The Dilemma of the Simple RPG

In my experience with contemporary college game clubs, there are many younger people who have not yet tried tabletop RPGs. I was also told that many of the players coming to the evening games at a local shop have been new to tabletop RPGs. This is different from my pre-Internet, pre-video gamegeneration (Boomers), where most game-minded people were exposed to D&D because it had so little competition for leisure time.

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Another reason for the difference may be the “crunchiness” of many contemporary RPGs. That is, the fiddliness and time needed to generate a character and start actually playing the game is offputting. Then there is the difficulty of running a character because there are so many details and numbers (such as skills) involved. The rules interfere with the adventure.

Yet we continue to see the most popular RPGs loaded down with vast rulebooks. Unfortunately, the seeds of long-range destruction of any RPG edition are built into the capitalist economy.

You don't need a Ph.D. in history to know a lot can be explained if you "follow the money". To make money you need to sell product. If your primary business is RPGs you have to produce a game that is not only large but very extensible, so that you can sell additional rules. In the long run, that makes the game crunchy and unwieldy, dooms it to become too complex to appeal to the less than hard-core players.

Complexity may be a boon for some players. 3rd Edition D&D (3e) became "find rules somewhere that give me an advantage." This is a complete contrast to my advice to GMs dating back to the 70s: prevent players from gaining unearned advantages. When I GMed 3e I said "core rules only, no add-ons." When the highly-tinkered-by-additional-rules "one man armies" are present in a game, the more casual players are left behind in several ways.

"Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstien

Complex games also make the GM's job harder. As there are more rules, there's more work for the GM. The biggest problem of tabletop RPGs, compared with other games, is that GMing is work, not play. We need more GMs to "grow" the hobby, yet complex games with constant rules add-ons lead to fewer GMs available.

The typical course of events is that RPGs get more complex as more rules are added, until the entire edition is abandoned and a new one comes out. While D&D Second Edition wasn't much different than 1e, and many more or less ignored 2e (I did), each succeeding edition has changed the game drastically to help persuade players to buy the new version, coming full circle with 5e. In each case, a new edition led to lots of sales. And each was then subjected to the rising pyramid of additional rules.

Money talks. Unfortunately for RPGs, money argues for complexity, not simplicity.

contributed by Lewis Pulsipher

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[Celebrim]

[*] In a rules heavy game, when people don't know something, the game stops and there is a 10 minute search and discussion before the situation is resolved.

Simply put, a GM should know the rules sufficient that this doesn't happen or he shouldn't run the system. If you are frequently doing a rules search something is wrong. Read the damn rule book. Then do it again. System mastery is a prerequisite of GMing. And even if you run into a situation where the rules don't adequately cover the situation, you should be able to run within about 2 minutes of being confronted with a rules challenge.

The problem with a rules light system is that it ALL THE TIME confronts the GM with a situation which the rules don't adequately cover. This to me involves more head space than having a system that at least tries to provide answer, and generally slows down my game less. Rules heavy isn't the same as process heavy. You can have lots of rules, but they all specify basically a single dice roll to resolve them. That's rules heavy but process light.

[*] In a rules-heavy system, character creation requires effort. So much so that I have *never* had a good experience where we rolled up characters at a convention session. Near the top of my worst-ever games would be the 6 hour Aces and Eights game that featured 4 hours character creation and 2 hours combat, of which 1 hour was looking up rules. That does not happen in rules-light systems. I've rolled up full characters for Fiasco, Fudge, Hillfolk, and "finished off" characters in 13th Age, FATE and other mid-weight systems. Many people really like to create a character. Much harder to work out which of 100+ feats to take than write down a descriptive aspect.

Oh good grief yes. Rules light systems are much much better than rules heavy systems at dealing with one off play. Indeed, I consider this exactly what they are designed for. There are lots of games that are way too light for me to ever consider running a full traditional campaign in the system, but which I think would be a blast to play for 3-4 hours. I have no idea why you'd consider a process heavy, rules heavy game like Aces and Eights, however brilliant it is, for a convention setting.

Rules trump GMs.

Many of your objections seem to be with crappy GMs rather than the systems themselves. I assure you, no one bullies me with rules - ever. For one thing, I make all the rules. If a player quotes rules to me, it's my rules and I wrote them for a purpose. Even if they are RAW, if I haven't changed them, chances are I want to abide by them. The rules are my vision of the game. Forgetting the rules is a faux pas I want corrected.

As sated before, we must consider RULE ZERO. In a rules heavy game, rule zero is the rule of last resort.

Yes, because it is the single heaviest most mentally burdensome rule of all the rules. I've argued before that you are fooling yourself if you think that any game with Rule Zero is really rules light. Your argument that Rules Light empowers rule zero I think misses my main objection to Rules Light games - they tend to act like resolution and results don't really matter much. They tend to have arbitrary resolution methods with highly suspect odds of success because they act like success or failure doesn't really matter, and rulings don't really matter much, so that whatever the GM says or however he rules is just no big deal. It's like flying an airplane with no trim controls, because the assumption is that the pilot is just so solid, that regardless of who the plane shakes and wobbles, the GM can correct everything. This works fine when you've got 2 hours invested in a character or a story that you are half likely to abandon in 2 hours. It doesn't work so well when you've invested 100's of hours in building a story.

Or, thinking of it another way, if everything goes well, any system is good.

Or putting it another way, if the GM is skilled enough, every system works.

If you assume there are issues with a new GM, would you prefer to spend 4 hours looking up rules, or 4 hours playing a wildly inconsistent game with odd interpretations.

Why should we want either one? But the advantage of the former is that in the second session, you now only spend 2 hours looking up rules. And by the third just one. Whereas, it's not at all clear how you get from having a wildly inconsistent game with odd interpretations to a good GM. Or to put it another way, most modern Indy games do a very poor job of explaining the process of play and what a game is actually like or supposed to be like, to the extent that I've read several just absolutely elegant and beautiful systems and came away with zero ideas about how the game could actually be run the way it was written.

My answer is the second, by a lot. I'd prefer to actually play a Captain America who the GM has decided wrongly that the shield is a useless attack, rather than spend the time working out that I need to take the Heavy Shield feat to use it, then the Thrown Shield Feat to throw it, and cross-reference that with the thrown weapons (improvised) table, adding a +4 bonus for the heavy shield to the attack, but NOT to the damage.

It sounds to me fundamentally that the problem is you've chosen a system that you've kludged Captain America into, because Cap' wasn't a supported concept in the system and you are trying to play an unsupported character type by leveraging rules never intended for the uses you are putting them to. Of course you can't necessarily port a Superhero into a fantasy game, nor is it 'wrong' for the GM to decide that your character doesn't have a shield that defies the laws of physics and renders weapons superfluous (lamp-shaded in 'Civil War').

 

[Hussar]

Celebrity stop posting stuff that makes me nod along as I read it. It's just freaking me out.

 

[billd91]

Simply put, a GM should know the rules sufficient that this doesn't happen or he shouldn't run the system. If you are frequently doing a rules search something is wrong. Read the damn rule book. Then do it again. System mastery is a prerequisite of GMing. And even if you run into a situation where the rules don't adequately cover the situation, you should be able to run within about 2 minutes of being confronted with a rules challenge.

Sort of. But the best way to learn the system and gain mastery of it... is to get together with the players and effing play it. Every GM's new at some point. Reading, re-reading, and then reading the rules again won't teach system mastery as much as working through it with patient players. My advice is to dive in and work out your understanding together and that will often take longer with a rules heavy system than with a rules light one.

I've argued before that you are fooling yourself if you think that any game with Rule Zero is really rules light.

Since every RPG essentially has a Rule Zero (how can they not?) this basically just tells me you think no RPG is really rules light. And that's something I disagree with.

 

[Hussar]

Sort of. But the best way to learn the system and gain mastery of it... is to get together with the players and effing play it. Every GM's new at some point. Reading, re-reading, and then reading the rules again won't teach system mastery as much as working through it with patient players. My advice is to dive in and work out your understanding together and that will often take longer with a rules heavy system than with a rules light one.

Fair enough. Learn through play is certainly something lots of us have done. Although, I wonder if a lot of DM's didn't start out as players at one time too - and learned the rules from someone else.

I'm not sure I agree with your second point though. "Understanding the system" in a rules heavy game is basically just learning the rules - yes, there are wonky bits, as always, but, in a decently written (key point there) rules heavy game, a lot of the rules just become second nature after a few play throughs. In a rules light game though, you need to not only learn the actual rules of the game, but, also find a way to compromise your understanding and interpretations of those rules to match up with the understandings and interpretations of everyone else at the table.

Otherwise the game grinds to a screeching halt as your interpretation slams up against my interpretation and since it's a rules light game, we have to hash out some sort of compromise. And this can cause all sorts of issues at the table.

Since every RPG essentially has a Rule Zero (how can they not?) this basically just tells me you think no RPG is really rules light. And that's something I disagree with.

I think the issue here is defining terms. Compared to, say, board games, no RPG is ever actually rules light. It can't be. There are just too many things you can do in an RPG either before play or during play, to ever really be rules light. There's a reason that your actions are so restricted in CRPG's. It's to simplify the system. Unless you're running a game on a supercomputer, you simply cannot program a CRPG to take into account even fairly simple things.

I think all you can really say is that game X is lighter than game Y. Certainly Basic/Expert D&D is rules lighter than, say, 3.5 D&D. Or HERO. But, is Basic/Expert D&D actually rules light? Well, not really. Look at the rules for combat and that is certainly not what I'd consider a rules light system.

 

[GrahamWills]

It's a little unhelpful to trim off the part where I stated that the list applies "Focusing specifically on new players experience" and then talk about how the issues I raised go away with experienced players.

I guess I kind of took for granted that with high skilled, experienced GMs who have an in-depth knowledge of the system, pretty much any system will work pretty well. Isn't that a basic principle that no-one argues anymore? That's why it's not relevant to make such an assumption and then use that as argument that rules-heavy systems are suitable for an introduction to the game.

So let be more explicit: If we're limiting our discussion only to high skilled, experienced GMs who have an in-depth knowledge of the system they are running, I am very willing to agree that they will have no more trouble with a rules-heavy game than a rules-light one. As you say: "if the GM is skilled enough, every system works" -- absolutely. So there is no point even discussing systems for skilled GMs! I think all your objections but one boil down to the suggestion: Always have a skilled, experienced, knowledgable GM, so I'll concentrate on the one that is most interesting:

I've argued before that you are fooling yourself if you think that any game with Rule Zero is really rules light. Your argument that Rules Light empowers rule zero I think misses my main objection to Rules Light games - they tend to act like resolution and results don't really matter much. They tend to have arbitrary resolution methods with highly suspect odds of success because they act like success or failure doesn't really matter, and rulings don't really matter much, so that whatever the GM says or however he rules is just no big deal. It's like flying an airplane with no trim controls, because the assumption is that the pilot is just so solid, that regardless of who the plane shakes and wobbles, the GM can correct everything. This works fine when you've got 2 hours invested in a character or a story that you are half likely to abandon in 2 hours. It doesn't work so well when you've invested 100's of hours in building a story.

I was thinking about your statement that rules light systems "tend to act like resolution and results don't really matter much", and although my initial reaction was to object, I think I now tend to agree with you. Except that I also think that they don't actually matter that much in any system, taking your definition of matter as having good estimates of "odds of success"

I agree with you that in a rules-heavy system with experienced GMs, you are more likely to get that consistency in minor matters: Is ¾ cover worth +2 or +4 on a d20 roll (a difference that will only be meaningful 10% of the time). It may be related to a simulationist bent -- where the consistency of world physics is the most important feature. But for me, even when playing a rules-heavy game, I find that "resolution and results don't really matter much" is very true. Most of the time, when I roll a d20 for an attack in 4E, I know the result without bothering. And if I make a mistake on any roll, does it make a major difference? Nope. So I'd challenge people who think that the added consistency supported by a rules-heavy system is important to ask yourselves: When was the last time it actually made a real difference? Can you think of a situation in the last game you played where if the GM had made even a 25% probability-shifting error one way or another, it would have made a real difference in the story?

In my experience, the serious differences that have had major effects in resolution have been exactly the ones where rules-heavy systems give LESS help than rules-light ones. These fall into the "knowing which rule to apply" issue, which is self-obviously harder in rules-heavy games (there's more choice!) and for which no advice is given. Things like:

• Does Skill X or Skill Y apply to this situation?
• Can I use ability Z in this situation?

Frankly, this is where, as a long-time heavy-rules system running GM and player, I find that rules-heavy systems are weakest. Because they have so many rules, it can be very hard to work out which ones apply. And when your GM believes your agile rogue character with +25 Acrobatics has to make a check using their +6 athletics skill instead, that's way more nasty than inconsistent application of a +2 fate aspect bonus

And if you go to rules-heavy boards, the number of questions related to applicability of an ability are so overwhelming that companies used to have entire teams of customer support answering questions like "can a monk who has polymorphed into a hydra use flurry of blows?" and the like. Essentially, rule zero is particularly hard for rules-heavy games because the GM has to make so many more calls on what to apply.

Now you may argue that this doesn't fit into the definition of "rule zero" -- thinking of it as limited to "making up" rules and not including "deciding which to apply". I'm OK with that definition, but the essential point stands -- my belief is that the GM has to make many more game affecting judgement calls in a rules-heavy system than they make game affecting judgement calls in a rules-light system.


A long note, because it's an interesting point about rules light versus heavy and judgement calls. It made me think back over a long career of rules decisions and impact to think about what made a difference. It's especially helpful for me, because I've run several rules-heavy campaigns of 300+ hours (Rolemaster, 3.5, 4E) and several rules light ones of equal length (Call of Cthulhu, GUMSHOE) and it made me realize that the details of the resolution process really aren't that often game-affecting. So I've ended up generally supporting your contention, except broadening it to all games:

With a reasonably competent GM and players, resolution and results don't really matter much.

 

[billd91]

I think the issue here is defining terms. Compared to, say, board games, no RPG is ever actually rules light. It can't be. There are just too many things you can do in an RPG either before play or during play, to ever really be rules light. There's a reason that your actions are so restricted in CRPG's. It's to simplify the system. Unless you're running a game on a supercomputer, you simply cannot program a CRPG to take into account even fairly simple things.

I think all you can really say is that game X is lighter than game Y. Certainly Basic/Expert D&D is rules lighter than, say, 3.5 D&D. Or HERO. But, is Basic/Expert D&D actually rules light? Well, not really. Look at the rules for combat and that is certainly not what I'd consider a rules light system.

I'm not entirely sure comparing RPGs with board games is even worthwhile when it comes to determining if something's rules light. Board games include some pretty extreme examples of light like Chutes and Ladders and Candyland. It's ultimately like comparing apples and Nutella - a lot of people eat both with peanut butter but that's about where the validity of the comparison ends.

 

[billd91]

Double post

 

[Hussar]

I'm not entirely sure comparing RPGs with board games is even worthwhile when it comes to determining if something's rules light. Board games include some pretty extreme examples of light like Chutes and Ladders and Candyland. It's ultimately like comparing apples and Nutella - a lot of people eat both with peanut butter but that's about where the validity of the comparison ends.

I tend to agree. But, that being said, when talking about rules light or rules heavy RPG's, it's probably not a bad thing to start from the point of view that even rules light games are not simple. Running an RPG, whether your rule book is 10 pages long, or a 1000, is never a simple task.

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[MENTION=75787]GrahamWills[/MENTION] - My issue with the idea of rules light vs rules heavy is that rules light, by their very nature, require more DM input to determine the results of actions. I think that's a fairly uncontroversial point. The thing is, the more often the DM has to step in and determine the results of actions, the more likely it is that the DM will make a questionable call. Again, this is just math. If the DM has to step in 100 times, it's more likely that he or she's going to make a mistake than if the DM has to step in 10 times.

And, IME, forcing people to play amateur game designer is a bad idea. People are notoriously bad at determining odds and calculating risk vs reward, especially on the fly. Which often results in rules light games being very frustrating in play as the DM (or GM, or whatever you want to call it) continuously comes up with arbitrary resolutions that are more punishing than fun.

 

[thzero]

And, IME, forcing people to play amateur game designer is a bad idea.

Yeah but most RPGs, of any sort, are created by amateur game designers. Technically yes, if you get paid, you are a 'professional' but doesn't really mean much.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah but most RPGs, of any sort, are created by amateur game designers. Technically yes, if you get paid, you are a 'professional' but doesn't really mean much.

You know what I mean.

Amateur game designer as in something you do on the fly, without a whole lot of input from anyone else, and no testing. I.E. what a GM has to do when the rules don't cover some aspect of play. And it brings with it all sorts of issues - any time you have a divergence of expectations at the table, the fact that it's that person sitting to your left telling you "no, you fail", even though you think you should have a chance of success, is always going to cause friction at the table and no amount of "trust your GM" advice is going to erase that.