Rules Light Games: Examples and Definitions

We will never be able to agree on what rules-light is, there are too many shades of grey. I like the approach of defining rules-medium, however. For me, D&D 5E is rules-medium. I can cite plenty of games that are significantly easier/more difficult to play.

DMMike said:

Officially, anything that uses a d100 is rules-heavy.

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I don't think we can agree on that. Call of Cthulhu is rules-medium, at worst. In fact, I have been considering whether it doesn't straddle the boundaries to rules-light. It's certainly less cumbersome than D&D in gameplay.

Alexander Kalinowski said:

We will never be able to agree on what rules-light is, there are too many shades of grey. I like the approach of defining rules-medium, however. For me, D&D 5E is rules-medium. I can cite plenty of games that are significantly easier/more difficult to play. . .It's certainly less cumbersome than D&D in gameplay.

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Oh ye of little faitb*! Never is a strong word. You're probably offending some #WOTCstaff by suggesting that 5e is rules-medium instead of rules-light, but that's what they get for being on top. Your comparison of Cthulhu to D&D agrees with my definition; whatever the gray is, D&D is in the middle of it.

Bedrockgames said:

I am intending to do so. I thought of this, but because I get such varied responses from individual players, I really wanted to get a sense from the community, rather than from companies putting 'rules light' on the cover, what their thoughts are.

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Getting a sense yet? Try my (impromptu) questionnaire:

- Do characters take 30 or more minutes to make, WITH GM assistance?
- Are there 3 or more tables used for determining character features?
- Is it very helpful to have a rulebook on hand while playing?
- Is more than one rulebook required for playing?

*Flaw, alignment, ideal, trait, bond.

practicalm said:

Two early rules light games, Tunnels and Trolls and The Fantasy Trip (SJ Games is bring it back).
These are both combat focused which make it easier to keep light. Adding other pillars adds more complexity.

Traveller started out pretty rules light and then supplements came.

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Loved The Fantasy Trip back in the day, and was glad to hear of SJG’s plans to bring it back.

FWIW, though, Dark City Games is basically using the same core mechanics as TFT for their RPGs.
http://www.darkcitygames.com

Dungeons and Dragons can be a rules light game! All you have to do is ignore all the rules you don't want to deal with and make rulings whenever something comes up. People have been playing it that way for years!

Greg Saunder's post apocalyptic Summerland RPG is very much a rules light game. I haven't checked out the 2nd edition which was on kickstarter last year, but I doubt it will be too different from the original which uses the open d6 system.

I'd say rules light games are extremely fast to learn (i.e. 10-15 minutes) and usually rely more heavily on narration.

MichaelSomething said:

Dungeons and Dragons can be a rules light game! All you have to do is ignore all the rules you don't want to deal with and make rulings whenever something comes up. People have been playing it that way for years!

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Using such lenient criteria what game isn't a rules light game?

steenan said:

I call a game "rules light" if I can run it for players new to the game and they have all the information they need on their character sheets and single page cheat sheet. No need to browse books during character creation or during play, no need for me to handle the mechanics because it takes too long to understand it.

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practicalm said:

Traveller started out pretty rules light and then supplements came.

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I'm a big fan of Classic Traveller and have recently been playing it a fair bit (a report of today's session is here). But I don't think it reasonably counts as rules light.

Character creation can be reasonably quick and quite colourful, and the skill names generally give you a sense of what your PC can do. But the game has a lot of subsystems (for intersteller travel; for using vacc-suits; for vehicular travel; for landing small craft in inclement weather; for combat, both melee and ranged; for ship combat; for making repairs to a ship during combat; etc, etc). In our play I'm finding that, as referee, I'm carrying the load of making sense of the rules while the players declare actions drawing on a combination of their sense of the fiction, their sense of the genre, and the descriptors on their PC sheets.

Greenstone.Walker said:

Personally, I found "aspects" to be the opposite of clear. After several games, I'm still not sure I know what an aspect really is.

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Interestingly, when introducing kids to roleplaying, I have found that n matter what system you start with, they start thinking in terms of aspects and have to be trained if the system uses skills. As an example, I ran D&D for some kids and a typical conversation would go:

PLAYER: I look for animal tracks
GM: Make a roll unit the tracking skill
PLAYER: Wait ... why am I not good at that? I should be because I'm a Ranger

Almost invariably, players conceptualized their character in terms of aspects. If they were a "DWARVEN FIGHTER" they would assume that they could speak dwarven, know stuff about stone, fight with an axe and hate elves. The whole skills idea seems not to be a good model for how people think -- for the novice player, skills are an annoying feature that needs to be managed to make their character feel like the aspects they have in mind when they think of their character. Many, many times I have heard novice role-players complain that a skill should be changed because of their aspect. I don't think I've ever heard anyone suggest that they change their aspects based on their skills: "I seem to have a lot of thievery and intriusion skills -- maybe I should be a thief?" <-- This doesn't happen.

I believe (I am not an expert) that this actually the way our minds work for storing inforamtion -- as a set of related concepts that have been built up by examples of "typical" such things.

So, my currently thinking is that aspects (what your character IS) are more fundamental to roleplaying, and that skills and abilities (what your character DOES) is a secondary thing. That might well be why rules-light games simply stop at the first, whereas rules heavy games almost always have BOTH.

GrahamWills said:

Interestingly, when introducing kids to roleplaying, I have found that n matter what system you start with, they start thinking in terms of aspects and have to be trained if the system uses skills. As an example, I ran D&D for some kids and a typical conversation would go:

PLAYER: I look for animal tracks
GM: Make a roll unit the tracking skill
PLAYER: Wait ... why am I not good at that? I should be because I'm a Ranger

Almost invariably, players conceptualized their character in terms of aspects. If they were a "DWARVEN FIGHTER" they would assume that they could speak dwarven, know stuff about stone, fight with an axe and hate elves. The whole skills idea seems not to be a good model for how people think -- for the novice player, skills are an annoying feature that needs to be managed to make their character feel like the aspects they have in mind when they think of their character. Many, many times I have heard novice role-players complain that a skill should be changed because of their aspect. I don't think I've ever heard anyone suggest that they change their aspects based on their skills: "I seem to have a lot of thievery and intriusion skills -- maybe I should be a thief?" <-- This doesn't happen.

I believe (I am not an expert) that this actually the way our minds work for storing inforamtion -- as a set of related concepts that have been built up by examples of "typical" such things.

So, my currently thinking is that aspects (what your character IS) are more fundamental to roleplaying, and that skills and abilities (what your character DOES) is a secondary thing. That might well be why rules-light games simply stop at the first, whereas rules heavy games almost always have BOTH.

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First, this is a really interesting observation that is going to cause me to put more thought into it for my own system

Second, I wonder how much of this is based on the class issue. Ie, in a classless, skill-based system (and with no other aspect element), is this something that would happen, or would people just envision their character in terms of the skills they picked?

> Interestingly, when introducing kids to roleplaying, I have found that no matter what system you start with, they start thinking in terms of aspects and have to be trained if the system uses skills. As an example, I ran D&D for some kids and a typical conversation would go:

Sword of Spirit said:

First, this is a really interesting observation that is going to cause me to put more thought into it for my own system

Second, I wonder how much of this is based on the class issue. Ie, in a classless, skill-based system (and with no other aspect element), is this something that would happen, or would people just envision their character in terms of the skills they picked?

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I (and my son) have run a few different systems for the church youth group. I've been running BIG EYES SMALL MOUTH (2nd ed) with them for a while now, which is a classless system -- you pick up skills and special powers using point buy and it's the same thing. Even though there is no official "class" or "main aspect" they still think in those terms.

I'm running in S. John Ross's Uresia setting (high recommend for an angst-free, anime fantasy world full of sailing, romance, pirates, cat people, maps and cooking) and my players are running a pretty random selection of character types -- I have a ghost who has two different sets of powers depending on whether they possess their recently acquired dead body or not, a robot, a Barry Allen/Flash clone, a half-tree druid, a dwarven axefighter, a demon and a few others.

Pretty much every session the younger kid playing Barry Allen tries to use a skill they don't have because "that's what Barry can do". The dwarven axe fighter has expressed frustration that they don't know anything about smithing (because all dwarves do) and so on. So I think this is not really a class issue. The class is a stand-in for the "main character concept" in many games; certainly in my long and happy history playing D&D if you asked a random person to describe their character, the first aspect they describe is almost always the class. In fact, I think that is the appeal of a class-based system -- the class is a main aspect that makes it easier to decide (or be told!) which skills and abilities to take. Even in purely skill-based games (e.g. Call of Cthulhu) a nice feature is a "package" of skills that describe some aspect of a character ("profession").

Thinking back over the many, many characters I have created, in many, many systems, I think my though process does go like this:

• Find some idea / concept / mechanic / media that inspires me
• Think of a summary statement that describes them
• Considering the system, map those to most suitable high level choices -- main aspects, classes, professions, packages
• Flesh out details with the stats /attributes / skills / abilities / powers that make sense
• Come back after a few sessions and ask the GM if I can change some of the above because the mechanics didn't match the concept the way I thought it would

So, my D&D 4E character was Sigbert. I was excited about playing a competent D&D fighter who knew some magic for the first time ever so I went for "barbarian fighter forced to learn magic", which leads to fighter class, multi-classing wizard with brute force based weapon abilities and stats and skills to support it.

For ICONS my concept was a scared teenager (I usually play assertive, pro-active characters and wanted to try something different) so took some aspects that supported that and then chose powers that didn't involve direct conflict, leading to my new super-hero: The Mouse.

For Call of Cthulhu, we were asked to play Miskatonic students in the 1930's, so I went with an immigrant communist agitator -- I'm pretty sure that with those descriptors, most people would come up with a similar set of skills to the ones I took.

Maybe it's a simplistic model, but the Numenéra style description "I am an immigrant communist agitator who studies engineering" or "I am a barbarian fighter forced to learn magic" seems to cover the basics of what I need to define a character, and the rest is just matching against the system.