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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4832056" data-attributes="member: 58197">It wasn't rules light, exactly, but here's the thing: In 2E, the rules could be divided into two sections. There was the chunk of rules you absolutely needed to create a character and play the game - character generation, core combat mechanics, and so on. And then there was a mass of other rules that did nothing very much.If you threw out the latter, and played with the former, you had a fairly rules-light game. And you could do that, and many people did... even, I venture to say, most people. I've been a gamer for over twenty years, much of that playing 2E, but I don't remember anyone ever using the weapon versus armor tables, or the pummeling and overbearing rules.In 3E, the addition of feats, the drastic increase in the number of things affected by stat modifiers, the increase in magnitude of those modifiers (such that you no longer needed exceptional stats for it to have a game effect), the inclusion of skill points, and the multiclassing system, all added up to a huge expansion of the "indispensable" section of the rules. You could tweak or house-rule this stuff, but you couldn't just ignore it. Trying to do so would leave you with a great gaping hole in your game.Furthermore, those "indispensable" rules had many more hooks into other areas. For instance, you could pretty easily ignore the 2E rules for pummeling and overbearing, because they were their own little bubble floating off in space. But in 3E, every monster and its brother had Improved Grab; and if the fighter picked up Improved Grapple, well, then, grappling just became indispensable. You couldn't get rid of it without either a) screwing over the fighter or b) making up a detailed set of house rules.2E was not so much rules-light as rules-modular.</blockquote>

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