How Much Proprietary Is Too Much?

 So full disclaimer here before anyone decides to come kicking down my door: I am not inherently against the use of proprietary items in games. You may have guess that from every single game I've done unboxings and first impressions of thus far. All of them use something, and I've never thrown a shitfit over it.

That being said, is there a point when it becomes too much?

Now I want to clarify something, when I say proprietary items I don't mean basic stuff like stat cards or upgrade cards or tokens. Those are all pretty essential and not really a deal breaker for anyone as far as I know (although I am firmly in the "offer stat cards for fucks sake" camp). When I talk about needing proprietary items to play a game I mean specialty dice and the likes.

I think that these types of things can be done well, and correctly. In games like Godtear, Oak & Iron or Warhammer Underworlds the special dice and such used don't bother me in the slightest becasue they are, by and large, self contained games. And in all three of those cases, buying a starter set just makes sense (especially for Oak & Iron). Obviously they can be expanded with new champions/ships/warbands respectively, but by being that sort of board/wargame hybrid they feel less...manipulative. This also applies to something like X-Wing, or at least did when I played back after Episode 7 came out. I bought the starter box, but only had three ships I didn't want to worry about. yeah I bought an extra pack of dice because some of the combos got a little crazy, but it was largely self contained.

And that brings us to another Star Wars game, and probably the most egregious offender of too much proprietary in my opinon: Legion. You may recall that I quite enjoyed my game of Legion way back when, and I still maintain that it is a solid enough game. I get why people like it mechanically, although I think it should be 15mm, and if asked if someone who enjoys Star Wars and wargames should look into it I will absolutely tell them yes. But it does go fucking mental with the proprietary stuff. Basically everything in that game is proprietary: the dice, the movement tools, the range rulers for shooting, even the god damned bases aren't standard sized. Yeah, the normal infantry are on 27mm bases. Who does that?

And to make it worse, as I mentioned in my first impression post, if you buy a starter set (over $100 investment, mind you) it doesn't even get you enough dice to actually play the game proper!

This gets you three more of each type of dice

It just baffles me how anyone could think this was the best way. And it brings me to my main issue: what does it add to the game? What does not using inches for measurement add to the game that the special tools do? The only thing I can think of is that it means no conversions in countries that use the metric system. That's not enough to justify it for me. What do the dice add? Nothing to real value in this nerd's opinion. It just lets them have different levels of dice, which could still be accomplished by just using a tiered dice system and letting people use the piles of dice they likely already own.

Again, not a bad game, but it does, to borrow one of my favorite British terms, absolutely take the piss.

It wouldn't be so bad if things were easily converted for those who don't want to spend money on extra stuff (i.e. anyone who maybe wants to start by buying one of the battle force sets that don't come with range tools or dice), but it seems even that doesn't work. The shortest movement tool is roughly 3 inches, for example. Not exactly 3 inches, but roughly around that mark. 

Now this probably all sounds like someone who hates proprietary items in games, and as I established I'm not one of those. So let me talk about two games I find myself quite enamoured with that use proprietary items: Bot War and World of Twilight. 

Bot War uses non-standard dice. Okay, not great because again it would be nice to have to keep track of a separate pile of dice, but whatever. Here's the difference, and where I really draw the line with Legion: one pack gets you enough to play a normal game. 

Five of each dice and some energy cubes

If you don't want to buy the two player starter, this is a whopping $15. Bam, done. Compare that to the Legion dice pack, which retails at $18 and doesn't give you enough dice to roll a small squad's shooting without having to re-roll at least one die. Now, there are the rare few models in Bot War that have stats that will require you to roll more than five dice, but I think there's a total of four in the whole game.

Lord Humongous here being one of the rare ones (and he stands at over 5 inches tall)

So that dice pack is, generally speaking, enough to play the game comfortably. And that's the key thing to me: I want to have to buy as few things as possible to enjoy the game. Obviously with a platoon scaled game you need more models than you do a skirkish game, but I want to keep the extra purchases of non-model items to a minimum.

The other game I mentioned as being a good example of proprietary is World of Twilight. Brief aside: World of Twilight is one of the best games I've ever played. The rules are solid and innovative, they're fun as hell and the game packs so much charm per square inch that it verges on creating some sort of singularity. It's an absolute fucking disgrace that more people don't know about it. Go check it out, for the love of god.

Now in World of Twilight combat is handled in a unique fashion. Each model as a combat score, and when fighting you take a number of combat stones equal to your combat score and choose what you will allocate to attack and what you will allocate to defense (Bushido does a similar method using dice, and is also awesome). The game also uses a random activation system akin to Bolt Action, but there are two activation tokens that denote when combats are fought (outside of special abilities that let you initiate one out of turn). Sounds like you need a ton of stuff to play, but it all comes in one easy to use package.

And for the low price of ten quid (or roughly $12)

But all of these things can be substitued pretty easily if you don't want to make that extra investment (although it's dirt cheap). Combat stones? Use coins, heads are a success and tails a failure. Activation tokens? Use different colored dice, it's not like we gamers are in short supply of a variety of dice. So these extra things aren't actually required to play the game, although for the cost the official stuff is great. 

This brings me to the point I made earlier: these things feel like a new take. Special dice for the sake of special dice? I'm a little iffy on. If the game does other things right then I'm willing to let it slide, for the most part. But in World of Twilight the core mechanics are so unique and different that you can't really replace them with a normal dice roll. I suppose you could do 1-3 is  fail and 4-6 is a success if you wanted, but seeing how you use a d6 to make Tough rolls it could get confusing quickly. But becasue it does something different it doesn't feel like as much of a copout, you know? Why does a game that uses dice need special dice? Does it, really? 

Again, I'm not against these types of things at face value. Legion is a good game, Crisis Protocol is a good game that suffers from the same design philosophy, I'm sure Shatterpoint is fun. But I'm getting to a point where needing tons of extra stuff for a single game just feels like a way to gouge me. If things were cross compatible it'd probably sting a hell of a lot less. 

A game can do proprietary right, and many games do. But the best way, if you ask me, is to keep it to a minimum. And if your core mechanic is going to require something special, make it available in a single purchase. Games like Bot War, World of Twilight, even MERCS show that you can have a gimmick without going overboard. And I think more games that want a gimmick that requires special parts need to keep that in mind.

Less is more sometimes.