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General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
The Stakes of Classifying Games as Rules Lite, Medium, or Heavy?
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<blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8472020" data-attributes="member: 75787"><p>I’m with [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] 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!</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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”.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Gorgon Zee, post: 8472020, member: 75787"] I’m with [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] 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”. [/QUOTE]
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The Stakes of Classifying Games as Rules Lite, Medium, or Heavy?
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