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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6838682" data-attributes="member: 4937">I concur with Umbran that devising a measurement system is a better approach, but even this definition needs the caveat, "And the rules are not also heavy.", since it's entirely possible for a game to qualify under the above and yet have rules heavy features inherited from process resolution which is easy to describe but fiddly in play, such as totaling all the dice from all relevant allies dice pools because all actions are intended to be cooperative and assisted.As a simple metric, you can tell how rules heavy a system is by how many seconds are required to resolve a typical player proposition.For example, "I cast fireball", despite referencing a spell list, is in the ideal circumstances not a particularly rules heavy proposition.  The basic mechanic of, "I get one 1d6 of damage per caster level", is easy to remember and relatively quick to add up mentally.    In general, despite coming from a spell list, fireball resolves at the lower end of rules medium.  Where it gets complicated is that in the non-ideal case, fireball can require minutes or even hours to resolve and that has nothing to do with the fact its in a spell list.  That has to do with our expectations of granularity.   How do we get the problem that complicated?  Well, for starters we put a lot of objects in the spell's radius.a) You have to (or decide to) make a saving throw for every creature and in some circumstances every object in the effected spell.b) You have to (or decide to) resolve that failed saving throws sometimes also damage the objects the creatures are wearing.c) You have to (or decide to) apply damage to each monster or object separately, taking into account its resistance to fire damage or hardness.d) In 1e, you were supposed to calculate the actual area that the fire spreads to if it is fired into an area that is smaller than the blast radius since the fire spread to fill an area.So firing a fireball at say a giant bat flying toward you is pretty darn easy to resolve and will feel very rules light.But if we fire a fireball into a large well furnished wood paneled room in which there are 38 varied NPCs with different saves, different resistances, and different allegiances, and we care what furnishings and objects might be destroyed in the blast and whether the building might catch on fire and where, all the sudden that simple mechanic now seems grotesquely complicated.So, now that I've got that out of the way, I put it to you that there is no meaningful measure of 'rules light' and in fact no such thing as a rules light system.  All there are is different expectations of the complexity of the scenarios and the granularity of proposition resolution.  Some systems set the expectation that the scenarios will be simple and the complexities ignored, but if the group decides to run more complex scenarios and decides to not ignore the potential complexities (or not leave them entirely to DM fiat which even then is often complex), then the same very simple system will become complex even without a lot of rules adornment.</blockquote>

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