What non-optional rules does AD&D include compared to B/X that make it "rules heavy"?
D&D General Hot Take: Dungeon Exploration Requires Light Rules To Be Fun
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
Neonchameleon
Legend
See, this makes me sigh.
Last night I was playing the actually rules light game Lasers and Feelings where the entire game's rules fit onto a single side of A4. Tomorrow night I will be running a game of Dread where the resolution mechanic is a Jenga tower.
Those are rules light games. Tonight I am playing Monster of the Week which I hesitate to call rules light because it is an entire category heavier than those games. The book is small and slim, and it has a consistent resolution mechanic. But there is a single sheet of common rules that players in their second session actually need to refer to in play.
Meanwhile I don't care if you're talking about 1e, 2e, 3.0, 3.5, 4e, 5e, or 5.24. You have three large hardbacks full of rules. You have people referring to the actual rulebooks during play (in part to look up the spells). You have multiple different subsystems. Even brown/white box and Moldvay or Mentzer Basic are at best questionably rules light.
A legitimate argument can be had as to the lightest of 1e, 4e, and 5e. But they all get nerds to practice weightlifting by lugging multiple large hardbacks around. Being the lightest heavyweight boxer doesn't make you a flyweight even if there are super-heavyweights.
Your only justification for calling AD&D rules light is that heavier games exist and that you clearly have rose tinted goggles on the subject given that you can write:
1e uses a lookup table to roll to hit and can't be consistent whether you want to roll low, roll high, or roll percentile dice. It's not just complex but gratuitously so.
Can't speak as much to 1e but in 2e, we basically threw out firing missiles into melee and grappling/unarmed combat rules. But that was probably the worst of it.
By that measure, I doubt we get much agreement on what constitutes rules-light in a TTRPG without describing the actual mechanic. There's also what do you want to do with a rules-light game - I can play a one shot game using a Jenga tower. I wouldn't want to play a campaign using that as a mechanic, for instance.
Someday, someone will explain what in the Hell they were thinking with 2E's unarmed combat rules.
AnotherGuy
Hero
Yes, agree with all.
I was just trying to gage what was being considered unfun per the OP - not that I myself think these items are unfun. Sorry, I could have worded it better.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
With the possible exception of the simplest versions of Basic, genuinely zero versions of D&D or its direct descendants (like PF) are actually rules-light games. Some editions may be lighter than others, but genuinely not one of them is a rules-light game. As others have said, ultralight games exist that are literally one page, sometimes less. I ran a DW game for several years (before I started adding supplements) where the entirety of the rules-text my players needed to know--including unused character playbooks--fit into a 26-page PDF.
By comparison to literally any clearly rules-light game, essentially every version of "D&D" ever published is an ultraheavy game.
The only way you could argue that any version of AD&D was "rules-light" is that so many people ignored or completely missed so many of the game's rules that it was effectively true that most people used no more than 90% of the actual game, and many many people used less than 50%. But "we didn't use half of the rules text due to ignorance, apathy, or avoidance" is not in any way a claim that the game itself is rules-light; it is simply that many people, whether accidentally or intentionally, ripped out huge chunks of the game and just did not use them.
Sure. But no one in their right mind would argue that Dungeon World is of comparable "weight" to AD&D1e. AD&D1e is a behemoth compared to DW. It's just patently ridiculous. Maybe--maybe--you could argue that AD&D1e was a "early installment weirdness" very patchy effort at rules-medium? But huge chunks of AD&D1e's clunky, weird, baroque rules got ossified into Eternal Tradition, rather than being (as they were in most cases) pure ad-hoc, and occasionally off-the-cuff, solutions to problems as they cropped up.
Which, incidentally, that is another great reason why AD&D (1e or 2e) is not and never was a rules-light game. Massive amounts of its rules-text are scattershot stuff Gygax invented for his home game that then became laid down as mandatory expectations. That's why we have a Van Helsing vampire hunter Cleric. That's why we have the arcane/divine magic divide. That's why you had the absolutely impenetrable "saving throw" categories. Etc., etc. Now, don't get me wrong, Gygax had some very savvy ideas about game design and there's quite a bit of cleverness in the rules, particularly given this was the bleeding edge of game design at the time. But to call the grotesque melange of (almost always) patternless rules "light" in any way or form is either bad comedy or worse logic.
Neonchameleon
Legend
AD&D 1e has literally 60 pages of spells. And spells are character options. By contrast a PbTA character sheet is two sides and contains all options for that class on every level up other than "pick an option from another class". Even by your own standards AD&D is not in the same room as rules light.
And here the equivalent is working out what and how to roll. d20 low? d20 high? Are saving throws a d20 or percentile (for e.g. system shock). To climb are you rolling stat or thief skills? When even working out what and how to roll takes work you don't have a rules light system.
Which is why 5e rolled all the modifiers into Advantage. So this doesn't apply.
Where "modern" includes things D&D hasn't done in a decade.
GMMichael
Guide of Modos
Amen. Turn-based activity is pretty painful. You might say it feels like "crawling" versus walking.
See, I would think that the additional situations that warrant additional rules (in some games) mentioned by @AnotherGuy would suggest rules-heavy instead of rules-light. They can make the crawl fun (or not), but they definitely contribute to why it's called a "crawl."
Clunky character rules can slow down the crawl, too, but I'd expect the effect of those to be felt way beyond the dungeon. Should the thread title be "role-playing requires rules-light to be fun" instead? Or "too much combat requires rules-light to be fun?"
