Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="nnms" data-source="post: 6260983" data-attributes="member: 83293">I think presentation has a lot to do with it as well.If you're sharing a PDF, laying it out like an old version of D&D and finding some black and white inked art you can use from relatively amateur artists is probably a good idea as well.As for the ones under discussion, I'm still not sure I buy the whole "Game has the expectation that the rules do not (and are not trying) to cover all available actions/possibilities, and that player innovation and GM arbitration are not only inevitable, but presumed" thing.  I maintain, for example, that Mentzer's version of Basic D&D does indeed have rules procedures for pretty much every part of play.  It even has a form of a universal resolution mechanic in attribute checks.  You don't really ever have to either set aside the rules or supplement them to cover new actions.  It's already sort of there already.  Like Apocalypse World, it already has all the "moves" that you might need right in the rules.I've always seen "rulings not rules" as the tacit admission that the rules fail and need to be set aside or extended because the procedures of play aren't covering what's actually going on in play.  It might be the case for 1974 D&D that you need to add rulings or set aside non-functioning rules subsystems, but I don't think that's the case for 1983 Basic D&D at all.  And AD&D1E was all about standardization of the RPG market in a way that wasn't seen again until d20 came about.So probably what you'll want to do is be like most 80s and 90s RPGs where they have rules for what actually goes on during the game and then have a "rule zero" section that talks about rulings and how everything is optional and that it's okay to make things up on the fly if you're not sure about a given situation or come across something not covered in the rules.  And you'll also want to keep any extraneous rules out.  If a given rule really isn't about what goes on in actual play, you can probably cut or minimize it.</blockquote>

Verification