After a horrifically long D&D campaign, my group switched over to Weird Heroes of Public Access. In WHPA, players are hosts of public access television shows who are tasked by the station manager with investigating various oddities around the small fictional town of Fairhaven. After a few sessions, the GM asked us how we were enjoying the game so far. One of the other players replied, "I'm having fun but I don't think it's because of the game itself."
There's really not much to the game itself. The rules for combat take up a single page. Character generation only takes up a few pages, and two of those pages are devoted to what abilities your character has depending on what kind of show they host. I don't even think there are any character advancement rules in the game. We've been playing for a few weeks and we're having fun, but at some point the lack of rules makes me feel as though we're just playing make believe instead of a game. I don't think I've ever played a game with so few rules before.
Anyone else experience this kind of thing with a rules lite game? In defense of WHPA, I don't think it was really designed to be played more than a few sessions at a time.
If it is a one shot, you can even omit dice or rules, but you need very good role players for this. If you consider D&D to complicated use Call of Cuthullu or Delta Green rules or any other D100 system. These are designed to support narrative role play play-style. Of course you cannot develop the mechanics of your character that versatile like you could with D&D.
Symbaroum is an in between, most development comes from skills, less from equipment, the characters are still really squishy, but if you got a character with well developed skills, he somehow is much stronger and can take some in combat. An additional advantage is, that the DM does almost do no dice rolls at all. e.g. the players rule to evade being hit, and how much damage they absorb, the damage output of mobs can be a fix number (I seen the latter in D&D, and i think the MM got rules for that one).
Maybe you should reduce optional rules in your D&D game. You can play without feats, use the rule that mobs do fixed damage, limit the number of weird subclasses and races, limit resources to the pnb and so on.
Believably roleplaying a human, halfelf, halfling or gnome or maybe still dwarf and halforc also is much much easier than roleplaying an elf, drow, dragonborn, tiefling and such. To play these races proper it is not enough to just view them as a human with some cool optic skin, they are weirdly different, not only physical but from their mindset, either because of their heritage, or because of their longevity, or because they got many aspects of a reptile.
