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Greetings Designers,

So, how much of a work of rules needs to be "new" for it to qualify as new rules instead of a re-skin of an older rules system?

For example, Hail Caesar is a re-skin of Warmaster for command rules, but uses different stats and wound mechanincs. is that sufficient to make it "New"?

Is Dragon Rampant enough new material as it forms the base from Lion Rampant or is it just a re-skin?

Does it even matter or is it all semantics anyway?

As much as it needs to deliver a new experience really.

It does not matter that much.

There are several examples of "families" of rules that have a basic commonality: WHFB, WH40K and WH:AoS all have common roots, for instance.

There are two main series of mechanisms from WRG, the ones based on the original Ancients rules, and the DBX series.

Osprey's Field of Glory ancients has been developed to Renaissance and Napoleonics periods.

The Basic Role Playing system used in RuneQuest, Stormbringer, and Call of Cthulhu, and so on and on. GURPS...

I'm not sure it matters if we call these reskins. They all offer a very different experience which hopefully is worthwhile in itself. There actually is a benefit to common rules mechanisms because you don't have to learn everything from the ground up again.

I don't think new rules are worthwhile in themselves. They need to offer some kind of benefit to the game, not just "newness".

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I don't think new rules are worthwhile in themselves. They need to offer some kind of benefit to the game, not just "newness".

Agree. To take it a step further, I don't think "newness" has any value whatsoever. And the Copyright Office agrees with me, which is why rules mechanics are essentially worthless and cannot be copyrighted. It's far better to reskin a fundamentally "good" game like Epic 40k into BFG, than it is to write a crappy new game from scratch. Same with reskinning X-wing into WW1 Wings of Glory, D&D Dragons, Star Trek, and so on. Sure, there is the occasional "novelty" - Command and Colors, and Magic: the Gathering come to mind, but those gems are few and far between.

Even there, the Command and Colors rules have now been used to cover the American Civil War, Ancient Rome, World War 2, Song of Ice And Fire, two other fantasy settings* and now World War 1.

If you've had a good idea, exploiting that is more important than "originality". Just be careful not to go too far with a set of rules.

* Battlelore was a sort of fantasy 100 Years' War, while I think the second edition is somewhat different.

Game design, and software design for that matter, is better considered as developing a particular product than building a wholly original blueprint.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
reskinning X-wing into WW1 Wings of Glory

Other way round there. Wings of Glory is the rebranded version, now published by Ares, of an Italian game called Wings of War. FFG distributed the English-language version of Wings of War until 2011. The FlightPath system used in X-Wing and the Attack Wing games evolved from Wings of War. On topic, I'd say FlightPath represents changes significant enough to qualify as a new system rather than a reskin. WoG (and its naval sister game, Sails of Glory) feels nothing like X-Wing, honestly.