How many Tools do you Need?

[Hussar]

As many as it takes, my tool box at home has screwdrivers, pliers, a hammer, wrenches and a tape measure, the basics. It also has a stud finder, battery tester, wire strippers, clamps and a set of files. I may only use them once a year, but it's nice having them, so I don't have to drive to the hardware store to buy them.
From what I gather the rules are take what you need and leave the rest, since they have to cover both newbie and experienced DMs, would you rather there be not enough for the newbie or too many for the old hand?

Bel

That's not really the problem though. It's the problem of too many rules for the newbie DM, especially if those rules are not presented and organized well enough. On the flip side, I don't really worry about not handing enough rules to the experienced DM, because his experience should allow him or her to extrapolate new rules from existing ones.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Maybe. My "common sense" tells me that in the following situation, a Cleave would be ruled out because of blatant physical impossibility:

Cleave doesn't have a Range, so you can only use it on adjacent enemies.

 

[Celebrim]

You lose pages that could have been used on things which help you.

Such as, more rules? You see, that line of argument doesn't really help you. Yes, ideally, you'd only have rules for the things which would come up in your campaign as the rest is 'wasted space' that you had to pay for. But what is going to come up in each person's campaign is different. That is what source books are for.

This really isn't true though. Having extra detailed rules for something that don't come up that, especially if it works differently to other systems, or isn't laid out really, really well is actually really bad, it bogs down play and causes confusion and arguments.

a) Having extra detailed rules for something that doesn't come up, doesn't slow down play because it doesn't come up.
b) Obviously, badly written rules or badly editted books bogs down play and causes confusion and arguments. Thats true if we have 3 pages of rules or 3000.

Simply "more rules is better" even in a situation where you have unlimited page space will still cause slowdown and annoys people who want enjoyable, fast action or resolution.

The total number of rules has very little impact on the speed of play or resolution. For example, the rules in 'FrostBurn' or 'Stormwrack' don't impact the speed of play in most campaigns at all, because they are just ignored. 'Lords of Madness' didn't slow down many campaigns because the detailed rules there don't impact the ordinary task resolution system in the vast majority of cases. Detailed rules regarding how lava behaves and how dangerous it is would not slow down the speed of resolution of anything but a bad GM. For any GM worth his pizza, he's not going to concern himself with lava rules when they don't concern his campaign, but if he plans on featuring lava in a scenario he will familiarize himself with those rules sufficiently before play begins and make what notes he needs so that he's not flipping through books at the game table looking like an idiot. And this will not slow down preparation for the scenario significantly either, because the sort of things he needs to draw from the rules are the sort of decisions he would have to make before or during play anyway.

Or to put it more simply, the more rules you have, the more likely it is that you're going to have to look them up, and the longer that's going to take.

But the corner cases covered by detailed rules are precisely those that are going to pause the game anyway. Bad as a pause to look up how some corner case that doesn't happen very often is handled, its not near as bad as the pause to figure out how to resolve this fairly without having some rule already in mind both because it reduces the mental burden on the referee and because less player argument and social consensus is needed. Plus, the DM is less likely to find that he's made a bad snap ruling that needs to be retconned or otherwise handled at a metagame level.

Sure, I'll grant that badly organized rules or overly large rule books can be intimidating to new players, but in any decent game system the core resolution system is going to be pretty simple and clean regardless of how many rules there are. All that extra detail need only accrue in a campaign at the rate that its needed. What makes for bad overly complex rules isn't the total number of rules, but the total number of rules that bear on the resolution of any particular situation or player proposition.

 

[Jackelope King]

What makes for bad overly complex rules isn't the total number of rules, but the total number of rules that bear on the resolution of any particular situation or player proposition.

This is a big part of it. The fewer (and simpler) the steps involved in a player's proposition, the more likely a player is to make and carry through with the proposition when it's relevant. I refer to this as the "Forget It Test". If a rule is complicated or confusing enough that when I explain to a casual player in my face to face group how to use it, the player just shakes his head ands says "forget it", then it's not a well-designed rule.

The other big part of it is finding just how broadly applicable a particular rule can be. Older editions went for narrow applicability, where each resolution system was independent of the other. While it might be that this allowed for a finer grain in each resolution system (combat could have special rules just for combat that wouldn't exist in a wilderness system). With the d20 System, you have a single main resolution system which can be applied across an entire spectrum of potential situations. Different situations are kept thematically separate by changing what modifies the core d20 roll.

An ideal rule is broad enough to resolve many situations in similar ways while keeping those vastly different situations different enough to be relevant and interesting. The broadness is useful because it makes it much easier for the people playing the game to keep, well, playing the game with reduced dependence on rulebook flipping. The relevance is essential to make sure that the game is still fun and exciting. How relevant something needs to be is a function of taste (for instance, I don't see much advantage to having hundreds of different condition modifiers... having just a few modifiers which can represent a lot of different conditions well would be preferential to me, as it would enable my group to use them more quickly and easily in-game and it would make it easier for me to reverse-engineer those conditions into new balanced crunchy bits that my group might need).

 

[LostSoul]

a) Having extra detailed rules for something that doesn't come up, doesn't slow down play because it doesn't come up.

The wheat can get lost in the chaff.

 

[D'karr]

The wheat can get lost in the chaff.

When life gives you chaff make chaff bread.

 

[Hella_Tellah]

This is a big part of it. The fewer (and simpler) the steps involved in a player's proposition, the more likely a player is to make and carry through with the proposition when it's relevant. I refer to this as the "Forget It Test". If a rule is complicated or confusing enough that when I explain to a casual player in my face to face group how to use it, the player just shakes his head ands says "forget it", then it's not a well-designed rule.

QFT. My group is full of eager roleplayers who hate to have the game slowed down for even a minute by having to search for a rule. That means I either need to play games with fewer rules to look up, or become very, very familiar with the rules.

In that second part lies the rub. If I, as a DM, am expected to know all (or most) of the rules, they'd better be intuitive and streamlined. With 3.5, there were so many rules that, after a year and a half of weekly play, there were still fiddly rules that I needed to look up all the time. This is why Clerics in my game never turned undead, melee fighters never grappled, and no one ever tried to indulge in aerial combat. Even if it was an optimal solution for the character's success, those strategies were never optimal for the player's fun. Jackelope King's "Forget It Test" is the number one reason I'm excited for Fourth Edition, and the number one reason I will never DM another game of 3.5.

 

[Imban]

Cleave doesn't have a Range, so you can only use it on adjacent enemies.

Of course. The question is whether the second target also has to be adjacent to you. If it is, then the only problem I have with Cleave is gone.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I said I felt that 3E as written did so--for me--less so than any of the other editions.

This is, perhaps, to be expected, given that 3E focused on sourcebooks, which are by definition more mechanics-heavy, whereas 2E was the era of campaign settings and 1E the era of 25,897 adventures, both of which are obviously more flavor-based. Whatever the case, however, that's how I found it.

Yeah, that's true enough. And a quick rummage of my memories doesn't turn up much I discovered in 3e that was juicy that wasn't based, in some way, on stuff from 1e or 2e. Which is part of my apprehension regarding 4e's flavor flavs.

I guess the Bodak isn't a bad example of something that had good flavor from the earlier editions, but was ripped out and replaced with, IIRC, basically "It kills because it likes to kill, and somtimes it kills with friends!"

Which, yeah, the friends are a good addition, but.....ew.

At the same time, stuff like the Shadar Kai information that was tacked up to the WotC site recently isn't too shabby. But that's one of the hip new monsters that the designers and probably more than a few fans have rampant lust for, so they're easy.

But, anyway, this is rampantly off-topic, so to contribute to the convo about rules thickness:

A rule that is very complex that you use only some of the time, and can't reduce the complexity of, is a problem. 3e Grapple fell into this camp. It was complex, but the idea may have been "Well, the only ones who do it are the specialized grapplers, and they'll enjoy the plethora of options." But then we have 1,001 tentacled/jowled/improved-grabbed horrors that happen to use those complex rules in situations where you don't really want the hassle, but they couldn't really simplify it at all.

So there is a point in the middle of Celebrim's bookmarks where additional rules do more harm than good, especially if it's irreducable complexity.

 

[D'karr]

Of course. The question is whether the second target also has to be adjacent to you. If it is, then the only problem I have with Cleave is gone.

See, that is the real issue.

Some people need everything spelled out and some don't. Since we have not seen the full rules neither can say.

But I know I don't have a problem because I don't need everything spelled out. The second target is at range so he is not a valid target for cleave.