer has the weakness and so um that is a rule that's foundational that is trying to set something up and that breaking that rule causes problems um and so the the first thing to understand when you're breaking a rule is understanding what kind of rule you have, why the rule's in place, what is it doing for you. And like I said, some rules are more situational to help define things to teach and to make the game easier to understand. Some are foundational in which they're actually there and they serve a larger purpose, whether or not you explain that to the audience. So in general, when I'm going to break a rule,

the first thing I have to look at is, oh, well, the rule I'm breaking, why does the rule exist? What is it doing? Now, as with the color pie, breaking the rule, it's a spectrum. Sometimes, I call them bends when we're messing with the color pie. And a bend is like, well,

you know, we're messing with this rule, but a little bit. We're understanding what the foundational aspect is, and we're trying not to break the foundational aspect, but we're tweaking it, we're twisting it a little bit. And in general, when you're looking at rule breaking,

you want to sort of understand you know, is this, well, there's two big things. One is, is it undermining anything? Like, is there some foundational rule that me making this break will allow

you to do something you're not supposed to do and then forever change the sort of structure of the game? Or is it, well, we don't normally let you do this, but we think this would be good. And the two big reasons that will break things, number one is gameplay slash storytelling, which is it allows us to do something that we think enhances what we're doing. Okay, you don't normally get to do thing X, but in this set we'll let you do it, and all of a sudden it's like, oh. Like, for example, we have, in Theros,

for example, we made enchantment creatures. We don't normally make enchantment creatures. That's not a thing we normally do. But we had a reason for them here, and we go and look, why aren't there enchantment creatures? Why does that rule exist? And the answer was, it was just a clarity rule.

When Richard first made the game, there wasn't a lot of clean... Artifact creatures made a lot more sense flavorfully than enchantment creatures, so we didn't make enchantment creatures. But we were in a place where it did make sense, where we had a reason that answered, why are these enchantment creatures? And thematically, mechanically, it mattered. We needed to have enough enchantment creatures. And thematically, mechanically, it mattered. We needed to have enough enchantment creatures to make it work. And so, I'm sorry, we need to have enough enchantments, but enchantment creatures allow you to get to that threshold. So that's an example where we broke a rule, but the rule we broke wasn't set up foundationally. It was more set up structurally to sort of reinforce flavor.

Okay, we found a place where that flavor made sense, and it allowed us to break that rule, allowed us to do that. So the other big question, I mean, so we always look at gameplay. We're always like, is making this change something that will enhance gameplay? Now, like the Yang Yu thing, that enhances gameplay a little bit in that we got to make a legendary creature. That's Mao. I mean, we thought that we could make something and that there's some attributes to it

so it would enhance the gameplay. But usually when we're trying to break a rule, it's like, okay, well, what happens if we break this rule? Does the game get better or worse when we do it? And usually, if there's a reason to do it, if there's a point to it, if it plays into the gameplay,

you know, that's when we're willing to break the rules. We're willing to break the rules because we think it's going to enhance the game. If we think that it's going to undermine something or really... Like, one of the things... So we made a set called Planar Chaos. In Planar Chaos and Planar Chaos

so Time Spiral Block was all about time there was past, present, future but the present set which was Planar Chaos was kind of an alternate future sorry an alternate present where it was very what if

and we really sort of messed around with the color pie and it's a good example where I think we broke something in a way that wasn't good for the game because it just caused confusion. To this day, on my blog,

it's become a running joke on my blog, people get confused about the color pie and use cards from Planter Chaos, constantly go, but this card. You know, and like I said, it's happened so much it's become a running joke on my blog because like, well, you were picking the one set that the whole point of the set was that it wasn't

normal. But the fact that it caused so much confusion says, oh, maybe this rule, breaking this rule, was problematic. Because the point of the rules is to create some fun gameplay, not sort of cause chaos, per se. Another thing we look at is, is the rule break exciting? Are people going to like it? Okay, we don't let people, you know, planeswalkers can't have any organic material with them,

and they can't travel with living things. Okay, well, what if we said, but this one can travel with his dog, where players go, oh, or they go, ooh, his dog, and we thought, you know what, that's kind of cool. It's kind of neat that there's this bond between a boy and his dog, so much so that when he planeswalks, the dog comes with him.

That seemed really cool. And we're like, okay, we're breaking a rule, but we think players would like that. We think it's something that it won't undermine the reason for the rule and it'd be something players would enjoy. There's no reason to break a rule, even if the gameplay is good, if it just fundamentally goes against

whether your audience would enjoy that thing. If you break a rule and, okay, I think this is good gameplay, but the audience is just like, it fundamentally flies in the face of what I believe, you know, of how I feel. Like, one of the interesting things in my blog is a lot of times the arguments I will have is people who are arguing more principle than anything.

I set a rule. I broke the rule. Why am I breaking the rule? But it's funny how many people chimed in and go, let the boy have his dog. Why can't the boy have his dog? Like a lot of people chimed in and they're like, hey, I don't know why the boy gets his dog, but you know what?

I let the boy get his dog. Let the boy play with his dog. And so it's very interesting in that while all this was going on and people trying to clarify stuff, there's just this very loud voice of dog lovers, essentially, who are like, this is cool. Can we stop

arguing with him? Let him do the cool thing. And that is another big thing, is like, not only is the gameplay good, but the reaction, the audience reaction is important. And making sure that what you're doing sort of

makes sense to the audience and feels right to the audience. And I'll admit, by the way, there's a, anytime you do something you don't normally do, somebody's going to go, oh, wait, wait, you don't do that. Oh, there's a rule, you don't do that.

And so you are going to upset, there are people who like the rules and really they get a lot... A lot of their identity stems from really understanding the rules and being an expert on the rules. And really, they have a connection with that. And when you break that, there's some people, even if you're breaking

for good reason and the gameplay is good, you know, are still going to be, why did you break that rule? This is the argument I was having this weekend. It's not that most of them didn't even like the fact that yangu had his dog most of them actually thought it was cool they're like why are you breaking your rule and that was a lot of the interesting discussion is why why are you breaking the rule and so it forced me to sort of get into the well let's go back and talk about why why does this rule exist and the funny thing is one of the things i pointed out this weekend that a lot of you don't realize is we don't get to talk a lot about planeswalking in the

set because we go to a new world. We're there. The planeswalkers are there. And we stay there for the whole story. We don't really see the planeswalking as a cosmological element, we don't really have to explain too much about it because you don't see that much planeswalking. It's kind of like the story begins that are there, the story ends, and they're still there. And in between the stories is when they travel between the planes. And so we don't, and on top of that, trading card games are static moments, right? It's kind of like, oh, this action's taking place. So there's not a lot of room on the cards to talk about planeswalking. It's just not something

we, in the nature of what we do. And so one of the issues this weekend I realized was, it wasn't so much, like, I think the perception of some players was, oh, these are hard and fast rules. Where the reality is, every planeswalker planeswalks different.

Some planeswalkers, it takes a great strain to planeswalk. Some can do it relatively easy. Some can planeswalk once and then planeswalk again pretty quickly. Some takes a while to sort of reboot their energies. Some people can carry a bunch of inorganic stuff with them. Some can only carry a little. Some like Yangu, which is rare, can take a biological thing with them. It depends.

And the idea is the planeswalkers, by definition, are supposed to be a bit different from each other. Everyone does not work the same. But what I realized this weekend was because we don't show that on cards, there's not a lot of cards that represent a planeswalker planeswalking. That's not a we don't show that on cards, there's not a lot of cards that represent a planeswalker planeswalking. We don't, that's not a thing we tend to show on cards, but the nature of how we do sets.

So the fact that there's a uniqueness, you know, if you read the stories, it's there, but you really have to have read the stories. It's not touchifying in the card set. It's just the card set is not well suited to be able to do that. You know, and that is an important sort of distinction of understanding why. So, oh, the other thing about breaking a rule is understanding what your set is doing. And a lot of times when we break a rule, we know that it will draw attention. We know that rule breaking is eye-opening

and can be exciting because when you say to somebody, you can't do something, and all of a sudden they, now you can. People go, ooh, I can? I thought I couldn't do that, you know? And there's a freedom and excitement to being able to do something

you've been told you can't do. And that's another reason, by the way, why we make rules on some level is, yes, I mean, all the stuff I said before is true, but also we know by making rules, we allow ourselves to occasionally break those rules. That one of the exciting things, so Richard was very influenced by a game called Cosmic Encounter. by a game called Cosmic Encounter. And one of the things about Cosmic Encounter is Cosmic Encounter is just the game of exceptions.

Like, the way it works is you're having an intergalactic battle and you have an alien race that you represent. And for starters, your alien race just has a rule that basically lets it break one of the rules of the game. For starters. And then you have cards that let you further break the rules set in the game. And the game really is like, here are all the rules, and then there's very few rules you can't break in Cosmic Encounter.

And I know Richard was very inspired by that. So that's another thing that's kind of fun, is setting up things that say you can't do this, then when you get to say, no, you can do it, it definitely has some... It really enhances things and makes it exciting. So the important part for us is when we break a rule, not only do we want to make sure that it fits what we're doing and helps the gameplay and maybe helps the story, but also it's going to

draw attention to itself. When you do something you've never done before. So for example, I use War of the Spark. We were doing a Planeswalker theme. Okay. Well, I knew part of doing a Planeswalker theme was I wanted to draw attention to the Planeswalkers. So, we broke a bunch of rules

about the Planeswalkers. For example, the original rule is we only have about 10 Planeswalkers a year, which means a large set has, eh, usually about three Planeswalkers. We had 36. Breaking large set has, eh, usually about three Planeswalkers.

We had 36. Breaking the rule. I mean, majorly breaking the rule. Normally, Planeswalkers just have loyalty abilities. In War of the Spark, we introduced static abilities and triggered abilities. You know, barring a few rare exceptions to make cards work, that

wasn't something Planeswalkers do. We had rare Planeswalkers.. We had rare planeswalkers. We had uncommon planeswalkers. That is not something we do. And we had hybrid planeswalkers. We've never made hybrid planeswalkers before. And so, like, I constantly chose to break some of the existing rules here because it reinforced the theme of what we were doing. Like, I wanted you to go, oh, planeswalker set. Well, if I only used three planeswalkers, and they were only mythic rare,

and they only used loyalty abilities, like, you know, and they were just normal colors, what about that says, ooh, it's, you know, what says it's the planeswalker set? Like, if I do everything as normal, it doesn't reinforce anything, you know. But when I say there's 36 planeswalkers as opposed to 3

there's 12 times as many planeswalkers and they're rare and they're uncommon and they have static and triggered abilities and some of them are a hybrid you sit up and go oh that's not normal and then it reinforces what we're trying to do you go oh I see

it's the planeswalker set look at all these not normal things you did with planeswalkers. So that's another big thing about when you break the rules is you want to break them in a way that reinforces the set you're working on, reinforces the themes you're working on, that helps sort of, like one of the problems of breaking the rules for just break the rules is when people see something broken, they assume it's important because we don't break the rules all the time. And so usually I go, why are they breaking this here? So breaking the rule also sort of does some messaging you have to be careful about because people attribute rule breaking to being important because it's not something you do very often. And so when you break your rules,

you want to lean toward your theme, lean toward your mechanics, so that they help reinforce and sell the set. Okay, it's War of the Spark. It's a Planeswalker set. Well, how do we get people excited for that? Well, let's break some rules and expectations. Let's do something they don't expect. And that's not to say, like, I think it's important that we keep to the 10 Planeswalker rule in general. You know, there's a bunch of things, the way we do and balance things, and our norm is the way that we want it to work,

but, hey, we get to do something special every once in a while, break our rules, and really make something unique and special. But that doesn't mean that now, like, the other thing about breaking a rule is understand when and how you're breaking the rule, and then, after, revert. Now, I mean, sometimes we fundamentally change

what we're doing in Magic, and that's not as much breaking the rules as changing the rules. But when we break the rules, the idea is, we do it in small amounts, we do it for purpose in a place, we make sure it doesn't undermine anything, you know, that it's not breaking something that's foundational, and

we make sure that it's exciting, and it's something that something that's foundational. And we make sure that it's exciting and it's something that players want to see. And that's why we break a rule. We break a rule. We don't carelessly break a rule. We very willfully break rules and we break them for purpose. And so it is not as if we're like,

oh, whatever, you know. We're trying to make sure that we do things where there's a point and a purpose to it. Like I said, sometimes the purpose is shorter term, sometimes it's longer term, but it is something in which we're very careful about it. You never should break a rule just for the sake of breaking it. You should never break it just for shock value. You should break it because it is serving the purpose of what you are doing in a way that aids it and helps it and helps direct the audience toward what you're doing. Anyway, I hope that was

good. So as a spontaneous topic for my blog, I would like those. Hope that was entertaining today. A little insight into why we do what we do. But I'm now at work. So we all know that means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.