The Quest Rules Committee

How to Make a Rules Proposal

The first step in making any proposal is to write down your basic idea, as clearly and simply as possible. The last step is to send it to the Rules Chair. In between, you'll want to write down some of your thoughts and reasoning, since that helps our discussions. This page will explain how to do that. For complicated proposals, you'll probably also want to talk to an experienced member of the RC, to make sure that there aren't any problems that you haven't seen. And in general, it's just a good idea to talk about your proposal with your friends, first. They may have new insights or ideas, and at the least they'll be able to tell you whether they agree or not.

Once you've submitted your proposal to the Rules Chair, it will be placed on the web and given a place in the Rules Committee's queue. Keep in mind that the main purpose of putting a proposal up on the web is to get feedback, so you may get some emails from interested people after you submit your proposal. This is good; you can come up with a revised version that addresses as many of their comments as possible (either by doing as they suggest, or by explaining why that would be a bad idea), and then resubmit it to the Rules Chair. Eventually, your proposal will be presented to the RC, and if you're not on the rules list, then you'll be cc'ed in on the discussion, so you can respond to what people say.

When your proposal comes up for discussion, your role will be to persuade Rules Committee members that it's a good idea. Their role will be to find any problems that are left in your proposal. This may involve a lot of discussion and persuasion on your part; you shouldn't assume that the RC will immediately agree (or disagree) with you. It may also involve you revising your proposal, or other people making counterproposals or proposing amendments. Once discussion time is up, the Rules Chair will call for a vote, and your proposal will pass or fail depending on how many RC members have been convinced to see things your way.

Character Proposals

Full instructions are located with the rest of the character proposal guidelines. The short version of what to do is:

• Heroic Honor codes go to the RC first, and the GWC second.
• Racial kits go to the GWC first, and the RC second.
• Everything else goes to the GWC only.

Rules Change Proposals

A rules proposal is, quite simply, you re-writing Quest's rules to be the way you want them. The Rules Committee has to approve the change, and the Publisher has to add it into the rules, but you, the proposer, are the one doing the actual writing. Everything about a proposal comes from that.

The first thing to keep in mind is that your proposed change has to be clear and specific. If you want to add a new spell, you need to write out the glossary text and specify its level and canon (mage or cleric or both). If you want to add a new ability, you need to write out the description and specify its point cost. If you want to change part of the general rules, you need to include "before" and "after" versions. All of this is necessary so that the Rules Committee knows exactly what it's voting on, and so that the Publishers can easily add it to the rulebook.

You can't just propose to change things without specifying how. Someone has to write out the new spell's glossary text, or the new ability's description, or the text of the new rule. The Publishers don't have authority to do that. Neither does the Rules Chair. The Rules Committee can approve a change, but some individual person has to write it down first. We call that person, "the proposer". (Sometimes a small group of people work together to develop a proposal, but even then, one person usually writes it down.)

So the nice part is that you get to rewrite the rules to suit your own ideas. The not-so-nice part is that lots of other people have ideas about what the rules should be like, too. Especially the members of the Rules Committee, who are concerned about game balance, loopholes, clarity, and so forth. They'll be going over your proposal with a fine-toothed comb, looking for problems. And that's a good thing, because no proposal is ever perfect, and few are good enough in their first draft. You'll wind up revising and altering and using other people's suggestions, in order to make as many people as possible like your proposal. (Sometimes it might even be easier to ask an experienced RC member to draft the text of the rule, if they have more experience with writing rules than you do. It's simply a question of whether you want to deal with the problem of revision or the problem of communication. Just choose whichever way is easier for you.)

So that's a proposal in a nutshell. All you really need are precise descriptions of the changes you want to make. However, people are going to ask a lot of questions: about why Quest needs to change its rules, about why your particular change is the right choice, and about all the bad effects of your proposal. (Every change is a trade-off, and there are always bad effects. Good proposals have minor bad effects, or a large enough good effect that the bad effects are acceptable.) So to answer these questions ahead of time, you'll probably want to put some explanations into your proposal. Here are some sections that I've found to be good ways of grouping my arguments. I don't use all of them all the time. You don't have to call them what I call them. You don't even have to use them at all. But in the interests of helping people write good proposals, here's what I think is a good place to start:

Title and Author

First should come the title and your name. This is technically optional, but can get people in the right frame of mind when reading your proposal. (Especially the Rules Chair, who lists your proposal in the queue, saves it with a file name, and composes the subject line of the email discussion.)

What's Wrong

Second, convince people that there's a problem that needs fixing. This is often a good idea for controversial proposals. Sometimes people can't agree on whether there's a problem, or what the problem is. This section announces where you stand, and what you're trying to do. It's also a useful place to put background information, such as the current text of a rule or a spell. If you're adding something new, though, this section might be completely irrelevant.

Your Solution

Third, describe your solution. Unless your proposal is straightforward, including this section is a good idea. In addition to describing your proposal in big-picture terms, you can explain your reasoning, the train of thought that led you to the idea, or perhaps the general principles you worked under. This helps keep people from asking questions about the little details of the proposal, and helps make sure that any suggested changes will fit in with your basic idea.

Potential Problems

Fourth, run through some of the potential problems with your solution. This is necessary only to the extent that you've thought of some. You can also defend your proposal against objections that you think people might raise. And you can point out unfixed problems with your proposal, in the hopes that someone else will have a solution. (However, you shouldn't propose any change that you don't think would be an overall improvement.) Also, this is a good place to mention the trade-offs involved in your proposal.

The Actual Proposal

Finally comes the proposal itself: a description of all the actual changes to be made. This is what the committee votes on, and this is what the Rules Chair gives to the Publisher to include in the next rulebook. A good way to think about it is to imagine that you've rewritten the rulebook yourself, and are trying to explain exactly what changed. You should be precise and clear, so that the RC isn't confused about what they're voting on. About 90% of changes can use the format:

Add this:
	"something new"

Remove this:
	"something old"

Change this:
	"the old text"
to this:
	"my new text"

If you don't use that format, then remember: the magic words are "I propose ...". If you don't say that, it might be difficult to tell exactly what you're proposing.

If you have multiple different changes to propose, but they're all fundamentally related, then you should put them in the same file, and label them "proposal 1" and "proposal 2" (and so forth). You can also add conditions to your proposal, like "proposal 2 only takes effect if proposal 1 fails", which can sometimes be useful. (But don't overdo it.) The Rules Chair might standardize the format of your proposal a bit, because it's easiest for the committee if all proposals look alike, instead of each being confusingly different. These changes will be only cosmetic, though - if something important was changed, it's an accident, and will be fixed as soon as you report it.

Rules Change Proposal Examples

Here are some examples of past proposals.

Discussion Topics

If you don't include specific changes, but instead talk on a more general level, then you don't actually have a proposal. (For example, "___ should be more expensive" or "we should have a spell that does ___".) The RC can still discuss this, but we can't actually vote on it. So it's what I call a "discussion topic".

This is how you can get the RC to discuss a general problem, even if you haven't been able to think of a specific solution. At the very least, you'll be able to get the entire rules list to think about the issue you have in mind. And perhaps the discussion will spark an idea in someone's head, which can be turned into a full-fledged proposal. But there's no guarantee that anything will actually happen, not even a vote. So it's usually better to have some concrete proposal in mind.

Other Proposals

Other proposals (ie, to change the way the RC operates) should be handled similarly to rules change proposals.