From the widest gully to the deepest trench, holes define who we are and where we are going. And although Rover here may not know it, he is participating in a ritual as old as time itself; he is giving birth to a hole.
I mean, uh, holes. That's what this post is about. Specifically, systemic holes. In order to talk about a systemic hole, first we need to define them.
A systemic hole is a hole in a system.
Ok, that was easy.
The question then is, what is a hole in a system, and how do you identify them? No system will cover everything, and it shouldn't be expected to. A system actively choosing not to cover or include something is not a hole; it's a wall, a boundary. Just like people, it's good for systems to set boundaries and enforce them as needed.
A hole is something you trip over or fall into. It's nothing where you expected something. It gets in your way and blocks travel, or you get stuck inside it and can't get out. So a systemic hole is a place where a system failed to include something that it implied; a thing that the system seems like it wants you to do, but then gives you no way to actually do it.
An easy example from recent times would be ship combat rules in the 5E Spelljammer adaptation. The setting has ships, it has combat, you'd think that you might want to do both of these at the same time; but the rules given for it are anemic at best, basically just a handwave about how to use your ships to do personal scale combat. This is a systemic hole, because the system leads you to expect something and then you fall in a hole.
This implies two basic things to ask. First, if you're designing a system, how do you avoid filling it with holes? Second, if you have encountered a hole in a system that you're using, what do do you do about it?
When designing a system, to avoid holes, you need to maintain your focus. Set your boundaries and stay within them. A lot of holes in systems are the result of the designer not staying within the boundaries that they set. If you're making a fantasy adventure game, for example, and you add a throwaway line about "Players may be able to rule domains and engage in mass combat", you just dug yourself a hole. Players are going to want to do that and they will go looking for the rules, and then they fall in the hole because there's no rules there. If you can't resist mentioning things like this, make it clear that they are out of bounds for this game right now; for example, "Future supplements may add options for ruling a domain and mass combat" or "If your players want to take over the world, you're on your own, good luck GM". Again, just like people; set your boundaries and communicate them. There are no holes outside the boundaries of your system (or, if there are, they're not your problem). The only holes you care about are the ones inside your system area. Your system is about the things that it is about. If someone wants to use it for something else, that's their problem. Don't dig holes inside your system boundaries, making the game worse for people trying to play it as intended, just to support a hypothetical person who wants to take it outside the bounds.
The second question is what to do about it if you find a hole in a system you're using. There are two basic options for this; go around it or fill it in. Going around it is much easier, but harder to describe, so we'll talk about filling it in first. Filling it in just means homebrewing something. A complete explanation of how to homebrew things is outside the scope of this post (so it's not a hole that I'm not explaining it), but Ten Rules of RPG Design is a good place to start. You fill in the hole by providing the missing rule or rules.
To go around, you do the opposite; you remove the rules that imply the hole. Using Spelljammer as an example again because I'm too lazy to think of a second example, the grid-scale ship movement rules are the strongest implication that there should be ship combat rules. So you remove them. Ships can't move on a grid and there's no particular way to track that. Now no one expects ship-to-ship combat; if you want to get in a fight in space, you do it using your personal-scale grid rules. The lack of ship-to-ship combat is no longer a hole, no longer implied that it should be part of the game, because a new boundary was drawn, and it's outside the boundary.
Holes are all about expectations. A hole is something you trip over or fall into. If you know that there's nothing there, that the space you're about to travel to is out of bounds, then there's no problem; you're forewarned and, hopefully, forearmed. If your system correctly sets and communicates your boundaries, it will make expectations clear, and there will be no holes for anyone to trip over.
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