on rules and etrian odyssey iv

2025-09-14

A discussion on rules prompted by Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop and a short review of Etrian Odyssey IV.

exercise 2.4: rules

Can you think of a game that has no rules? If so, describe it. How about one rule? Why is this exercise difficult? If "rules" in games are used to define valid player actions and objects in the game, then there can be no game without rules. Even experiences that aren't technically "games", like children playing house or role-playing, depends on the participants agreeing on universal limitations and situations of the world they are playing-pretend in; for example, a group of children pretending to be witches may use long sticks or other stick-like items to signify their role, while those who have no sticks may have to remain as regular people. This limitation or division-- "those who have sticks are witches and those who don't are people"-- can be thought of as a rule. Additionally, each person's abilities is limited to their role: witches can travel faster than humans and use magic, and humans are to act within the constraints of an average person. Thus, a child who insists that they're a witch even without a stick or tries to fly could be chastised by their peers for "breaking the rules", which were created naturally and spontaneously to specify the boundaries of the experience. Anecdotally, I can say that this exact scenario would play out for every play-pretend session I engaged in as a child.

For a situation as simple as children playing pretend, the unspoken limitations of play spiral out of control and become incredibly complicated and complex. Alternatively, there are other forms of idle play that are significantly less convoluted, like catch, which has only one rule: toss the ball (or other object) to any other player. There are no penalties for dropping the ball or throwing it poorly, just so long as it is thrown. This one rule scales on the amount of players: it is unchanged for playing catch with ten people or just one (a single person playing catch may throw the ball up into the air or bounce it off a wall).

Figuring out games with one or less rules is supremely difficult since games hinge on having rules. Supposedly "simple" games that are well-known and easy to remember will seldom have less than two rules: "The Game" is documented to have at least three rules. These super-minimalist games straddle the line between play and games due to the lack of specificity that comes with having less rules. Let's look at catch again: how long can a person hold onto the ball before tossing it to another player? What happens if they take too long? The answers to these questions become the basis for Hot Potato, where there is a time limit on passing the ball to others and the last person to hold the ball loses.

Games and play need rules to function, but games are more specific extrapolations of the rules in play.

game ideas

  1. You make public signs designed for extraterrestrial life to teach them Earth customs.
  2. You are a taxi driver in a new city, and one of your regular clients convinces you to work part-time for them as a deliveryman.
  3. You are a doppelganger trying to avoid the human you copied.
  4. A click-and-drag chiropractor adventure where you click and drag your clients' joints to crack them.
    1. Cracking more bones gives you more points.
    2. With a fake license, you can prescribe your clients dud prescriptions so they keep coming back.
  5. Interpretive dance charades?
    1. Create an interpretive dance based on a sentence prompt from an assortment of pre-set moves against a pre-determined soundtrack, then submit it to a group of friends for review, who have to guess the original sentence prompt from the dance.

new game! etrian odyssey iv: legends of the titan

This week's new game was Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan. I had heard that the Etrian Odyssey series was devilishly hard and had a steep learning curve, and I was excited to try it out for myself. Of the various RPGs I've played, few of them are dungeon-crawlers, so seeing EOIV's take on an RPG subgenre that I was already unfamiliar with seemed inviting.

The first dungeon in EOIV is a tutorial dungeon, teaching the player several key mechanics and strategies, the most important and interesting of which was the player-drawn map. Upon entering any unexplored area in Etrian Odyssey, the player is presented with a blank map to fill in, label, and mark up as they venture through the lands. This was a really interesting departure from other navigation methods I've seen, like being presented with a map at the very beginning of the area or finding it later in a chest or the like. The player-generated maps add a more personal twist to each area: this isn't just a map, it's my map, and the map becomes an added responsibility along with managing the team.

Along with the map generation system, the player quickly learns to choose their battles: both the dungeons and the overworld are rife with high-level enemies, and encountering them is practically a guaranteed Game Over. There is no way to save within the dungeon, so a Game Over will automatically transport the player to their last save outside of the dungeon, possibly before they even started exploring. The turn-based combat has order seemingly determined by RNG: units that acted first at turn one will act second or third or fourth, making combat unpredictable, especially against these high-level enemies. The first time losing all my progress to an unfortunate run-in was a gut punch, and it left a very clear image of how EOIV was meant to be played.

Difficult enemies combined with the player-driven map forces the player to rely on what they know and play cautiously, exactly how an adventuring party would approach a new area.

Everything about EOIV was enjoyable, but I did like in particular how normal the RPG mechanics itself were. Among the party, there are more standard roles each player character can fill: melee DPS/all-rounders, ranged units, magic units, sustains and supports, to name a few. Juxtaposing these familiar systems with the unconventional map generation and dungeon difficulty seems to give more attention to these elements than the RPG party system alone.