This is pulled from a conversation I had recently about optional rules.

Rules combine to make systems, and systems create flavor by shaping the permissible and supported space of a game. Any skillful or willful group of players (the storyteller is a player too) can play outside the rules of the game system they’re using—that’s normal!—but that play isn’t supported by the system, and it isn’t part of the flavor the system creates.

Optional rules are opportunities…

…to customize the taste of your game system. They come with additional cost (you have to remember them, use them, and adjudicate them, and they are often more complicated than the system default) but they can push play in fun and evocative directions.

When optional rules are written well, the underlying system doesn’t feel like it’s missing anything without them. Using such a system creates an experience that feels functional and whole. When the system and those optional rules are poorly written, ignoring the optional rules feels boring or bad.

In the latter case, you might as well make the optional rules part of the base system.

This next bit is half-remembered and slightly fuzzy, on account of how long it’s been since I last played the game in question. I think it still holds.

Unknown Armies 2^nd edition (UA 2e) had rules about using specific skills, with special things that happened given specific die rolls in combat. There were other special results for specific die rolls out of combat. I think this was an attempt to make some kinds of skills feel different, special. I don’t believe it was intended to be optional.

But these rules had very little connective logic. They mostly felt (to me) like a collection of extra results on a random table that I had to memorize or have open for reference. Worse, I wasn’t going to apply those rules consistently to every roll (just to some rolls, sometimes).

This kind of complication can be fun when it’s easy to remember how it works, or when the complication ties into other evocative and thematic elements of the game. Unfortunately, very few games manage both. Most game systems only make the complication simple (e.g. a 20 always succeeds and a 1 always fails, or rolling under 1/5^th of your skill rating is extra good) and don’t make the connection feel thematic.

For me, UA 2e managed neither. Worse, they didn’t make the complications optional. Fortunately those complications were easy to ignore… at the cost of some player fun.

To be fair, UA pioneered a different mechanic. The game system used a stress and sanity mechanic that broke different kinds of stress (and stressors) into separate tracks: Helplessness, Violence, Unnatural, Isolation, and Self (the order doesn’t matter). Most RPGs before Unknown Armies had a single track for mental resilience, sanity, or one’s ability to resist one’s inner demons. Call of Cthulhu’s Sanity attribute and Vampire the Masquerade’s Humanity attribute are both decent parallels. Because UA included these separate tracks, and included clear guidelines about how and when these tracks would come into play, it shaped play in a novel way. Suddenly, players had mechanics to back up and give weight to the fact that their character wouldn’t bat an eye at seeing bloodshed, but couldn’t handle being unable to act.

Mechanics tell players very clearly where a game’s focus lies. A system with detailed combat rules anticipates lots of fighting. A system like GURPS that handles every challenge with the same mechanic is usually trying to be less narratively biased, but might fail to evoke particular narrative flavor with its rolls. Thus, not all systems are equally suited to every task; if I were planning a social intrigue game where I didn’t expect combat to play a sizable role, I’d only use D&D as a last resort.

Sadly, I’m actually doing that right now.

All of this means that UA’s stress tracks implicitly make the game about psychological horror. Psychological horror isn’t required, but at some point something confronting will happen and some character is going to face a situation they’re not comfortable in… and then the stress track rules will come out. UA 2e was designed such that you theoretically could strip out the stress tracks if you wanted to, but at that point you might as well play any other mostly-generic system.

After speaking ill of UA 2e, I want to acknowledge that UA 3e changed things significantly. I haven’t yet played the game, but I’ve read through the system several times and I think it deserves kudos and more attention.

Unkown Armies 3e simplified the concepts of 2e by paring away individuated skills and making almost everything about Identities. For example, someone might be good with a pistol, but they’re good with a pistol because they’re a Competitive Marksman, or a Soldier, or maybe a Cowboy. Better yet, UA 3e wove the stress tracks into the remaining Basic Skills; a character’s rating in a Basic Skill is tied to where they fall on the related stress track. This means that, for example, as you become more inured to being alone, you may find it harder to connect with others. Identities can also swap in to substitute for Basic Skills, with a few qualifications.

There are a few places where this connection between Basic Skills and stress tracks feels forced or weird, but I think this is a fundamentally more interesting mechanical choice for the system. With this in place, the game is giving explicit weight to how people respond to the trauma they’ve faced. There are ways to work around it, but those require a choice and investment of effort from the player character.

Better yet, it seems like UA 3e simplified those goofy die results I complained about above. Honestly, they might be the exact same rules, but they felt more straightforward and streamlined to me. I had fewer questions about when and how they apply, and the logic of adjudicating contested rolls felt clearer as well.

Ultimately, because players are free to do whatever they like if everyone at the table is down, all rules are optional. But some rules are more optional than others. I could play UA 2e without the stress tracks and simply have a worse-than-mediocre game, because the game system wasn’t dependent on those tracks. Playing UA 3e without the stress tracks would feel silly to me—they’re baked into the game’s functioning. Yes, one could replace them, but one could just as easily choose a different d100 rules system instead.

If you aren’t already doing this, I recommend that you take a look at the game systems you play: what do their rules say about the stories they’ll help you tell? Is that what you want from your game? Are there any other games you’ve seen that might help you tell a story you’re more excited about? Check those out. You might find whole new worlds of fun.