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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9597807" data-attributes="member: 7026617">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).</blockquote>

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