Meaning of Rules Light/Medium/Heavy - a proposal

[Neonchameleon]

Too many people talk about rules light, medium, and heavy with no clear definitions of what they actually are. So I'm proposing the following as a starting point:

A game is Rules Light if:

• The entire actual game rules can be written on a double sided sheet of A4.
• PC character sheets can be written on an index card with minimal jargon.
• Complete NPC statblocks can be scrawled on a single post-it note
• Someone with five minutes of rules explanation can look at those statblocks and character sheets, see what they are saying, and are ready to pick up dice.

A game is Rules Medium if:
It is neither rules light nor rules heavy. (Sorry).

Or in short there is jargon that looks incomprehensible to the layman such as acronyms (THAC0, BAB, [2W]+Cha, etc.), the character sheet is more than a sie of A4, but you don't expect to open the rulebooks other than to look up discrete statblocks (and even then it isn't catastrophic if you leave all the rulebooks behind as long as everyone has access to their character sheets) and the resolution mechanics don't get fiddly.

A game is Rules Heavy if it has one of the following:

• Using rulebooks in play: You are expected to make any cross-references to actual rulebooks in actual play. (The most common example of this in what could otherwise be a rules medium game is a spell list - that refers to the rules for the actual spell printed either somewhere else in the rulebook or in another rulebook; Rolemaster with one chart wouldn't be rules heavy as you can put that on the back of a DM screen)
• Fiddly rolling mechanics: There is any rolling mechanic that requires anything more than simple mental arithmetic, direct comparisons of dice, or cancelling of dice. (Adding two percentile numbers is generally more than simple mental arithmetic, as is adding three modifiers and a basic number to a d20 roll - 5e manages to escape this by means of Advantage/Disadvantage replacing most modifiers)
• Analysis Paralysis: A sensible and coherent character is frequently created with more than two or three superficially similar options that may be used at the same time in the course of play and there is no obvious way to simplify this.

Or in short a game is rules heavy if any of the mechanics slow the game down.

And yes, you can move rules heavy games into the rules medium category by changing the presentation. To use two examples, if the preparation is done properly and spellcasters have all the spells they prepare/memorise on their character sheets or in the monster statblocks with the rules in full then they get rid of the cross-referencing. And 4e Essentials plus the Elementalist Sorcerer cut down the analysis paralysis by providing character classes with condensed options and split decision points.

Fiddly rolling mechanics can't necessarily be slid down a category and it may be undesirable to do so. Detailed games get merit from the detail despite being rules heavy - lightness is not an ideal.

 

[NerfedWizard]

Maybe you should rename:-

(1) Rules Ultra-Light (your Rules Light, ish)
(2) Rules Medium-Light (your Rules Medium, ish)
(3) Rules Medium-Heavy (your Rules Heavy, ish)
(4) Rules Heavy

 

[steenan]

I'd add one more criterion to "rules heavy": having players manage many different resources. If you need three or more types of tokens, the rules are complicated.

For example, Strike! would be in the rules-medium category (no need to reference books during play, all rules you need are on character sheets, simple rolling with d6, tactical combat with just enough options) if it didn't use 4 or 5 (depending on party composition) different types of points/tokens one needs to track.

It's a fun game anyway, but compared to the elegant simplicity of the rest of the game, this part definitely feels heavy.

 

[Umbran]

The terms heavy, medium, and light are generally subjective. I don't think you'll get anywhere trying to press an objective measure on them.

A friend of mine thinks a 30 pound bag is heavy. I don't think it is anywhere near heavy - because the measure is relative to our respective lift capacities.

Instead, you might try instead coming up with a "rules weight score":

If you can write the mechanics on two sides of A4, in 12 point font, that's 1 point.
If you can write the mechanics on two sides of A4, in 8 point font, that's 2 points.
If you can write a character on an index card, that's one point.
If you can write a character on 8.5" x 11" paper, that's two points.
If you need 2 sheets, that's three points, and one point per sheet beyond that...

And so on. You can then say that D&D 3e has a rules-weight of X, and Dungeon World has a rules-weight of Y.

You can then abstract slightly - whatever point score OD&D has is one Gygax of rules weight. AD&D may be 10 Gygaxes. Anything in the range is within the Gygaxian scale of weight. You can then have sub-Gygaxian and super-Gygaxian weights....

Woe betide you if you play a game that is a kiloGygax (Advanced Squad leader, maybe?).

 

[Neonchameleon]

Maybe you should rename:-

(1) Rules Ultra-Light (your Rules Light, ish)
(2) Rules Medium-Light (your Rules Medium, ish)
(3) Rules Medium-Heavy (your Rules Heavy, ish)
(4) Rules Heavy

I'd rather leave Rules Ultra-Light for one-page RPGs like Lasers and Feelings or a number of gamepoems.

I'd add one more criterion to "rules heavy": having players manage many different resources. If you need three or more types of tokens, the rules are complicated.

Good point. Especially if there aren't tokens provided.

And a scale of the sort Umbran suggests would have all the downsides of trying to set categories and devolve into its own jargon.

 

[Umbran]

And a scale of the sort Umbran suggests would have all the downsides of trying to set categories and devolve into its own jargon.

Yes, but the OP basically makes a commonly used subjective term, and turns it into objective term jargon. At least, with the scale, everyone can *see* it is jargon from the start. With the OP scheme, it isn't obvious, and that's a huge communication problem. Folks will not be able to differentiate whether a speaker is using the colloquial, or the jargon, and you're no better off than when you started.

Plus, from past experience, folks who use the jargon will get all superior and huffy about how *they* have a system, and how the natural-language user is wrongity-wrong, with wrong sauce, as if a thread on EN World has enough exposure to reach more than a the people who actively post in it, and/or as if someone here is Ron Edwards to define RPG words for others. So, all the trouble of having to explain a jargon *every single time you use it*, with the interpersonal communications issue of telling someone who was using normal English that they were wrong for doing so. Not a good plan.

But really, my suggestion was a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Setting a standard for a particular discussion ("I want to talk about this, and here's what I mean when I say...") is fine - often a good idea. But constructing jargon as if it will somehow spread and become a standard? Not a recipe for success.

 

[Celebrim]

Too many people talk about rules light, medium, and heavy with no clear definitions of what they actually are. So I'm proposing the following as a starting point:

A game is Rules Light if:

• The entire actual game rules can be written on a double sided sheet of A4.
• PC character sheets can be written on an index card with minimal jargon.
• Complete NPC statblocks can be scrawled on a single post-it note
• Someone with five minutes of rules explanation can look at those statblocks and character sheets, see what they are saying, and are ready to pick up dice.

I concur with Umbran that devising a measurement system is a better approach, but even this definition needs the caveat, "And the rules are not also heavy.", since it's entirely possible for a game to qualify under the above and yet have rules heavy features inherited from process resolution which is easy to describe but fiddly in play, such as totaling all the dice from all relevant allies dice pools because all actions are intended to be cooperative and assisted.

As a simple metric, you can tell how rules heavy a system is by how many seconds are required to resolve a typical player proposition.

For example, "I cast fireball", despite referencing a spell list, is in the ideal circumstances not a particularly rules heavy proposition. The basic mechanic of, "I get one 1d6 of damage per caster level", is easy to remember and relatively quick to add up mentally. In general, despite coming from a spell list, fireball resolves at the lower end of rules medium.

Where it gets complicated is that in the non-ideal case, fireball can require minutes or even hours to resolve and that has nothing to do with the fact its in a spell list. That has to do with our expectations of granularity. How do we get the problem that complicated? Well, for starters we put a lot of objects in the spell's radius.

a) You have to (or decide to) make a saving throw for every creature and in some circumstances every object in the effected spell.
b) You have to (or decide to) resolve that failed saving throws sometimes also damage the objects the creatures are wearing.
c) You have to (or decide to) apply damage to each monster or object separately, taking into account its resistance to fire damage or hardness.
d) In 1e, you were supposed to calculate the actual area that the fire spreads to if it is fired into an area that is smaller than the blast radius since the fire spread to fill an area.

So firing a fireball at say a giant bat flying toward you is pretty darn easy to resolve and will feel very rules light.

But if we fire a fireball into a large well furnished wood paneled room in which there are 38 varied NPCs with different saves, different resistances, and different allegiances, and we care what furnishings and objects might be destroyed in the blast and whether the building might catch on fire and where, all the sudden that simple mechanic now seems grotesquely complicated.

So, now that I've got that out of the way, I put it to you that there is no meaningful measure of 'rules light' and in fact no such thing as a rules light system. All there are is different expectations of the complexity of the scenarios and the granularity of proposition resolution. Some systems set the expectation that the scenarios will be simple and the complexities ignored, but if the group decides to run more complex scenarios and decides to not ignore the potential complexities (or not leave them entirely to DM fiat which even then is often complex), then the same very simple system will become complex even without a lot of rules adornment.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The cynic in me wants to say that a game is 'rules light' if its boosters can't come up with anything else good to say about it, and it's not too much over 1000 pages, and Rules Heavy if the speaker doesn't like it, and it's more than 64 pages or uses any jargon at all.

But the cynic in me should really stfu.


[MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION]: Your criteria for rules lite are fairly quantitative, and set a very high bar, very few games would qualify. Conversely, your criteria for Rules Heavy get fuzzy (for instance, there's only two games I regularly ran & played without consulting a rulebook at all: Champions! and 4e D&D - the former because I knew it so well, the latter because the necessary bits were all printed out on character sheets and monster stat blocks - but that hardly makes either of them rules lite).

So it looks like you'll have a lot of arguably 'Rules medium' games - something no one ever says - under that system. Not much help.

IMHO, most RPGs are necessarily 'Rules Heavy,' when compared to the vast range of much simpler games that humans play.

 

[GMMichael]

Where it gets complicated is that in the non-ideal case, fireball can require minutes or even hours to resolve and that has nothing to do with the fact its in a spell list. That has to do with our expectations of granularity. How do we get the problem that complicated? Well, for starters we put a lot of objects in the spell's radius.

a) You have to (or decide to) make a saving throw for every creature and in some circumstances every object in the effected spell.
b) You have to (or decide to) resolve that failed saving throws sometimes also damage the objects the creatures are wearing.
c) You have to (or decide to) apply damage to each monster or object separately, taking into account its resistance to fire damage or hardness.
d) In 1e, you were supposed to calculate the actual area that the fire spreads to if it is fired into an area that is smaller than the blast radius since the fire spread to fill an area.

Lightbulb:
Rules Light: the players are willing to accept Rule Zero.
Rules Heavy: the players throw Cheetos and vehemently reject Rule Zero.

If I may complicate things a bit further:
Neonchameleon's OP definition of Rules Light looks very similar to the definition of Board Game. So, maybe someone will help me out by explaining at what point a Game becomes a Roleplaying Game?

 

[Celebrim]

Lightbulb:
Rules Light: the players are willing to accept Rule Zero.
Rules Heavy: the players throw Cheetos and vehemently reject Rule Zero.

Possibly, but may I suggest that at least as often as the player's rejecting Rule Zero, a game gets complicated because the GM rejects Rule Zero. That is, the GM may reject a pure fiat ruling since doing so seems to interfere with his role as impartial referee, and he doesn't actually want to simply choose what happens. Also, speaking as a GM, Rule Zero is the most complicated rule there is. Again, speaking as a GM, I would say that if Rule Zero is in force, the game is rules heavy. Nothing slows down play for me and carries a big mental overhead than hitting a point in the flowchart that says, "Resolve this by Rule Zero". Often if I get to that point, I have to put my head down, close my eyes, and think for a minute or two to make sure I'm considering all the factors involved and understand the implications of the choices I'm complicating, and maybe run in my head how things will go depending on the choices I make before giving a ruling.

If your game has Rule Zero in it, it's rules heavy. Period. And the more you rely on Rule Zero, the heavier it gets.

Neonchameleon's OP definition of Rules Light looks very similar to the definition of Board Game. So, maybe someone will help me out by explaining at what point a Game becomes a Roleplaying Game?

Mice & Mystics is a board game based off RPGs with very D20 style mechanics. It is however a board game because of the following:

1) Players only have moves. They can't make open propositions. Every proposition has to be couched in the language of a move.
2) As a consequence, it has no need of and completely lacks Rule Zero. Every choice the player's can make and the outcome of every choice the player's can make is fully known and described.
3) Role playing can occur, but can't actually change the outcome, because 'conversation' is inherently open ended and while a quite natural 'mechanic' that most humans are naturally somewhat skilled at and can easily make up by "playing pretend" it still involves Rule Zero to use 'conversation' as a part of your process resolution. "What would the NPC say to that?", being one of the more frequent challenges I face as a GM, particularly with NPCs that are very alien in abilities and motivations. (That said, conservational improvisation is a lot easier than mechanical improvisation.)