Different philosophies concerning Rules Heavy and Rule Light RPGs.

[Piperken]

...Less rules = less consistency. There's more opportunity for conflict arguing about how something's been handled. More rules gives a black and white picture of what to expect. This group is built on knowing what to expect, and making our decisions based on what we know, and we can only do that because of the heavily imposed rules and ability to find a ruling for anything.

What do you think?

I want to push back a little on this assessment with an anecdote:

I'm not terribly versed in PbTA games/system, but got the opportunity recently to listen in to a one-shot of Night Witches by Bully Pulpit games, and got to ask questions while the game was in session.

In the game, you play Soviet airwomen who are part of a storied, all-women bomber group in WW2 (you can look them up on wikipedia).

A few aspects that I wanted to highlight:

• The players were all strangers as I understood; the table runner had run this game before
• Given the adult topics present, there was some discussion about how players wanted to have the story presented
• All were familiar with PbTA games; given it was a one-shot, they decided early in the character making process to purposefully select playbooks & moves that would naturally butt into/engage with one another
• There's two broad phases to the game: on-the-ground vs. mission. The character moves one has is dependent on which phase you are in; there's a variety of fictional activities that can occur when the crew is not on a mission-- it's not "downtime" (though it could be). However, what you do during that time integrates heavily into the mission later on
• In this one-shot, this entire crew ended up dying on their mission when their bomber group was attacked by German fighters, a couple of whom were aces -- there was some question at the very end whether the mission was purposefully leaked, for the sole purpose of drawing out the German aces, so they could be shot down by their Soviet counterparts

I can say as a casual observer, it was a "lighter" game vs. a traditional (current edition) D&D game. What stood out to me was the play processes the game had in place to produce the experience (this was what it genuinely felt like, not a game but an experience) were consistent. There weren't any situations that came up that resulted in arguing over how something should be handled.

In all, it's elegant. The game's design strongly delivers the experience it intends. This one-shot left a visceral impression on the players as well as myself; in my case, it was very much like listening to a radio drama.

It's worth adding this game could run an entire campaign, because of all the potential issues characters can choose to engage with in the fictive world when not on a mission. It's robust enough to handle that.

 

[Arilyn]

In Storypath there's a resource usually called Momentum. Its a metacurrency used for a variety of purposes in challenges, and as might be guessed from the name, builds up over a scene (combat or not) and allows the scene to finish successfully and hopefully with a flourish.

The kicker is, its a group resource as a default. Which is fine if you've got a group that's very well tuned to sharing spotlight and activity, but if your group runs more to the individualistic, its just asking for some people to overuse it and others to both underutilize it (to the detriment of play as a whole) and/or potentially resent the overuse of others.

Now, if you are very aware of your group and how it leans, this is easy to fix (treat it as an individual rather than group resource), but not everyone is that self-aware about their group dynamics; look at posts around here sometime and it'll be abundantly clear that's just not a talent every GM and player has. So its easy to walk into a problem the group would not have in a system without metacurrency, or the more common versions of that which are individualized.

That isn't a case of a flaw in the system, per se (I reference one of those in my other post to you) but its a case where a mismatch is not the fault of the gaming group either, just inexperience and the fact not all groups have a strong understanding of their social dynamics (often because they haven't needed to with their initial choices of system(s)).

But it feels like you are assuming that Momentum is a weakness as a mechanic, because some groups may struggle with it. But this is true of many game mechanics. Some games are poor fits for some tables. You are agreeing with this point, so I'm left confused.

There's a player in my group who likes RPGs but seemed to prefer board games. When we were playing 5e, he was that player who drifted, looked at his phone, etc. Not too bad but obviously not too engaged. We switched away from D&D and engagement went up. He even started buying non-D&D games. We are now playing Fate, and he's lit up. He knew nothing about Fate but has taken to the game like a duck to water. He's excited and wants to play more. He made an amazing character and is fully engaged.

So I guess D&D is problematic because some players find the mechanics so uninteresting it may turn them off the hobby?

 

[dragoner]

If you're looking at the hobby as a whole, almost a tautology.

Though for those of us who don't play it, it is important to remember that is the baseline most of these discussions arise from. In engineering it is called a correction factor, used for calibration.

 

[Faolyn]

Agreed. If one wants to argue that a game is poorly designed, or poorly written, the argument should be of the form, "Here's what the game says it is about. Here's what the rules as presented actually do. They don't match."

The issue of, "I have a player of Type Y in my group, so this game didn't work well for us," doesn't actually support the idea that game is poorly made.

Yep. And sometimes it takes a while for a player to grok system's differences, so playing a one- or tow-shot in that system doesn't give them enough time to truly understand it.

Sure, if a player really hates a particular system, don't force them to play it, but if they are just having a hard time with some of it, give them time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I objected to what read like implied responsibility. That a person can use a tool poorly is not controversial. That a tool can be designed with a few guards against misuse, and presented with instructions on proper use, is not controversial.

That ultimately it is the tool's fault if it is used when it shouldn't, though - that I push back on.

And I still assert in some cases it goes beyond tools that are simply easy to misapply, to ones that have outright bad design in ways that makes some social dynamic issues worse. I don't know why that should be shocking either, but there seems to be resistance to it.

Is there a post to that effect that you're responding to that I may have missed? Or are these "some people" not in evidence in these pages?

Post #150 from Aerlyn at least seem to imply that the system never helps or hurts here, which is why I responded to it as I did.

As it should. Like, you know, people vary considerably. We should not expect them to somehow be uniform on these issues.

And I reserve the right to express that some people seem overly quick to pull the trigger here, and worse, suggest that others who aren't creating a self-inflicted wound.

Perhaps that is true. So what?

If someone is "awfully fussy" isn't it better if they are up-front and clear about their needs and boundaries, rather than expecting folks to try at length to work around their fussiness to no avail?

That doesn't mean I consider it a good attitude, nor feel the need to not say so.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, some games are just badly written. But that's not quite the same as saying "this game is bad because it doesn't work with our group."

No, but "this game is bad because it seems to create problems for a lot of groups" also gets some serious pushback. That's my point. Its very much possible for a game to do that, and not just be a mismatch of expectations.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The issue of, "I have a player of Type Y in my group, so this game didn't work well for us," doesn't actually support the idea that game is poorly made.

I think, however, "This game plays very poorly with an extremely common sort of player, of a type that could reasonably expect to be in groups trying to use that game" is an entirely legitimate critque.

Again, I'm not talking about games that simply have a fundamentally different approach than what a group wants. I'm talking about games that seem a perfectly reasonable choice but have design elements that make assumptions about their end users that, at the least, a potential leap and not spelled out, and at worst, bad design elements in general.

 

[Desdichado]

Less rules = less consistency. There's more opportunity for conflict arguing about how something's been handled. More rules gives a black and white picture of what to expect. This group is built on knowing what to expect, and making our decisions based on what we know, and we can only do that because of the heavily imposed rules and ability to find a ruling for anything.

So the philosophy of rules heavy games is that it is better to have everything, or at least most things defined. It's best to have everything about what my character can do clearly defined on my character sheet. While the understanding of a rules light system is that less rules mean more of a chance to think outside your character sheet. If the rules favor just a basic rules like Old School Essentials, or my favorite Castles and Crusades and the rest will be up to the DM to adjudicate.

I've decided, I think, that the great dividing line between gamers on matters of taste is structure. On one pole, we have folks who are fundamentally skeptical of GMs and their authority. They don't trust it, either because they don't trust the GM to treat them fairly, or because they just think he'll make a mistake, so they require, by taste, a lot of structure and circumspection of the GM's ability to engage in inadvertent wrongfun, or whatever. Rules light vs crunchy is really a proxy for this preference; or at least it's the most normal root cause of a preference for rules crunch vs rules light. I'm sure some people just really enjoy the rules for their own sake. But mostly, it's about making sure that they can get a more predictable, constant experience out of people that they don't trust to give it to them otherwise.

I think that the chasm that divides these two poles around which gamers cluster is so vast and so deep that we literally don't understand each other. I read debates on this issue and I don't know what in the world they're even talking about. I'm sure it makes sense to them, but to me it reads like a gigantic non sequitur. To me; they're not even responding to what I said when we're "arguing" about the merits of one approach vs. the other. We're talking completely past each other with no mutual comprehension at all. The words look like English words, but they make no sense. For all of their comprehensibility, they might as well be written in Medieval Old Tibetan.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I can say as a casual observer, it was a "lighter" game vs. a traditional (current edition) D&D game. What stood out to me was the play processes the game had in place to produce the experience (this was what it genuinely felt like, not a game but an experience) were consistent. There weren't any situations that came up that resulted in arguing over how something should be handled.

I think you need to make a distinction when talking about "light" games between what PbtA games are doing, and what a lot of lightweight games that focus on "rulings not rules" are doing.

(Small caveat up front; I'm going to use the term "PbtA" somewhat generally, but because its a popular basic design paradigm there are a lot of games called PbtA out there, some of which have drifted considerably from the things I'm about to say; my specific model for this since I read it recently is Monster of the Week, but it should apply to at least most PbtA games).

The thing with PbtA is that while its relatively light, the mechanical portions of the game are also very sharp edged, and I'd even say, rigid. What I mean by that is, mechanically speaking, everything that's resolved is done by a set of finite Moves. There might be cases where the choice of Move at either the player or GM end is controversial, there's never going to be a case when (if run as intended) a brand new move or resolution method drops down on players. That sort of thing is just outside of the normal set of expectations for PbtA gaming, and even odd choices of Move should be uncommon.

This is very much not true intrinsically in RNR gaming, where the GM's ability to simply decide how something goes is not only permitted, its lauded. So even if both a PbtA game and a game with a RNR ethos of of similar degrees of mechanical complexity, the ability for a player to reasonably plan their actions can be vastly different.

(Note I am not a big fan of either approach for various reasons, but the difference seems pretty stark).

 

[Thomas Shey]

But it feels like you are assuming that Momentum is a weakness as a mechanic, because some groups may struggle with it. But this is true of many game mechanics. Some games are poor fits for some tables. You are agreeing with this point, so I'm left confused.

Possibly because I'm talking about two different things:

1. Games that can contribute to social problems in groups, not because they're misdesigned but because they contain design elements which are not obvious out the gate, and thus are to walk into; and

2. Games that seem to have fundamental design element problems that can be worked around, but if not will definitely cause both intrinsic problems and make certain social issues worse.

The first is not a flawed design, but may well be a flawed presentation if the designer doesn't consider some of the potential knock-on effects of some of his design elements and make them very clear. Because not everyone is good at seeing the implications of mechanics until they're in play. Both, however, are cases where the game system can very much create additional problems in some groups beyond what they routinely have, so I don't think letting game systems off the hook here is warranted.

There's a player in my group who likes RPGs but seemed to prefer board games. When we were playing 5e, he was that player who drifted, looked at his phone, etc. Not too bad but obviously not too engaged. We switched away from D&D and engagement went up. He even started buying non-D&D games. We are now playing Fate, and he's lit up. He knew nothing about Fate but has taken to the game like a duck to water. He's excited and wants to play more. He made an amazing character and is fully engaged.

So I guess D&D is problematic because some players find the mechanics so uninteresting it may turn them off the hobby?

Problematic is a word doing heavy lifting here. Does it present elements that made his problems worse? I'd have to assume so if there's a difference. Does it bring those elements to the attention of the GM and users to prepare for it? I'm not qualified to say not being a 5e player or GM.