Podcaster Justin McElroy once described playing Dungeons and Dragons as (roughly) the following:

It’s like playing pretend as a kid, only every now and then a guy goes ‘no no, you can’t do that’

It’s stuck with me for years: anyone who has played a tabletop rpg will know how brilliantly accurate and funny it is. Being told ‘no’ and having limits in place is what defines us as adults! Even beyond games, accepting limitations is a part of maturity that we have to develop; a complete free-for-all isn’t terribly fun, really.

That said, in the context of gaming, being told you can’t do something without justification or logic isn’t all that fun, either. Limitations can free our creativity when used correctly by challenging us to work within boundaries, focusing on what we can change rather than being blinded by choice.

Let’s look at two PC games: Europa Universalis and the Civilisation series. Both are thematically very similar, and there’s a demographic who’ll really enjoy both, but how each game introduces the player to the world demonstrates limitations differently. In Civilisation the player has some very specific and clear goals at the start – found a city, scout the map, contact other players, expand your nation. It also sets victory conditions for the end game also – control X amount of the map, create a global alliance, etc. These are absolute, the game simply doesn’t work if you don’t do them; failing to work towards these objectives will guarantee a loss. These are universal goals, too, as all players start from this point regardless.

Europa Universalis leaves the player to their own devices. You pick a nation, and away you go. There’s a tutorial available but it teaches the mechanics of the game rather than what you should be doing. No victory conditions, no objectives, and no measures to tell you whether you’re doing things right. In effect, you as the player are expected to create your own limitations by setting goals and challenges that you want to overcome. Deciding you want to play in a way that means you completely ignore military matters and focus solely on trade won’t lead to you being punished by the game (though that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy!)

Unsurprisingly, Europa Universalis (EU) has a much harsher learning curve than Civilisation. EU asks far more from its players up-front by essentially giving them the freedom to do whatever they feel like, whether it would be wise to do or not. When I first played EU I found this daunting, as unless you’ve got a rough idea of the history of the period – and EU covers a huge chunk of time – you don’t really know where to start. In Civilisation, the various nations are just a sense of ‘flavour’ and some bonuses, as you don’t start at a point in history.

How does different approaches to limitations reflect on the tabletop game? It finds its own peculiar niche in these things, because no matter the game, no matter how good it is, a tabletop game can never guarantee that its ruled are enforced completely or correctly. We’re all partial to the occasional house rule, something that can’t be put in place on a PC game without a great amount of knowledge and skill.

Add interpretation and reading comprehension into the mix and we begin to see why rules for tabletop games of all kinds so often miss the mark with some people. Rule-writing is a skill, arguably a collaborative one when playtesting is considered, and certainly not a skill that we can learn quickly. There are very few (successful) rulesets that haven’t had a second or revised edition.

Originally I’d planned to write about the concept of ‘friction’ and its uses, but it seems I’ve ended up exploring an idea that is similar but not identical. You could argue that these restrictions are their own form of friction, but their purpose is different. Friction mechanics are supplementary, whereas the limitations here are foundational. Take away a friction mechanic and agame will still broadly work in the way that it’s meant to. Chess would be an example of a game with firm restrictions (every piece moves in a very specific way) but no friction (there is no random chance in a game of chess.) I guess chess-boxing would be a different kettle of fish, but that’s a topic for another day.

With that, I should identify a restriction I’ve built into Tea and Toast. I wanted quite strict criteria but little friction in the movement rules, as WW1 planes didn’t have the finesse to vary their speed much of the time – the throttle on the Airco DH2, for example, had two settings: on or off. To achieve this, the rules state how far any plane can move and manoeuvre in a turn – this value is static. You’ll always know how fast your SE5A can travel in normal conditions, and how many turns the DR1 you’re fighting can make as it tries to avoid you. There are things you can do to alter this – climb to slow the plane down, dive for a speed boost – but you’ll always have a feel of what you can achieve and what your opponent is capable of.

A DH2 in action

The friction element here is how you can try and push your plane beyond this to get the upper hand. Sometimes it’ll work, sometimes you’ll shear the wings off and fall to earth, but I think I’ll cover that in my next post.