The Stakes of Classifying Games as Rules Lite, Medium, or Heavy?

[Cadence]

For those (like me) drifting more into the definitions instead of the original question, here's two older threads...

D&D 5E - Would you define the current edition of D&D rules-light or rules-heavy?

All considered, what would you call D&D 5th edition between "rules-light" and "rules-heavy"? This is more about your personal view that trying to nail some truth. Each one has its own experience with other editions/systems that may lead to consider 5e very differently compared to someone else...

www.enworld.org

Meaning of Rules Light/Medium/Heavy - a proposal

Too many people talk about rules light, medium, and heavy with no clear definitions of what they actually are. So I'm proposing the following as a starting point: A game is Rules Light if: The entire actual game rules can be written on a double sided sheet of A4. PC character sheets can be...

www.enworld.org

 

[aramis erak]

I don't think there's evidence that EN World discussion of classifying the weight of rules really has an impact on game sales. We aren't thought leaders influencing the market.

Cosnidering it's one of the largest RPG sites in existance? And that I've seen 3 publishing companies' owners posting today alone... sure, two of them are essentially nobodies... but EnWorld, RPGGeek, & RPGNet are followed by many publishers.

I think there's a common misconception that the weight of rules are reflective of their complexity or the difficulty involved in understanding them.

That would require that there was actual general consensus on the meaning of the term.

Which there isn't.

 

[Hussar]

I wonder how many people count options the same as rules? Is D&D lighter if there are only 36 spells and 4 weapons? Does a light or medium game lose that status when the first splat book comes out?

Well, it would certainly make the game lighter than it currently is.

But, really, number of weapons isn't really what makes D&D rules heavy. It's the fact that you have pretty complex rules that are generally not applicable outside of their specific areas makes a game rules heavy. In a rules light game, you generally have a small number of rules that apply to every (or at least most) situations. Savage World's Rule of 4, for example - where every check made succeeds so long as you score over a 4, regardless of whether it's in combat, out of combat, talking to someone or anything at all - vastly reduces rule complexity.

Think about how many different target numbers and means of achieving those target numbers you have in an average D&D session - the skills system uses a different method of resolution from the combat system (simple pass/fail vs HP), even if they have unified the mechanics to use a d20 roll.

Granted, 5e is simpler in resolution than, say, 3e, but, again, that's not saying much. LOTS of games are lighter than 3e D&D.

Heck, go back to AD&D. One fighter is attacking 3 orcs. Each of the fighter's attacks need to reference several different rules before, during and after a roll, and the fighter's AC will depend on which orc is attacking, because a shield only works against a specific number of attacks. Add in things like elevation, weapon vs armor tables, etc. and you have a very, very rules heavy system.

 

[TerraDave]

So, we do have a paradox.

Rules light is a selling point...but all the big selling games have some heft to them.

 

[Argyle King]

That would require that there was actual general consensus on the meaning of the term.

Which there isn't.

You'd think that, but, anecdotally, that hasn't appeared to be how threads tend to go.

Even without some objective measurement to apply, there are subjective comparisons between games.

I think the case could reasonably be made that, in most subjective measuring systems, tic-tac-toe would be a lighter game than Risk. Likewise, while there may not be an agreed upon objective way to measure rpg weight, I think it's fair to say that a hypothetical bell curve made up of game perceptions would tend to show some games being viewed as heavier or lighter than others.

Even so, the comparisons of "heavy" versus "light" (in so much as what those terms may mean to an individual) do not appear to correspond to either the contrast of good/bad (in terms of quality) nor easy/hard (in terms of learning difficulty) in a consistent manner.

There are "light" games which are built in ways which are not intuitive to a new player's imagining of how something ought to work.

 

[Hussar]

Well, often times the argument goes something like “I like game x but I don’t like game y. My preferred game allows more freedom and creativity because it’s rules light, while your constrained, rules heavy game stifles creativity.”

It’s often just a rhetorical tactic to make my preference sound like it’s an objective truth.

 

[payn]

I think folks get way too hung up on terms being distilled down to a single word or two that explains everything about their subject and has zero room for nuance. These community terms are general and usually need to be clarified through discussion. For some reason, that makes them unusable for people. I dont get it, but here we go again.

 

[Umbran]

Cosnidering it's one of the largest RPG sites in existance?

Yep.

EN World produces consensus on NOTHING. The medium and our culture are optimized for large groups and argumentation, so if you read this site, you'll get the impression that there's no agreement on anything valuable.

In addition, we are large and slow to uptake and discuss new things that aren't specifically WotC's newest releases in any depth, and we have no framework of analysis that doesn't get shouted down and devolve into nastiness.

Publishers may post here, but they don't generally discuss design or market behavior here - see above about argumentation and nastiness.

And all that is before we recognize the fact that this site is old media now.

I have often wondered what we might get if Morrus stood up a designers/publisher's forum that was read-only to the public, and written to only by design/publishing professionals or specifically invited individuals. Make it a safe place for professionals to talk about their work and thought processes and goals without internet randos being jerks at them. See, say, Monte Cook and Rob Donoghue discuss design principles, and such.

 

[GrahamWills]

If you want a system where two master warriors can have very different fighting styles, and where that matters beyond flavor, you need a system that has fairly complex combat rules.

I'm not sure that this is right. The difference between the two could come out in the way fictional positioning is used, both as an input into action resolution and as an element of the outcomes of action resolution.

I’m with @pemerton here. There was a recent thread here about how to model dune-style shield combat in games. My thought (since I’m running Fate at the moment) was to make a shield an obstacle that must be overcome to harm the opponent. How do you overcome it? No set rules; it just has to make sense for the world. Use athletics to remain close to the opponent, allowing the slow blade to penetrate the shield? Sure. Mechanics to build a dart that slowly burrows through? OK, but the dart will be obvious to everyone — no sneak kills here. Provoke to make them lose their cool and allow you to sneak a blade through? Of course!

In many rules-light systems players can define aspects / effects / attributes / tags which have a mechanical effect, but the details of how you interact is mechanically loose and restricted by the fiction. So to model a complex system, you use simple rules but require the players (including the GM) to have a complex shared model of the genre in their head and use it to adjudicate fiction. Fortunately, human beings are well designed for exactly that task.

In contrast, a rules-heavy system takes away the burden of keeping a shared model of ’what the world is like’ in people’s head and replaces it with mechanical rules. A good rules-heavy system does this for the cases which come up most often and for which a shared understanding of the fiction is trickiest.

So overall, it’s how they deal with complexity that seems the difference to me. A rules light system says “apply the basic rule(s), but restrict and apply that using the fiction”. A rules heavy system says “use the fiction to find the rule that applies best and use that. If no rule seems to fit, create a new rule”.

 

[Staffan]

So, we do have a paradox.

Rules light is a selling point...but all the big selling games have some heft to them.

If I wanted to be snarky, I would say that "rules light" is the selling point you use when you're out of actual selling points.