No More Massive Tomes of Rules

[Reynard]

Almost everything about it is actually wrong, either in obvious or subtle ways that suggest you haven't actually ran many chase scenes.

You know, it's your bedside manner, not your opinions, that are the problem.

 

[Arilyn]

I'm running Black Sword Hack. We've been playing regularly for months with absolutely no problems. The whole game is 103 pages. The Characters are well developed and jt feels like Sword & Sorcery. I'm currently playing in a long running Shadowdark game.

Prince Valiant, Mouseritter, Ars Magica 2e, Brindlewood Bay, Liminal, Fate, Paleo mythic are games just off the top of my head, that are light to really light, and can handle long campaigns.

I enjoy big thick, gorgeous tomes too, but even with these books, I want the rules section to be reasonably short. Fill the rest with lore and a sample adventure or two.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

yeah. I wrote them in 2 minutes.

Sounds about right if you were having to whip them up at the table.

 

[Reynard]

Sounds about right if you were having to whip them up at the table.

Sure, and at the table someone probably would have brought up the fact they wanted to get away, or the prey was so far away they would never catch them. My answer, by the way, is "you can break off pursuit at any time" which does not have to be stated in the rule.

But you sure as hell don't need 1500 words to describe a chase sequence.

 

[overgeeked]

What a weirdly ahistorical complaint to make. "You can't have a meaningful campaign with lighter rules." Nonsense. Yikes. What a take. I guess you weren't around in the first decade or two of the hobby.

In the original box, OD&D had a total of 108 pages of rules. People played decades-long campaigns with that and are still playing that, no problem. Same with AD&D. The only rules you actually need to play AD&D are in the Player's Handbook, which is 128 pages in total*. Same with B/X, which only has 128 pages of rules total. Same with early Traveller. The three LBB are 132 pages total. Same with early Call of Cthulhu. 2E has 98 pages total.

To say nothing of the absolutely massive amounts of rules-light games now that people are playing the hell out of.

Yes, you absolutely can play campaigns with lighter rules or less/fewer rules. People have for decades without problems.

* Ah, yes. The charts in the DMG. That amounts to either 2-3 photocopied pages, using THAC0, or lately switching to ascending AC.

 

[kenada]

Indeed. A lot of designers seem to be too trusting in the idea that Players will know to just say they want to flee, rather than being explicit about it.

I had to convince my players they could use their dead retainer’s corpse as bait. They were so convinced there was no hope, and they had to fight to the death.

Having reliable mechanics they can trust in my homebrew system has effected a big change in their behavior. They’re much more willing to try things knowing that success means success.

 

[Celebrim]

What a weirdly ahistorical complaint to make. "You can't have a meaningful campaign with lighter rules." Nonsense. Yikes. What a take. I guess you weren't around in the first decade or two of the hobby.

No, I was. That's part of the reason I have the opinion I do.

Same with AD&D. The only rules you actually need to play AD&D are in the Player's Handbook, which is 128 pages in total.

I think you may be misremembering. All the combat tables and rules are segregated away from the players and placed in the Dungeon Master's guide which I believe comes in at 240 pages. And while technically there might be enough summary of the monsters in the appendix of the DMG to play without the MM, it would not be recommended. So chalk on another 112 pages. As a practical matter, you needed the three "core books" to play the game which runs you 480 pages.

But what's really important for this discussion is that anyone who has played 1e AD&D for any length of time comes to realize that it isn't a complete game. And even the designers were aware of that before 2e came out, which is why they started expanding the game in supplements like the Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.

The way people in the "old days" dealt with the fact that the rules didn't describe a complete game (in all sorts of ways) is that they made a lot of house rules and house rulings. So many in fact that no two tables of 1e AD&D were likely playing the same game. These rulings whether formally written down or not still have to count in the actual page count of the game. And just how problematic this was can be seen by reading modules like C1 Hidden Shrine of Tomoachan and S2 White Plume mountain where so many encounter areas functionally have new rules in their location descriptions, where because the rules were absolutely silent on things like how to handle swimming or how to handle a skill contest the writers invented minigames to handle the situation and recorded the new rules in the encounter. And THOSE also have to be included in the page count of the actual rules of 1e AD&D, and it includes such common things as "roll under your ability score" that wasn't to be found really in the text of the Player's Handbook or the Dungeon Master's Guide but became a very common house rule.

Much of the 1e AD&D DMG just assumes like the text of the B2 Keep on the Borderlands that what is left out can just be created by the DM that is interested in it. It hints and inspires about aspects of the game like dynastic play by giving a price list for a do it yourself castle, without giving a full rules framework for dealing with it. This is why Dragon Magazine was such a fertile ground for rules extensions in the era.

1e AD&D absolutely trended toward the 1000-3000 pages of rules that I suggest are what a game publisher should be shooting for in terms of completeness.

Yes, you absolutely can play campaigns with lighter rules or less/fewer rules. People have for decades without problems.

I can't speak to that. I can only tell you that in every game I've ever been in as a player or DM, the need for rules multiplied the longer the game went on because we kept running off into the blank spaces of the rules much like in early published modules you might run off into the blank spaces of the map with the expectation that the DM would just fix it.

Traveller I'm only familiar with from Mongoose 2e, which I find brilliant, but it's a whole lot closer to what I'd expect in page count than it is to 128 pages. 128 pages might give you a bare bones "Truckers In Space" but I guarantee you that the game wouldn't stay there because I know from retroactive research into earlier editions of Traveller that it didn't. Or if your game ignored that and stayed with the 128 pages, well you got a lot more patience for doing the same thing over and over than I do.

 

[Celebrim]

Having reliable mechanics they can trust in my homebrew system has effected a big change in their behavior. They’re much more willing to try things knowing that success means success.

What the rules are silent on, players will typically not attempt to do because they simply won't think about it or think it is possible. And what the rules are silent on, game masters will typically not design for because they simply won't think about it or if they do won't think of it as possible. So if you have 1e AD&D, you probably have a whole lot of combats that are in 30x40 foot rooms against a relatively static foe where you charge and lock in melee supported by ranged attacks. And like me you probably had a lot of fun doing it. What you probably didn't have was a lot of running chases on horseback, because while the rules didn't say you couldn't and did imply you could, they said nothing particularly useful about it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

After sitting down and reading through the Dragonbane rulebook last night, I have realized that I just don't want to pour through 1000 pages of rules to run/play D&D anymore. Therer is no reason that 5E (or any other edition for that matter) can't be presented in a concise, complete, robust form like Dragonbane.

Do you like games in "long form" -- by that I mean the multiple rulebook, dense prose form common in the industry and exemplified by D&D and Pathfinder? Do you prefer a singular book but of the same form, like we usually get from Free League and Modiphius? Or do you like short and concise books?

Generally speaking, my tastes are unlikely to be served by a super-concise rulebook. In one way or another, having enough character definition and meaningful tactical choice is going to take up a certain amount of space. It doesn't have to be multiple books though. (On the other hand I'm not allergic to that if its, say, monster books or covering ground that wasn't worth taking up space in a corebook).

 

[Thomas Shey]

What the rules are silent on, players will typically not attempt to do because they simply won't think about it or think it is possible.

Or subconsciously expect the result will be worse than the options they already have rules for.