What people enjoy and is therefor a good choice for them is the crucial factor.
Mallus, when you claim that "it's easier to achieve "rules-lightness" on the fly, as the mood strikes us, then to do the reverse," do you mean that having started rules-heavy, then chosen at one moment to use a simple ad hoc method, you find it very hard to go back to using a more complex "by the book" method a few minutes later?
If instead you mean to suggest that it is somehow a peculiar prerequisite for starting rules-light -- a mere difference in chronology -- to lack the pages of material that take as much time to write in any case ... then that makes no sense to me. It certainly does not match the more realistically typical situation I had in mind, in which books and magazine articles provide a great many bits and bobs one might toss into Game X.
There is a synergy between a relationship with (or position for) mechanical procedures -- as rigid "rules" or as mere optional "guidelines" -- and how they are constructed and presented.
Theoretically, one can say that in any RPG, all rules are optional; practically, some rules are more optional than others, and that varies from game to game. Designers have priorities, and so do players, and it's best when those are on the same page (as is more the case for some people with 4e than with 3e, or vice-versa).
If one does not like the complications of sorcery in C&S, then that's a drag -- but one might dump it altogether and still have a fine (if to one's taste) game of chivalry. The complications of combat in 4e (bound up with powers, monster design, surges, magic-item packets, etc., etc.) are to my mind at least as troublesome if not one's cup of tea -- and dumping combat altogether would leave an ugly crater blasted in the ground of the game.
Part of the difficulty is how procedural elements are directly tied to the sub-game of "builds" in WotC-D&D. This is a (more or less) carefully balanced, foundation-up integration. TSR-D&D was/is to my mind not really a "system" but rather a motley accumulation of disparate pieces of chrome bolted onto the basic framework independently of each other. However successful were successive attempts to harmonize them, they did not much change the essentially modular nature (which was, I think, more an accident of circumstance than a "system" of modularity).
That doesn't make much difference to people who from the start believed 1e AD&D to be a precisely engineered system, who never saw material in the context of Supplements and magazine articles but considered everything essential, "core", officially required for proper play of the game. Similarly, some 3e fans may have concepts of propriety and "The Rules" that are quite firmly held regardless of whether they match the designers' stated intent.
Where those lines are drawn, there is a minimally acceptable rules-heaviness. That of course may vary from individual to individual, but there are definite trends in the "subcultures" that grow up around different games. There are values that warrant the construction of some rules-sets in the first place (such as the elaborate points system of Champions to replace dice-rolls and picks a la Villains & Vigilantes, or the shift from character classes to skills as focus in RuneQuest).
Mallus, when you claim that "it's easier to achieve "rules-lightness" on the fly, as the mood strikes us, then to do the reverse," do you mean that having started rules-heavy, then chosen at one moment to use a simple ad hoc method, you find it very hard to go back to using a more complex "by the book" method a few minutes later?
If instead you mean to suggest that it is somehow a peculiar prerequisite for starting rules-light -- a mere difference in chronology -- to lack the pages of material that take as much time to write in any case ... then that makes no sense to me. It certainly does not match the more realistically typical situation I had in mind, in which books and magazine articles provide a great many bits and bobs one might toss into Game X.
There is a synergy between a relationship with (or position for) mechanical procedures -- as rigid "rules" or as mere optional "guidelines" -- and how they are constructed and presented.
Theoretically, one can say that in any RPG, all rules are optional; practically, some rules are more optional than others, and that varies from game to game. Designers have priorities, and so do players, and it's best when those are on the same page (as is more the case for some people with 4e than with 3e, or vice-versa).
If one does not like the complications of sorcery in C&S, then that's a drag -- but one might dump it altogether and still have a fine (if to one's taste) game of chivalry. The complications of combat in 4e (bound up with powers, monster design, surges, magic-item packets, etc., etc.) are to my mind at least as troublesome if not one's cup of tea -- and dumping combat altogether would leave an ugly crater blasted in the ground of the game.
Part of the difficulty is how procedural elements are directly tied to the sub-game of "builds" in WotC-D&D. This is a (more or less) carefully balanced, foundation-up integration. TSR-D&D was/is to my mind not really a "system" but rather a motley accumulation of disparate pieces of chrome bolted onto the basic framework independently of each other. However successful were successive attempts to harmonize them, they did not much change the essentially modular nature (which was, I think, more an accident of circumstance than a "system" of modularity).
That doesn't make much difference to people who from the start believed 1e AD&D to be a precisely engineered system, who never saw material in the context of Supplements and magazine articles but considered everything essential, "core", officially required for proper play of the game. Similarly, some 3e fans may have concepts of propriety and "The Rules" that are quite firmly held regardless of whether they match the designers' stated intent.
Where those lines are drawn, there is a minimally acceptable rules-heaviness. That of course may vary from individual to individual, but there are definite trends in the "subcultures" that grow up around different games. There are values that warrant the construction of some rules-sets in the first place (such as the elaborate points system of Champions to replace dice-rolls and picks a la Villains & Vigilantes, or the shift from character classes to skills as focus in RuneQuest).
