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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7715926" data-attributes="member: 4937">Simply put, a GM should know the rules sufficient that this doesn't happen or he shouldn't run the system.  If you are frequently doing a rules search something is wrong.   Read the damn rule book.  Then do it again.  System mastery is a prerequisite of GMing.  And even if you run into a situation where the rules don't adequately cover the situation, you should be able to run within about 2 minutes of being confronted with a rules challenge.The problem with a rules light system is that it ALL THE TIME confronts the GM with a situation which the rules don't adequately cover.  This to me involves more head space than having a system that at least tries to provide answer, and generally slows down my game less.   Rules heavy isn't the same as process heavy.  You can have lots of rules, but they all specify basically a single dice roll to resolve them.   That's rules heavy but process light.   Oh good grief yes.  Rules light systems are much much better than rules heavy systems at dealing with one off play.  Indeed, I consider this exactly what they are designed for.  There are lots of games that are way too light for me to ever consider running a full traditional campaign in the system, but which I think would be a blast to play for 3-4 hours.   I have no idea why you'd consider a process heavy, rules heavy game like Aces and Eights, however brilliant it is, for a convention setting.Many of your objections seem to be with crappy GMs rather than the systems themselves.  I assure you, no one bullies me with rules - ever.  For one thing, I make all the rules.  If a player quotes rules to me, it's my rules and I wrote them for a purpose.   Even if they are RAW, if I haven't changed them, chances are I want to abide by them.   The rules are my vision of the game.  Forgetting the rules is a faux pas I want corrected.Yes, because it is the single heaviest most mentally burdensome rule of all the rules.  I've argued before that you are fooling yourself if you think that any game with Rule Zero is really rules light.   Your argument that Rules Light empowers rule zero I think misses my main objection to Rules Light games - they tend to act like resolution and results don't really matter much.  They tend to have arbitrary resolution methods with highly suspect odds of success because they act like success or failure doesn't really matter, and rulings don't really matter much, so that whatever the GM says or however he rules is just no big deal.  It's like flying an airplane with no trim controls, because the assumption is that the pilot is just so solid, that regardless of who the plane shakes and wobbles, the GM can correct everything.   This works fine when you've got 2 hours invested in a character or a story that you are half likely to abandon in 2 hours.  It doesn't work so well when you've invested 100's of hours in building a story.Or putting it another way, if the GM is skilled enough, every system works.Why should we want either one?  But the advantage of the former is that in the second session, you now only spend 2 hours looking up rules.  And by the third just one.   Whereas, it's not at all clear how you get from having a wildly inconsistent game with odd interpretations to a good GM.  Or to put it another way, most modern Indy games do a very poor job of explaining the process of play and what a game is actually like or supposed to be like, to the extent that I've read several just absolutely elegant and beautiful systems and came away with zero ideas about how the game could actually be run the way it was written.It sounds to me fundamentally that the problem is you've chosen a system that you've kludged Captain America into, because Cap' wasn't a supported concept in the system and you are trying to play an unsupported character type by leveraging rules never intended for the uses you are putting them to.  Of course you can't necessarily port a Superhero into a fantasy game, nor is it 'wrong' for the GM to decide that your character doesn't have a shield that defies the laws of physics and renders weapons superfluous (lamp-shaded in 'Civil War').</blockquote>

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