[Actual Play] Role Playing Without Formal Systems

[Wightbred]

... The Cortex rules are excellent, but they just fell away, as we focused on scenes and what just felt like, "should happen."

It ended up being very rewarding, and satisfying. Players told me, they just kind of forgot about the rules too.

I’ve been slowly shifting my games to fewer and fewer player facing rules to achieve more of this type of realistic and flexible play over the past few decades.

I just found the Free Kriegspiele Revolution is going on right now on Discord, and I wondered if others posting or lurking in this thread were interested. Basically, a group of people are trying to design and play RPGs with minimal player facing rules, which is intended to emulate the style that David Wesley (and earlier proponents) used to represent the fog and uncertainty of war games.

A good blog to start with if you are potentially interested:

Free Kriegsspiel: Worlds, Not Rules, Etc.

What's Free Kriegsspiel? That's a silly name. Okay, free kriegsspiel (FK) is shorthand for "ancient school" RPG theory. That is, how were r...

d66kobolds.blogspot.com

 

[Wightbred]

(Double post.)

 

[hawkeyefan]

This has happened in a few of my recent Blades in the Dark games. The players are Bluecoats and over the past few sessions, they've been more investigating than they have pursuing or subduing criminals, and so the rules have kind of receded to some extent as we just go back and forth with what they're doing, what they're saying, and I just respond. I've had to remind myself at times that a roll should be made to determine how successful they are and what happens next.

I've been really looking at ways to reduce rules or at least complexity of rules for. @Wightbred thanks for the link to that blog and the ones its referencing. Some really interesting reading.