Rules heavy = bad; light = good

[Grogg of the North]

I don't mind the game having rules. Even a lot of rules. What I dislike is something like this:

Player: Can I do X?
DM: Geeze ... um ... *Spends 10 minutes flipping through book to see if he can find a rule*

What I want to see more of is this:

Player: Can I do X?
DM: Hmm ... I don't know. Give me a couple rolls and we'll find out! *DM scribbles note to look up X later and see if it's covered somewhere*

DMs need to be empowered either through the rule books or through a gentleman's agreement at the table to just make on the spot calls and move on. Nothing grinds a game to a halt for me more than sitting there at the table while someone, perhaps multiple people, shift through books looking something up.

 

[steenan]

You see, as a GM I don't like to have this kind of responsibility on me.

I'll gladly decide n the spot on setting matters, or on NPC personalities and motivations. But in a rules-heavy game there is too many interacting parts and an on-the-spot ruling may easily break things (like neutralize some abilities that PCs have, or make something too easy).

I definitely prefer games that allow me to scale complexity and give reasonable defaults in the rules. This way, if I don't remember a specific rule, I may fall back to a more general, simpler approach - still ensured that it has been tested and works correctly in the whole rules framework.

 

[S'mon]

@OP - they both have their place. My general feeling is that rules
heavy games have distinct advantages for long term play, where
the 'meat' is on the player side. I have not found much use for systems that require a ton of work on the GM side just to be able to run a session.
The attraction of rules-heavy GM-side stuff seems to be more for people who like fiddling with systems and making stuff as an end in itself, they may not even be GMing any games. Given how much a GM has to do, relatively light systems are always a plus in my book. So eg BECMI D&D's Dominion & War Machine mass battle rules always beat super-heavy-crunch domain & mass battle systems such as Fields of Blood
by Green Ronin for 3e D&D. The relatively light starship design rules of Classic Traveller beat the insanely
high-crunch Traveller: The New Era stuff.
Whereas for many players a rules-heavy PC-side system such as 3e/PF and 4e/PF can support interest in playing over the long term. For players, light systems are much superior for pick-up, short-term, and one-off play, but heavy systems may be preferable for a years-long campaign. Certainly in
recent years I've had mostly more luck at long terms games with the heavier systems. But I've also avoided joining games where I'd have to learn a complicated new system to play.

Thinking a bit about genre and game design - if you are making a zombie apocalypse game, realistically it is likely to be used for short term play. It better be pretty light on the player side, and GM-side tools can be robust, but shouldn't be complicated. If you are making a space opera, fantasy, or super heroes game that you have geared to long term play, it can be more complicated, though
accessibility is always a plus, so think about having a quickstart/beginner box type intro.

 

[Piratecat]

There's a real joy to rules-heavy games that comes from character optimization. I can't entirely figure out why I've moved away from them; at some point, I mostly stopped running or writing games that I'd need to open the rulebook for during play. (It's hilarious I say this, as I run two 4e campaigns, but it's the players who have to look things up far more than me.) I think that I'm okay with heavy rules on the front end during character creation, such as MnM, so long as the ongoing resolution mechanic is straightforward and clear.

 

[Hyper-Man]

It all depends on your definition of the term "rules heavy."

Yes.

Hero System (most famous for Champions) is often labeled as a rules heavy system in a negative way. It IS rules heavy at character and campaign creation, especially in a powers intensive setting like supers (Champions), but once the characters are made the system play is quite rules lite in that almost no reference to the books is needed as most if not all the rules for what the characters can do is already on the character sheet. And it has very consistent resolution mechanics.

 

[Viking Bastard]

I guess I'm a rules-medium guy. I used to think of my preferences as rules-lite, but I keep bumping into people finding my ideas of rules-light to be too rule heavy. There are a lot more rules-light games around now than when my perception of the scale was formed in the 90s, where the rare outlier got categorized by my brain as "niche ultra-light".

But it all depends on where the weight lands. I absolutely can't stand having to consult the books during play, unless it's one of the first few sessions with a new system. I do, though, appreciate a fair amount of character options--not because I care that much about them myself (I usually DM and when I don't, I tend to just throw a character together) but because I find, like many in this thread, that a lot of players get really into it, especially long-term campaigns.

But if those character options frequently slow down play, I get testy.

 

[Zhaleskra]

I guess from the GM side, I'm against what I consider player laziness. Perhaps this has a lot to do with thinking "so you want everything done for you" when an ex-coworker told me why he likes D&D 4e. Also influenced by me considering one hour a reasonably short time to create a character. The systems I would consider rules-medium, are similar to the above description of Hero: there's a lot of work in making a character, but the rest of the basic rules can be easily memorized.

Remember 3x's +2/-2 convenience? Well HARP does the same thing, except it's 20 instead of 2.

World Tree has a lot of detail in character creation, and most of it is still used in play. The next rank in a skill costs 1 more than the current rank. In character creation, if you're raising a skill from say 0 to 5, that's a total of 15 skill points. Sure it drops some things after character creation: you'll never deal with advantage points in play, though you can still gain advantages and develop off disadvantages.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Does the rule pull its weight?

For me, when I look at any game (roleplaying or boardgames) I want to know that the effort of learning a rule is worthwhile -- basically, if there is a rule for X, does the rule make the game more fun to play.

What exactly *is* fun can depend a lot -- it can be enhance the drama of a game, improve realism, whatever -- but it has to be a better game in some sense WITH the rule than WITHOUT it.

So when I see a game with, say, an insanely complex system for grappling, or a table correlating the percentage chance of breaking a door down by strength, I don't think the right question is "is this heavy?". It should be "does this make the game more fun?"

A rules-light game, almost by definition, errs on the side of caution. It throws out anything that *might not be fun*. A rules-heavy game errs on the side of liberality; it includes anything that *might be fun*. You pays your money and takes your chances. However, rules-light has an immediate advantage -- it's much easier to get started, and requires less continual expenditure of effort. For me, that's a big deal. I loved Rolemaster with a passion and still do -- but I do not have the energy to re-learn it all. FATE it is ... not as a "second best", but because even if both are perfect, I just do not have time for rules-heavy.

 

[TerraDave]

I kinda wonder about the whole premise.

Are truly light indie-games, or the lighter OSR type games (more B/X then A) that popular?

We know PF is popular. 3E was popular. 4E is pretty popular, and its rules-steamlined, but it current main rules reference is still a few hundred pages long, and thats with no powers/spells, magic items, etc.

Before there was GURPS, HERO-Champion.... or what about Traveler, WoD, Savage Worlds? I would still see those as rules-medium, with some options or versions going to rules heavy. CoC is lighter then a lot of games, though taking into account the range of skills, how the mythos/sanity rules work, the way combat is actually written up...is that light?

Even for indie games, Burning Wheel may be the biggest, but again, is far from the lightest.

 

[Neonchameleon]

We know PF is popular. 3E was popular. 4E is pretty popular, and its rules-steamlined, but it current main rules reference is still a few hundred pages long, and thats with no powers/spells, magic items, etc.

I must finish my 4E on a Trifold...

Even for indie games, Burning Wheel may be the biggest, but again, is far from the lightest.

Depending on definitions, I'd say that there are three games I'd consider bigger than Burning Wheel and that might qualify as Indy RPGs.

First place is Fate. Evil Hat might well no longer qualify as Indy - but Fate's definitely bigger than Burning Wheel.

Second place is probably Fiasco. Which depending on definitions might not qualify as an RPG. Or it might. Tabletop gave it the chance to break out.

Third place is Dungeon World. New but pretty popular and only growing in strength, having already eclipsed its parent game.

Burning Wheel is next after those.

But there's a huge issue here - it's very hard to make an industry out of rules light RPGs. Supplements are much harder to write and people who want them don't think they need more. So the industry is always going to lean to heavier rules than the players want.