Gentlegamer
Adventurer
In my experience, "rules heavy" actually limits your options by setting the parameters of how you as a player (and GM) conceptualize your in game actions.
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Interesting Ryan Dancey comment on "lite" RPGs
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ThirdWizard
First Post
Gentlegamer said:
Having more options will limit what you are capable of more than having less options? I disagree.
EDIT: It's completely baed on the players not the rule system. A group of players who likes to do weird and crazy stunts will do so in a lite system or a heavy system. A group of players who doesn't like to do weird and crazy stunts won't do so in either system. A bad GM will flounder when the PCs break outside the box in either case, and a good GM will be able to run with it under either system.
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fredramsey
First Post
Gentlegamer said:
Exactly.
That's what I experienced many times moving to Savage Worlds, and even between other systems. If someone is very experienced in using a system, it is hard for them to imagine doing something not covered by the rules.
But I think the trust factor has a lot to do with why people don't like rules lite systems. They don't trust the GM to provide them with an entertaining story. They are more worried about the fact that they could stuff 12 monkeys in a barrel last week, and this week, the GM would only let them stuff 11. "Oh the humanity! Oh, how cruel! I can't suspend my disbelief! Help me, oh heavy rules!"
der_kluge
Adventurer
I'm certainly no expert in this field of study, but I've got opinions on here like everyone else.
It seems to me, that if you compare "rules-light" versus "rules-heavy" you could compare computer games - Baldur's Gate, versus say, Ultima 6 (the greatest RPG game every made, IMHO).
Baldur's Gate: You had complex spells, and complex dispel magic spells (a variety to choose from), and to successfully attack a spell caster, you often had to use a variety of strategic measures to bring down his magical defenses.
Ultima 6: To kill something, you had to whack it with a lot of pointy sticks, sometimes a lot.
Baldur's Gate: Dragons were fierce combatants, made all the more powerful with effects like Stoneskin, so you had to monitor the event log to see if the dragon had cast that, and if he had, you had to counter with a dispel magic in order to affect him.
Ultima 6: To kill a dragon, you had to have a lot of hit points, and whack it with a lot of pointy sticks.
Baldur's Gate: If you tried to convince the town guard to do something, often the game would secretly roll (or in NWN's case, would openly show you the roll, be it bluff, or whatever) that you were attempting some form of deception. Success was based on the dice roll.
Ultima 6: You either chose the right thing to say, or you didn't.
I think both were great games, but they play differently. I don't think I agree with the argument that you need a real heavy rules system to create an effective computer simulation of an RPG. Neither system would want randomness in place. Consider the grabbing the rope and swinging across with the Princess. If this were done in a computer game, and it came down to a single dice roll, people would save the game before hand, attempt it, and failing it would just reload and try it again. It would be kind of pointless, and not very fun.
At their core, they are essentially the same game. But BG takes a lot more rules understanding. I pity the poor fool who doesn't know the 3rd edition rules try to make it all the way to the end of BGII because you have to have a lot of game knowledge on how to defeat certain monsters. The Mind Flayer area would be particularly frustrating.
It occurred to me that playing C&C (with Scadgrad) that the concept of an ability score check is a long-lost concept in 3rd edition. I was hesitant to lose skills at first, but I no longer miss them. Everthing is resolved with a quick and easy ability score check, and it negates the need for a skill. If you really think about it, having a lot of rules can lead to weird conclusions. For example, swimming can either be strength (trying to swim across a fast river) or constitution (treading water in the middle of the ocean for hours). Applying a hard rule to a concept can actually make the game *less* realistic, which kind of loses the intent, I think.
The other point I'd like to make is the concept of character creation. I don't *want* to be able to create a character in 5 minutes. I want a backstory, I want a personality, I want all those things, that should be standard for any character (unless I'm slopping one together at a convention). To this end, rules-heavy can give me more flexibility and more definition, but even it is insufficient for what I want. With a rules-light system, I might be mechanically nothing more than a few ability scores, a class, and some hit points. With rules-heavy, I might be all those things, and some skills and feats as well. But neither tells the complete story of *who* I am.
Aside from trying to create people within the middle of a game (never a good idea, in any situation), I don't *care* if character creation takes 2 hours. I like character creation. It's the rules that come up during game play that I don't want to eat up all my time. Game time is precious to me, and if I can spend that time actually role-playing and propelling the story foreward, rather than debating some rules minutia, then I'm happier.
It seems to me, that if you compare "rules-light" versus "rules-heavy" you could compare computer games - Baldur's Gate, versus say, Ultima 6 (the greatest RPG game every made, IMHO).
Baldur's Gate: You had complex spells, and complex dispel magic spells (a variety to choose from), and to successfully attack a spell caster, you often had to use a variety of strategic measures to bring down his magical defenses.
Ultima 6: To kill something, you had to whack it with a lot of pointy sticks, sometimes a lot.
Baldur's Gate: Dragons were fierce combatants, made all the more powerful with effects like Stoneskin, so you had to monitor the event log to see if the dragon had cast that, and if he had, you had to counter with a dispel magic in order to affect him.
Ultima 6: To kill a dragon, you had to have a lot of hit points, and whack it with a lot of pointy sticks.
Baldur's Gate: If you tried to convince the town guard to do something, often the game would secretly roll (or in NWN's case, would openly show you the roll, be it bluff, or whatever) that you were attempting some form of deception. Success was based on the dice roll.
Ultima 6: You either chose the right thing to say, or you didn't.
I think both were great games, but they play differently. I don't think I agree with the argument that you need a real heavy rules system to create an effective computer simulation of an RPG. Neither system would want randomness in place. Consider the grabbing the rope and swinging across with the Princess. If this were done in a computer game, and it came down to a single dice roll, people would save the game before hand, attempt it, and failing it would just reload and try it again. It would be kind of pointless, and not very fun.
At their core, they are essentially the same game. But BG takes a lot more rules understanding. I pity the poor fool who doesn't know the 3rd edition rules try to make it all the way to the end of BGII because you have to have a lot of game knowledge on how to defeat certain monsters. The Mind Flayer area would be particularly frustrating.
It occurred to me that playing C&C (with Scadgrad) that the concept of an ability score check is a long-lost concept in 3rd edition. I was hesitant to lose skills at first, but I no longer miss them. Everthing is resolved with a quick and easy ability score check, and it negates the need for a skill. If you really think about it, having a lot of rules can lead to weird conclusions. For example, swimming can either be strength (trying to swim across a fast river) or constitution (treading water in the middle of the ocean for hours). Applying a hard rule to a concept can actually make the game *less* realistic, which kind of loses the intent, I think.
The other point I'd like to make is the concept of character creation. I don't *want* to be able to create a character in 5 minutes. I want a backstory, I want a personality, I want all those things, that should be standard for any character (unless I'm slopping one together at a convention). To this end, rules-heavy can give me more flexibility and more definition, but even it is insufficient for what I want. With a rules-light system, I might be mechanically nothing more than a few ability scores, a class, and some hit points. With rules-heavy, I might be all those things, and some skills and feats as well. But neither tells the complete story of *who* I am.
Aside from trying to create people within the middle of a game (never a good idea, in any situation), I don't *care* if character creation takes 2 hours. I like character creation. It's the rules that come up during game play that I don't want to eat up all my time. Game time is precious to me, and if I can spend that time actually role-playing and propelling the story foreward, rather than debating some rules minutia, then I'm happier.
Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
fredramsey said:
The work in question is not a gaming product, but rather it is reference guide to the OGL and d20 STL, the formation of which Dancey played a pretty integral role in. Dancey has a good deal of working knowledge of these licenses, despite his perception of the rpg market being suspect.
Additionally, it is a mistake to view the d20 industry as a monolithic entity. The d20/OGL market if you can call it that is composed mostly of small independent publishers who have less communication amongst each other than Microsoft has with the open source community.
Nikosandros
Golden Procrastinator
mearls said:
Yes, but in a rules heavy game that "telling" takes a lot more time... at least such was my experience with AD&D (which is not rules light per se, but it's lighter then 3E) vs 3rd edition, with the kind of players that don't own or read the manuals.
mearls said:
Personally, I think that you don't have more tools, you just have different tools for different jobs...
I do agree however, that games with more rules, make the system more "GM proof", by reducing the amount of "arbitrary" adjudication. Wheter this is a good or bad thing is clearly a matter of personal taste.
mearls said:
And a good thing too, considering that we seem to disagree on these posts, but I absolutely adore your writing!
fredramsey
First Post
True, but if everyone thought that nothing this guy said was important, we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place...
Campbell said:
SweeneyTodd
First Post
On the "20 minutes of game in 4 hours" quote: That was Ryan Dancey. (The quote that started the thread was his response to someone who responded to that, saying "Wouldn't simpler rules help?"
BryonD: I would agree with you that if you are playing a game where it matters how much you can lift, then you should use a ruleset that handles that. If you want everything quantified, then use a rules-heavy system that quantifies everything.
I'm saying this kind of stuff doesn't come up in my games. Seriously. Nobody sits around wondering if they can lift 250 pounds or not. (I recognize this is an extreme example, but I'm going for a general principle. I'm not hung up on the specifics of deadlifting.)
I've had characters have to struggle to move some heavy debris to save a friend. They had a stat that measured their physical ability, and they rolled against a difficulty that represented that it was a heavy weight and they had to do it quickly.
If I'd played that scene in D&D, I would have looked at the heaviest character's Strength stat, seen how much they could barely lift, and made the weight of the debris that much.
Either way, the difficulty was the same. It didn't make any difference.
But wait, you might say. What if he was strong enough that it wasn't a question, he could definately do it. Then in any system, I wouldn't have had him roll. If it isn't dramatic or interesting to do something, why are we using the rules for it?
I think I see the biggest sticking point: None of this stuff is real.
Seriously, though, it's not. The GM invented the debris. We're all imaging that it's there, pinning this guy's poor friend. The conflict isn't about mass vs. muscle capacity -- it's about this guy trying to save his friend.
And the thing is, the player was fine with it. He did something heroic, saved his friend, and everybody went "Man, he's strong." Nobody went back with a scale to measure the debris and write down how much weight he lifted.
What I'm trying to say is that it's entirely possible to play a challenging, believable game where the mechanics handle "can you achieve your goal", without knowing concrete specifics about everything.
If you want to know concrete specifics about everything, I got nothin'. You'd probably hate my GMing. I strive hard to present a believable, interesting world, and it works for my players and their preferences, but it wouldn't work for everybody.
If the concern is that it's not fair, well, I challenge the PCs with a variety of conflicts. Some are easy enough that we don't roll. Some are difficult and risky, and the system resolves those with a relevant element of chance. Some are impossible, and must be overcome in a different way. It'd be exactly the same if I played by-the-book rules-heavy, except that I'd add an additional step after deciding the difficulty where I reverse-engineered from the numbers to determine the specifics.
Because if it's not challenging and interesting, why are you using the rules to determine the outcome? And if the rules you use make those conflicts challenging and interesting, why use more?
That's just my angle.
BryonD said:
BryonD: I would agree with you that if you are playing a game where it matters how much you can lift, then you should use a ruleset that handles that. If you want everything quantified, then use a rules-heavy system that quantifies everything.
I'm saying this kind of stuff doesn't come up in my games. Seriously. Nobody sits around wondering if they can lift 250 pounds or not. (I recognize this is an extreme example, but I'm going for a general principle. I'm not hung up on the specifics of deadlifting.)
I've had characters have to struggle to move some heavy debris to save a friend. They had a stat that measured their physical ability, and they rolled against a difficulty that represented that it was a heavy weight and they had to do it quickly.
If I'd played that scene in D&D, I would have looked at the heaviest character's Strength stat, seen how much they could barely lift, and made the weight of the debris that much.
Either way, the difficulty was the same. It didn't make any difference.
But wait, you might say. What if he was strong enough that it wasn't a question, he could definately do it. Then in any system, I wouldn't have had him roll. If it isn't dramatic or interesting to do something, why are we using the rules for it?
I think I see the biggest sticking point: None of this stuff is real.
Seriously, though, it's not. The GM invented the debris. We're all imaging that it's there, pinning this guy's poor friend. The conflict isn't about mass vs. muscle capacity -- it's about this guy trying to save his friend. And the thing is, the player was fine with it. He did something heroic, saved his friend, and everybody went "Man, he's strong." Nobody went back with a scale to measure the debris and write down how much weight he lifted.
What I'm trying to say is that it's entirely possible to play a challenging, believable game where the mechanics handle "can you achieve your goal", without knowing concrete specifics about everything.
If you want to know concrete specifics about everything, I got nothin'. You'd probably hate my GMing. I strive hard to present a believable, interesting world, and it works for my players and their preferences, but it wouldn't work for everybody.
If the concern is that it's not fair, well, I challenge the PCs with a variety of conflicts. Some are easy enough that we don't roll. Some are difficult and risky, and the system resolves those with a relevant element of chance. Some are impossible, and must be overcome in a different way. It'd be exactly the same if I played by-the-book rules-heavy, except that I'd add an additional step after deciding the difficulty where I reverse-engineered from the numbers to determine the specifics.
Because if it's not challenging and interesting, why are you using the rules to determine the outcome? And if the rules you use make those conflicts challenging and interesting, why use more?
That's just my angle.
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The problem here, for me, is that nobody seems to be able to agree which games are actually "rules lite". It seems only the most extreme cases, of which I can't currently think of any, are able to be identified and globally recognized as such. In that regard it is a lot like "Low Magic". Some people love the idea. Some people hate the idea. Most are indifferent. And nobody seems to be able to agree on what the idea was in the first place.
Desdichado
Hero
But Warhammer Fantasy Battle never has been, to the best of my knowledge.buzz said:
