No More Massive Tomes of Rules

[Reynard]

Now, let me come at this from a different direction. Actual event in my most recent fantasy game:

There is a coach being drawn by six horses along a steep winding mountain path with a sharp turn every few hundred yards. Inside the coach are two nobles and their marriage eligible noble daughter. The horses are panicked. Outside the coach are two footman, a coachman, and a liveried man-at-arms in padded armor with a heavy crossbow and a club, as well as three wights that have jumped onto the coach and are determined to murder everyone. The wights are fighting the servants, smashing the windows, and trying to pull the doors off their hinges to get inside. The PCs are on horseback chasing the coach and two of them want to cast spells while the horse is galloping. When they catch up to the coach, one of the PCs will attempt to stand up on his galloping horse and jump onto the carriage, while another one will attempt to jump on to the tongue of the carriage in order to disconnect it from the horses.

Will the rules of Dragonbane provide enough context, clarity and mechanical support that a novice GM with no prior gaming experience and no knowledge of 18th century carriages will be able to run this scene with confidence?

Dragonbane is a skill based system for running old school fantasy exploration type games (but overland and in dungeons; it is not as dungeon centric as either OSE or Shadowdark). Because it is a skill based system, it maps pretty easily to most situations that adventurers in its milieu would find themselves in.

In your example, there is no "driving" skill but there is a riding skill as well as an acrobatics skill. I am not sure why anyone would need to know anything about 18th century carriages, though.

So, yes, there is enough there to get the job done.

 

[Reynard]

Then you aren't interested in anything but one shots and mini-campaigns, and as such, with respect, who cares what you think about the rules because rules aren't for you anyway.

Good god you are rude.

Perhaps others might have a difference of opinion about how many pages of rules you need for long term games.

 

[CleverNickName]

The "huge tome of rules" problem is why we shifted to 5th Edition D&D from Pathfinder.

 

[grimmgoose]

Savage Worlds really changed my perception of this. So much game in just 200 pages. I feel like I've gotten more out of the 200 pages in Savage Worlds Adventure Edition than the near 1,000 pages of the PHB, DMG, and MM combined. Hell, the 40 pages of the "Adventure Toolkit" from SWADE has given me more than the entire DMG.

 

[Celebrim]

Dragonbane is a skill based system for running old school fantasy exploration type games (but overland and in dungeons; it is not as dungeon centric as either OSE or Shadowdark). Because it is a skill based system, it maps pretty easily to most situations that adventurers in its milieu would find themselves in.

In your example, there is no "driving" skill but there is a riding skill as well as an acrobatics skill. I am not sure why anyone would need to know anything about 18th century carriages, though.

So, yes, there is enough there to get the job done.

In Dragonbane, are there specific rules for handling chases, or does it attempt to handle this as combat where the carriage isn't moving except on its turn when it then does it's full move?

In Dragonbane, how much damage do you take if you are in or on a carriage when it tips over? What do you roll to avoid that damage?

In Dragonbane, what is the change in difficulty of controlling a vehicle between it being on road and going into rough terrain if the carriage doesn't stay on the road?

In Dragonbane, what is the difficulty to rip a door off its hinges by brute force? How many hit points does something made of light wood actually have if you were trying to batter through it? Is there anything in the game rules at all that deals with attacking objects?

The answer might be, yes. I haven't paid much attention to Dragonbane.

But in my experience if you have an open world RPG that empowers players and has active antagonists and fronts and all that good stuff that really is what I associate with fantasy RPG play, these sorts of situations occur more often than not.

As for why you need to know things about 18th century carriages, a diagram of one and an overview of how they work should be a part of any rules set where things like wagons or carriages could be used or purchased, because here in the 21st century the average player may have never even seen one before.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

I can't tell if serious.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You guys know that "I like rules to cover everything" and "I am fine when rules don't cover everything" are opinions and not a situation where one person is objectively right or wrong, yes?

 

[Reynard]

But in my experience if you have an open world RPG that empowers players and has active antagonists and fronts and all that good stuff that really is what I associate with fantasy RPG play, these sorts of situations occur more often than not.

True. And so what you need are rules that can be applied broadly with consistency and fun. You do not need specific subsystems if your core is strong.

 

[Maggan]

Will the rules of Dragonbane provide enough context, clarity and mechanical support that a novice GM with no prior gaming experience and no knowledge of 18th century carriages will be able to run this scene with confidence?

Heck, I've been playing and gamemastering for nigh on 40 years and I wouldn't play that scene with confidence, whether the rules were D&D or Dragobane.

 

[timbannock]

Do you like games in "long form" -- by that I mean the multiple rulebook, dense prose form common in the industry and exemplified by D&D and Pathfinder? Do you prefer a singular book but of the same form, like we usually get from Free League and Modiphius? Or do you like short and concise books?

Short and concise. Looking back on 35+ years of gaming, I can say that while my players (in many groups) and I did a decent job of remembering rules, the fact is that "more rules" was never better for our playstyles. While some of the stricter systems did give some players the fun mini-game of character builds, I'd say the number of people that remembered or implemented rules incorrectly in those games, and/or who weren't there for the rules but for the "let's just play something and have fun!" element far, far outweighed the folks that really dug into the rules, much less the ones who did so and actually got the rules right more than 60-75% of the time.

That said, I've seen many GMs who clearly needed more rules to help support them, especially early on. But a problematic element of that is that so many of them didn't realize that, and/or were so quick to house-rule a game that they never understand the mechanics as they were originally intended to be, and therefore made really bad house rules or really bad rulings in the moment. I'm very guilty of that, early on. I still default to tweaking a system very early on, and have to consciously dial it back and play a game RAW a few times.

I think Shadowdark is a nice compromise for me: the rulebook is 300 pages, but also A5 sized, and much of it is inspirational tables. The actual rules could easily fit in 100 pages.

My suspicion is that Shadowdark could be a lot smaller already: cut all the inspirational and encounter tables, boil monsters down to a 1 or 2 page spread ala Sly Flourish's Forge of Foes, probably do something similar with magic items, and condense the procedures into numbered (or checkbox) lists, and you could probably cut that book into 1/3 or 1/2 the size it is now.

And that's keeping it A5. It'd be even less if you then put all that into an 8.5x11 layout.