Different philosophies concerning Rules Heavy and Rule Light RPGs.

[PrunellaUK]

The rich tasty sauce was also good game design, I played a lot of wargames that weren't so good, both simple and complex. This is also something that applies to RPG's.

Agreed. A lot of this is in the execution.

I think the key point for me is that I reject the OP's assertion that simple is less consistent, and any assumption that it's qualitatively inferior. My years of experience in both wargaming and roleplay says otherwise. I've personally found many examples where simpler mechanics get to the nub of things more efficiently and effectively.

However, as Mr. Selfridge said: "The customer is always right, in matters of taste."

I entirely understand the player who wants more complexity, more process; the player who finds joy in the confines of a simulationist rules system. To that person I say: "Yours is a hard road, little priest." They travel a different path from me.

Having played more systems than I care to count over the last 43 years, I have ambled away from simulationism. Give me the storytelling-focused system. Give me lower rules overhead. Get me to decisions points faster, without lots of tedious make-work in the form of die rolls. I want narrative. Remove anything that encumbers or prevents me mainlining that sweet, sweet story.

 

[Blue]

So, in another post I mentioned a gaming group that didn't come back to my table because I mentioned that I preferred lighter systems to crunch.

That must have been some discussion that every member of the group abandoned your table because of a preference.

In our discussion via text this came up:

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.

So in summation, crunching systems better define what you can with a clearly defined rules set. While a lighter system is more up to GM fiat which fans of crunchy game really don't like. At least that is how I perceive it.

What do you think?

The issue is that there's a diminishing return in more rules. You can have a simple task resolution, and that by itself can handle say 50% of the cases that come up. No single rule can add more. Add in a list of modifiers for common issues, and you might be covering 80%. Every rule after that adds more complexity for less return.

I remember in a 3.x game with us paused mid-session for a good 10+ minutes because there was a combat going on waist deep in water in a marsh, and we knew there were rules for it but couldn't find them. And the group wanted the rules, even though none of them actually knew the exact rule so we couldn't either follow what they knew nor make an adjudication. It was in one of the many (!!) additional monthly hardcovers for 3.x, not the core rules.

So, there comes a point where the players cannot make informed judgement based on the rules because there are too many rules, covering too many corner cases. At this point the argument for complexity breaks down.

And this doesn't even address the organization of those rules. That was one of the reasons I subscribed to the 4e tools, they had a wonderful compendium that if I knew a rule existed (not a given), then I could look it up fast.

On the flip side, rules are a shared understanding. That's why I am perfectly fine mid-session with rulings ("the rules don't cover this corner case, let me make a call") and very against house-rules mid session ("the rules are clear but I'm changing them"). And yes, if a game is too light players don't have enough mechanical/probability understanding to make a call.

Let me give an example even in a non-rules light game (PF2r) - was recently in a session and to get a horse you are riding to do things in combat takes a check. One my character wasn't good at. If I don't know the DC of that check, I can't make any call on if I will move faster over a long distance on horse or on foot. The DM told me it was a DC 10 check, and I got off the horse.

Or we were playing Fate Core, in an Expanse/Mass Effect inspired universe, and our ship's engineer had no guidance on what was appropriate to even try, so kept herself to doing very basic things. Because there wasn't guidance to even give a scope of what she should be able to accomplish.

 

[dragoner]

Agreed. A lot of this is in the execution.

I think the key point for me is that I reject the OP's assertion that simple is less consistent, and any assumption that it's qualitatively inferior. My years of experience in both wargaming and roleplay says otherwise. I've personally found many examples where simpler mechanics get to the nub of things more efficiently and effectively.

However, as Mr. Selfridge said: "The customer is always right, in matters of taste."

I entirely understand the player who wants more complexity, more process; the player who finds joy in the confines of a simulationist rules system. To that person I say: "Yours is a hard road, little priest." They travel a different path from me.

Having played more systems than I care to count over the last 43 years, I have ambled away from simulationism. Give me the storytelling-focused system. Give me lower rules overhead. Get me to decisions points faster, without lots of tedious make-work in the form of die rolls. I want narrative. Remove anything that encumbers or prevents me mainlining that sweet, sweet story.

I find myself liking simpler rules, partially from just being old and lazy. Do I want to learn this, is it something that another game did and I either liked or did not like it? I can accept people might like to dig into a bunch of rule books, that is fine. You're right, it isn't a path I'm interested in either. I think I dig into settings more than rules anymore anyways. I like story and narrative a lot, though some games are so tightly focused they feel constricted. The sweet spot can be in the middle, like having played enough Call of Cthulhu from the 80's on, I can usually whip up a character using just the character sheet, starting over with it, I don't know. It can be a little heavy.

 

[Smackpixi]

I think the alternative between "can try anything" and "can only do what's on your character sheet" is a different distinction.

I think it’s a something that gets glossed over in rules heavy vs rules lite. The presumption in these discussions is that rules heavy is character sheet heavy and that isn’t necessarily the case. You can have a rules heavy game with index card character sheet. PC says “I’m strong, and carrying a bow called a “powerful bow” and am a master with that bow, so I want to shoot an arrow through that guy to hit another guy.” From a character sheet lite, but rules heavy game, the GM calls for a roll to not hit bone, then another for arrow velocity, then another for…and so forth. But in a character sheet heavy but rules lighter game, the GM just says no, because the character doesn’t have the “Two Birds One Arrow” feat, the existence of which imply those w/o it cannot do that.

My preference is for character sheet light games, because the greater the list of things PCs can do, the greater the implied list of things they can’t do gets. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but it’s a soft effect that affects the choices and decisions of players and GM.

Rules, not character sheet, heavy or lite is much more a preference from both GM and player for how much rolling are we gonna do and how fixed is the world - fixed, not necessarily consistent depending on rules quality and GM application. Can I shoot two guys with one arrow because the physics of the world and dice reveal it possible, or because the DM says yeah probably, that’d be cool. Rules heavy here may be complex, but mostly for the GM who needs to have all the tables handy. A player, need only wish to give it a shot. It’s not at all player limiting as some say/imply.

 

[dragoner]

My preference is for character sheet light games, because the greater the list of things PCs can do, the greater the implied list of things they can’t do gets.

I see this sometimes too, where the character sheet becomes a "playbook."

 

[Celebrim]

A characteristic of some rules light games is stake setting and user-generated traits. So a particular conflict can resolve even extremely esoteric or nuanced situations that even the most complete rules engine could not hope to anticipate, and then articulate exactly the impact that might have on the characters involved.

I think we aren't actually disagreeing, though it's hard to tell exactly what you mean. Stake setting and user generated traits, such as in DITV, do allow you to resolve anything using a generic proposition resolution engine and do allow for broadly defined traits that can arguably be leveraged in different and often unanticipated situations. And in any system for any fortune mechanic or rules engine, you can "articulate exactly the impact that might have on the characters involved".

However, there is a fundamentally different game experience and utility if we have a rules engine for a particular situation compared to if we don't. Suppose my heavy rules cover in detail mass combat and how players can impact or steer the course of battles. Perhaps we even have a wargame sub-game where we move tokens on the board. Applying something like DITV to the fantasy equivalent of the battle of Crecy is not straight forward and is unlikely to produce the same transcript of play as laying out 5000 tokens in your garage and spending the night maneuvering units and dicing for leadership tests and single combats to sway the outcome of meetings between forces.

Likewise, we certainly can resolve surviving a hurricane in an 80' schooner using FATE or what have you, but without a detailed engine for doing so and having a rules light system without a GM who has a lot of understanding of sailing mechanics and age of sail ships, this is likely to produce very different experiences regardless of how complete the rules light game is compared to a rules heavy game.

 

[Reynard]

No I don't think this is true at all. FATE, Dogs, Apocalypse World and others are all rules light games where the mechanics strongly underpin and drive play.

I don't think FATE (Core or Condensed) qualifies as a rule light game at all. There are plenty of moving parts in FATE.

 

[Bill Zebub]

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.

I disagree here.

More complex rules never cover all the cases that actually occur at the table, which invariably leads...in my experience...not to a 'black and white picture of what to expect' but arguments about how to interpret those rules.

 

[Celebrim]

I disagree here.

More complex rules never cover all the cases that actually occur at the table, which invariably leads...in my experience...not to a 'black and white picture of what to expect' but arguments about how to interpret those rules.

Table arguments are a social issue; not a rules issue. You can't solve out of game problems within game solutions. While it is good to be clear and concise, it is not possible to make something clear and concise enough that people won't argue about it.

That being said, there is difference in having an agreed upon set of rules and rule by fiat.

I come at this from a very different perspective that most. Stereotypically you tend to hear players demanding rules rather than fiat so that they can know what to expect from the game and the propositions that they make in play, whereas you tend to hear GMs going, "Rules are too limiting and I can always cover and handle situations better than any complex rules." or "I hate interrupting the flow of the game to look up rules."

I'm almost always the GM and I hate making up fiat rulings on the fly precisely because making good rulings requires so much mental headspace that I could be using for something else, and precisely because looking things up in any really well-designed rule set with an index is faster than making things up and less likely to involve regret. I hear a GM talking about how they'd rather have rulings than rules and all I hear is a GM that doesn't agonize like I do over being fair or who isn't self-aware about their own biases or the probabilities that they are imposing.

So many of the board arguments aren't based on the actual rules of the game or how a game can be or should be run using those rules, but how the person or some person in their group approached a game in a novel way because the differences in the rules gave them a new perspective on play. So I'm all the time hearing about how "I tried this rules light game for the first time and suddenly I realized that I could be creative in offering propositions and not just limited to pressing a button to initiate a well-defined move. Rules heavy games constrain your creativity!" and then a few posts later someone else is writing, "I tried this rules light game for the first time and I got very frustrated very quickly, because no matter how creative my proposition was it all got translated into this highly simplistic move and my creativity had no impact on the resolution. Rules light games don't reward your creativity!" And none of that really has anything to do with the rules.

 

[Golden age Superhero]

Dungeon World

Shapeshifter
When you call upon the spirits to change your shape, roll+Wis. ✴On a 10+ hold 3. ✴On a 7–9 hold 2. ✴On a miss hold 1 in addition to whatever the GM says.

You may take on the physical form of any species whose essence you have studied or who lives in your land: you and your possessions meld into a perfect copy of the species’ form. You have any innate abilities and weaknesses of the form: claws, wings, gills, breathing water instead of air. You still use your normal stats but some moves may be harder to trigger—a housecat will find it hard to do battle with an ogre. The GM will also tell you one or more moves associated with your new form. Spend 1 hold to make that move. Once you’re out of hold, you return to your natural form. At any time, you may spend all your hold and revert to your natural form.

Animal moves just say what the animal naturally does, like “call the pack,” “trample them,” or “escape to the air.” When you spend your hold your natural instinct kicks in and that move happens. If you spend hold to escape to the air, that’s it—you’re away and on the wing.

---

Over the Edge 3E

Your main trait defines your core set of skills and capabilities, and it covers a lot of ground. Your side trait gives you some specific advantage, capability, talent, or expertise, especially something not already covered by your main trait. You are presumed to be competent and effective at what you do. Your skills related to your traits are assumed to be remarkable.

Main Trait: Shapeshifting Druid from the 12th Dimension.

Here is Castles and Crusades version although it's called Totem Shape.
TOTEM SHAPE: At 6th level, druids gain the spell-like ability to change into a small or medium-size animal and back again once per day. This ability operates like the spell polymorph self. Upon attaining this ability, a druid must choose a totem shape. The selection is permanent, and cannot be changed. Each time a druid uses this ability, the character regains 1d4 hit points. At 7th and 8th levels, the druid gains a new totem shape. Each shape can be assumed once per day. At 12th level, the druid gains the ability to take the shape of a large version of one of the previously chosen totem forms. This large form can be assumed once per day, and the druid can decide between the three forms each time this ability is used. When assuming the large version of a totem form, the druid heals 5d8 hit points. At 15th level, the druid can take a totem shape twice per day and at 18th level, three times per day.