@Black_Elk said in Grand Plans, 3rd Edition?:
But then the trick is broad adoption, which seems like it only ever comes with some sort of official nod.
I’m not sure that’s totally accurate! I think we as a community of players underestimate ourselves. I know that the friends I game with are usually willing to try mods that I’ve designed, and I’m willing to try theirs. Corpo42 has hosted a Bay Area Anniversary tournament with some modest rule changes for the last two years that’s drawn broad attendance, and SiredBlood in Orange County made his own Global 40-esque map and ruleset and tech tree for a tournament that also got good attendance. Balanced Mod 3.0 currently sees about as much play as OOB Global 40, and several years ago I believe New World Order (another unofficial map) was one of the most commonly played games on TripleA. So when people make good games, I think other people are usually pretty willing to play them.
One place where I do see the community lacking is in organization and consensus-building. The people who are interested in house rules (myself included!) spend a lot more time creating their personal favorite versions and arguing about them on the forums than they do systematically playtesting and reviewing other people’s mods. You don’t really see “committees” set up to design games very often, much less committees set up to vote on or approve new games as “semi-official.”
In my opinion, that’s what it would take to shift games even further away from OOB toward games that are more responsive to player feedback: if we’re not going to be dependent on the Word of God from Avalon Hill or Larry Harris or whatever, then we need to rely on the Word of the Majority from some sort of board or committee or general membership that has high enough status/prestige within the community that they can say “this game is official” and the game becomes accepted as a result. People might follow the board’s leadership if the board is full of very high quality players and designers, or if the board pumps a lot of energy into organizing leagues and tournaments, or if the board includes skilled programmers and artists who can make very pretty games, or if people see that the board is using a thorough, fair, transparent review process to evaluate new game designs, or some combination of the above.
Right now, though, we don’t even have the beginnings of that kind of Board – the people running their various regional tournaments aren’t even trying to coordinate their rules, and the people running the axisandallies.org League are totally agnostic about house rules (you can play a league game with whatever house rules people do or don’t agree to), and the people maintaining the tripleA software are running a neutral platform that can accommodate any and all game designs…so nobody’s really even trying to develop a “moral counterweight” to Larry Harris’s moral authority as one of the original designers.
I think we could wait until the stars grow cold for someone like Larry Harris or an Avalon Hill executive to officially bless a variant Axis & Allies game – if they were interested in acting on constructive criticism, they could have fixed their mainline map on any of their last three tries. They’ve got no special need to listen to feedback from die-hard fans like the people who post on this forum, because they’re making good money from ongoing sales to casual players, and they’re generally well-respected in the community. If we want a new and improved mainline map to catch on more broadly than with just a local group of friends, we will have to do the hard work of building a consensus around that map by ourselves, without help from the corporate owners of the intellectual property.