What is the least amount of rules you need?

[Eyes of Nine]

Lasers and Feelings is fun for a 1shot, and World of Dungeons can suffice for a couple sessions.

Longer than that, will need more rules. But not a ton. Again, this is for "need". My players will have fun, and I think I can adjudicate just about any situation and create just about any sort of interesting situation/NPC/challenge on the fly. Whether the sequence of situations/encounters ties together to make a pleasing whole - that's more challenging. But most rules sets don't really give good tools for that anyway.

So I put Minimal; but prefer Light to Moderate.

Point of curiosity - where does 5e fall on your scale?

 

[Umbran]

Lemon curry.

I've played games that had no written rules. I've played games where there were no written rules, my character sheet was a flip-packet of stick figure drawings, and neither characters or players could speak during game, except for emergencies.

I can easily have fun with a game session based on an index-card of rules. One of my favorite games is about 40 digest-sized pages, with art.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'll freely admit to having had a strong gamist streak for all my gaming life, and it hasn't changed; I both want to tools to do fairly detailed character definition if I need it, and ones to give me both some reasonable mechanical engagement, and enough that I don't think I'll be guessing how the GM judges things too often. I called that moderate, but you could make an argument its the step up.

 

[MNblockhead]

For one shots I'll play anything, but prefer rules-light systems. For long campaigns I like something more rules heavy robust character advancement rules.

The most minimalist rules games I've played are Dread and Grim. Both are great for one shots.
For rules light, I like InSPECTREs and Index Card RPG, both are great for mini-campaigns.
I use D&D 5e for my main, years-long campaigns. I would consider 5e moderate, but in my current campaign I have added a lot of third-party and home brew rules for strongholds, factions, followers, leveling up, etc. So I would say it is more on the heavy side now.
I don't think I would want to run anything heavier than my current modified 5e game, but might be happy playing in such a game.

 

[The Shadow]

A coin toss to determine succ or failure is probably the minimum to qualify as a game?

Some games managed to do without the coin toss. Though I wouldn't call Amber Diceless minimalist, all the complexity (such as it is) is in character creation. The actual gameplay is extremely simple.

 

[schneeland]

I can run/play minimalist games, but typically I don't find them very enticing, except for, maybe, a single session. And since I can also do that using light games, that's where my vote goes. I think my preference these days lies on the lighter side of moderately crunchy games.

 

[JAMUMU]

I've got a friend who runs AD&D with no books, no characters sheets and the only rule is "roll high good" for anything anyone might need to roll for. I like to make a pretence at character sheets when I run light.

Medium to heavy crunch games just bring out the editor in me. Everything can be simplified. Why is that three rolls when it could be two? Why is this thing called that when it clearly has no relation to the natural language use of the term? Why have we been waiting through fifteen minutes of die rolls to find out if one character has managed to hear a who? I understand for a lot of people the math is the jam, man, but it gets in the way of my play experience.

 

[innerdude]

I agree with the general sentiment that for a campaign of around 10 sessions or less, almost anything will work. I had a great time with Tiny D6 last year (as a player, not GM), which is maybe 30 pages of rules tops, and most of that is describing the heritages. Campaign was 9 or 10 sessions total spanning 4 months of "real time".

For campaigns spanning 10-20 sessions (6-12 months) PbtA and FitD are a great fit. Long enough to be meaningful, but not long enough to run out of player progression "ramp".

Anything longer than that I'd probably want something at least as complex as Genesys or Savage Worlds.

As best I can tell Genesys seems specifically designed around a campaign lasting around 18 months. After that it seems the designers recognize your mileage may vary, as the sheer weight of interpreting the dice for players at 300+ XP just gets to be too much.

 

[the Jester]

EDIT: I added a poll.

I am planning to run Lazers and Feelings soon, and it got me to thinking about how little/few rules one might need in order to effectively play a TTRPG. So I am curious what others thing.

Note: for the purposes of this discussion, I think the G part is important. That is, it should still be a game (as opposed to a simple storytelling exercise) so there must SOME rules and something that looks like success or failure (although those concepts are fuzzy in RPGs). But with that in mind, what is the bare minimum level of rules you need to feel like you are playing a TTRPG?

I'm not sure. There are variants of Amber Diceless RPG that dispense with the rules entirely, and they still look like they'd feel like a game to me, but I haven't tried them.

The minimum I can work with and feel like I'm playing and rpg is one thing, my preference is another- I like more crunchy bits than I actually need.

 

[GMMichael]

Note: for the purposes of this discussion, I think the G part is important. That is, it should still be a game (as opposed to a simple storytelling exercise) so there must SOME rules and something that looks like success or failure (although those concepts are fuzzy in RPGs). But with that in mind, what is the bare minimum level of rules you need to feel like you are playing a TTRPG?

Thought I'd analyze this a bit (and stop in to see if anyone else provided an actual number of rules). This quoted part is important. Games have rules. In those rules, there are some nebulous requirements. Let's take a stab...

Role-playing: gotta have a rule about creating or being a character, even if prescribed.
Competition: two opposing sides seems to be a minimum. Interestingly, a win-condition hasn't been needed since the RPG evolved from the war game.
Randomness: surprisingly, this isn't as necessary as I'd thought. The ideas that come out of a human head are all the RNG that a gamer needs. Wants, however...
Goal: this doesn't have to be a win condition - end of game. But it's something for which to play; it moves the competitors forward (see my rule #1 earlier in the thread). It's the goal that requires...
Navigating the competition: how do the competitors compete? Whatever the method, it'll probably need a rule.

Did I miss anything?

Minimalist: Basically, a core mechanic. You don't need anything more than the barest of bones.

Whenever D&D invokes "core mechanic," it's talking about a few different ideas: rolling a d20, a difficulty class (DC), two types of player, and the results. Assuming that's the "core mechanic" above, this minimalist option refers to about four different rules. There's still a character/role-playing requirement (which of the two types of player are playing a character) and a goal requirement (why are we doing this). I'd put Minimalist at 6 rules, minimum.

Light: Core mechanics are great, but you need a little more than that: a couple subsystems to cover broad topics, maybe a short codified list of character and/or NPC abilities, etc..

I see the core mechanic has multiplied (/snark). And subsystems are popping up, which would need to be at least 2 rules each (otherwise they're not "systems," they're just rules). I also like the term "rules modules." Anyway, I think we can assume that a subsystem probably shouldn't be much shorter than the core mechanic above (4 rules), so I'll say 4 rules times a core mechanic and two subsystems is 12 rules, plus the 2 required rules from above, is 14 rules. Lists are here too, and while they make a system beefier, I don't see them as rules so much as things you can do with the rules. Lists can shrink and grow, but that doesn't change how you play the game. So I might expect Lists to be more of a Moderate-sized feature, but something simple for Light-sized games isn't bad.

Getting more concrete from here just seems to involve page counts. Or numbers of book-covers...?