No More Massive Tomes of Rules

[Thomas Shey]

Well, I'm not a fan of subsystem bloat either (though I also think they're sometimes underused in some cases) as I've noted I'm not a big fan of exception based design. My basic feeling is that the more the system makes me ask "What do I need to do here" or even "What's the target number" the more its probably underdesigned. But a lot of that can be baked into a core design.

That said, I think stinting on discussion of some common situations doesn't do the game any favors; not discussing stealth or climbing, for example, often leads to dumb results as overgeneralization can easily produce bad outcomes there (sometimes the discussion will also lead to dumb results but at least that provides an opportunity to house rule at leisure rather than ad hoc it when it comes up).

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Or alternatively the people who happened to have responded lean in a particular direction. I know from past experience this board has no lack of people who think "Rulings, not Rules" isn't exactly a virtue.

Hence my reference to the people still engaging with Celebrim.

 

[kenada]

Note a certain amount of my objections tends to be addressed by having a fairly robust core rules process underneath everything. I'm not guessing what will happen if I know that X resolution system will be used and the target numbers will be within Y to Z. It doesn't deal with my issues with mechanical character definition or engagement by itself, but it does increase the number of areas I don't need custom rules for.

That’s basically what I’m doing. There’s a robust core resolution process (or that’s what I aspire to have), and characters with some amount of customization. While I have classes, they’re very stripped down (less than half a page A5). Most of your customization comes from spending EXP on skills, specialities, and proficiencies. Your level is based on total EXP acquired (so you’re not punished for saving), which determines group rank (all classes belong to one or more groups), HP, and Resilience (one of the defenses used to make defense checks). You can spend EXP to increase one thing as a nightly camp activity or advance (level and spend as much EXP as you want) as a weekly downtime activity. EXP is earned by completing goals, which the players determine (both what they are and whether they’re completed).

 

[kenada]

You make a lot of good points, and after work when I have time to write a lengthy post I'm going to have to address the board, but on this topic as a short response, I'd say "kinda".

My point is that well written "rules" serve the GM and that the GM's needs and games needs typically outstrip what can be done with a single system no matter how well designed. So, you want a robust conflict resolution system and yes that's a good basis for a game system. And that that conflict resolution system can be leveraged into different minigames is great, but often you need to structure each of those minigames slightly differently in order to get that "objective reality".

To give you a very concrete example, in Pendragon 5e the "Book of Battle" leverages the general tactical combat system to be the core part of a framework for the PC's participating in and influencing the outcome of mass combat by creating a minigame in which the PC's defeating individual enemies using the general tactical combat system has meaning and consequences within the larger fiction.

Now, you might not ever strictly need a mass combat system in any particular game. But any fantasy RPG benefits from it because every fantasy RPG is drawing from fantasy literature where mass combat is a major trope. Yes, it would be possible to replicate something like the "Book of Battle" combat system using just the basic rules, generous rulings, and fiat, but that's actually a major ask of the GM and likely to be a process that evolves a while before it gets truly robust.

And we could go further to say that for all the value of the "Book of Battle" it fails as a generic mass combat engine because it doesn't allow for PCs to take the role of commanders and influence the battle through strategic decision making as well as just tactical leadership. It has reasons for making that choice, and this doesn't mean it's bad rules, but it does leave a blank space for a GM to solve. Likewise, by it's own accounting the "Book of Battle" fails to resolve skirmishes that are two big to easily resolve using the tactical combat engine, but too small for its own assumptions and abstractions. So, there is another potential hole to fill.

I will say that I feel the "rules should be short and concise" party has gone off on a tangent where they are conflating lengthy with restrictive. And I think that those are tangential concepts where you can have either short or lengthy rules that are restrictive depending on how you write them. But proving that is a much longer conversation.

Right now, it’s difficult for me to speak to what I want the GM part of my homebrew system to look like because actually writing it comes after getting the core and customization right. I do know that I’ll need procedures layered on top of what the core provides. For example, crafting. I have a process for crafting, which uses the conflict resolution process and rules for projects. If players don’t read the crafting procedure, they should still understand how it works because it’s just using mechanics they should know already from the core. I’m sure there will be others. We came close to needing mass combat, but the PCs decided not to use an army to deal with a stirge nest, so I shifted my attention to other things. I also know I’ll need to explain how to use trackers and assess costs for conflicts, but all that stuff will come later.

Organizational, I expect to have a small core plus customization, gear and stuff, supplemental procedures, GM instructions, and commentary. The last part is for explaining how and why things are done they way they are, so if people want to tinker with the system, they can know why I did certain things.

(The above is why I describe it as light to medium. I’m eschewing having lots of different subsystems for a simple core, but I also won’t shy away from building procedures on top of the core as necessary. I also handle time and space concretely, and money is tracked as money.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

Hence my reference to the people still engaging with Celebrim.

Yeah but the tone of "You're all alone here" directed at them was a bit much.

 

[Celebrim]

So, I'd just about decided not to bother responding, but since the thread seems to be dying and no one has anything else they want to say compared to the fun of disagreeing with me, I thought I'd address the complaints that have arisen from a half-dozen or so posters collectively. If you read through those comments, you find a couple of common unifying themes. Some of those themes are obvious fallacies, and some of them are more subtle with important half-truths hidden in the complaint. There is actually a surprising lot we agree on, but let's get rid of the fallacies so we can look at the good stuff:

1) "The Oberoni/Rule Zero Fallacy": Probably the most famous informal fallacy in RPG design and who does it show up big time in this thread. A ton of the objections are of the form, "If the rules are bad, well you can always just change the rules." or else, "If the rules are missing, you can always just add the rules." Some posters have even gone so far as to make a virtue out of bad rules or missing rules because it allows the GM to exercise their creativity. The nice thing about the Oberoni Fallacy is that it sets up an unfalsifiable standard. No amount of evidence that the game would be better with a better rule or fewer holes in its resolution mechanics can prove that the game would be better with a better rule given the Oberoni test. If a game is good because it is bad, then we have nothing to say about it.

2) "The My Rulings Aren't Rules Because they Aren't Written Down Delusion": You could also call this the "Common Law isn't Law, Only Constitutional Law" delusion. This almost always comes alongside the Oberoni Fallacy. The idea is that if a table deals with the silence of the rules by implementing a large number of ad hoc rulings and procedures of play that somehow this isn't adding to the rules, the cognitive burden, the number of things that are memorized, just because they aren't written down. This particular delusion is often really common amongst people that have been playing 1st AD&D since the 1970s or early 1980s. I've talked with multiple 1e AD&D GMs that whenever you ask them about how they deal with something, they immediately can answer you with a procedure of play. "Oh, yeah, we just roll under strength when that comes up. Sometimes we just roll straight up under 1D20 but depending on how I judge the difficulty of the action, I might ask them to roll under attribute on 1d8+1d12 or on 2d12, and then...." And I'm not kidding, they can go on like that for literally hours. I've at one point listened to a 1e AD&D GM list his processes of play he'd developed over 30 years of gaming for over four hours. It's really impressive, but if you actually tried to document those processes of play what you'd realize is that they amount to having memorized basically another 270 pages of extra rules that form part of the core mechanics of this post 1e AD&D game system. This is actually a vastly more complex system than what I'm advocating for, because those 270 pages of methodology for how you deal with the lack of a unified skill system and challenge resolution system in 1e A&D by tacking one on with house rules ends up being a lot more elaborate if you just rebooted around a clean unified core challenge system with like a single common fortune test system instead of 20 diverse subsystems each rolling different dice combinations against different targets. The fact that you haven't documented your complex processes of play doesn't mean that they aren't rules. They are just rules you haven't written down and which the group collectively learns (or doesn't) as you communicate them to them (or don't). Your system doesn't get smaller when it depends heavily on rulings. It's bigger. Bodies of common law set by precedent tend to be much larger than constitutional or legislative law. You're actually advocating for a system that I find too complicated.

3) "GM rulings are always better than rules, so why do we need rules" fallacy: The argument could be made that since humans are capable of sophisticated reasoning there is no need for a large body of law. We could just rely on the GMs judgement to handle everything and run this like a Braunstein. And this is true. We could dispense with the rules and run everything by GM fiat. The question this raises for me is why have rules at all? The problem with this argument is that it doesn't just kick in when you hit 1000 pages of rules or 3000 pages of rules. This argument is equally valid against the first rule you propose having. After all, any rule is likely to have exceptions where the GMs judgment is better than the unreasoning judgment of the rules. So if you can think of any reason to have a rule, then that reason equally applies to the first rule or the second or the three hundredth. This fallacy really is tangential to the debate over how big our tomes of rules need to be. Instead, the real truth underlying here is that we do have to have reasons to add a rule to the system. There are in fact costs and tradeoffs involved in having rules. The system gets physically more expensive to produce and purchase. It gets harder to play test. It gets harder to track. I'm aware that there are tradeoffs in having more rules. But I want to point back to my first couple of posts in the thread here. I argued right from the start that the core engine, the core resolution mechanics, of a system should probably occupy no more than about 30 pages. So when I'm advocating for rules to cover 1000 or 3000 pages, I'm advocating for rules that are something other than core resolution mechanics. All the rules that I'm talking about beyond those first 30 pages are not part of the typical ordinary proposition->fortune->resolution system that will come up repeatedly and most often in play and which forms the backbone on which all the other rules are built. I'm arguing in fact that some sorts of game play and some sorts of game needs are emergent above and beyond that core gameplay loop and that there are reasons why you build rules for that emergent gameplay instead of trying to resolve it just by simple recourse to the game core challenge resolution mechanic. And I'm arguing that there is a vast body of supporting material that describes the game play universe you are playing in, which ought to be documented in a way that interfaces with the rules. And if you go back and look at the questions I had about what a system provides for, what those other 970 to 2970 pages of rules look like ought to become clear. Because I'm certainly not calling for a core resolution mechanism to cover 1000 or 3000 pages, and if you act like I am, well you aren't taking this (IMO important) discussion very seriously.

More to follow about the actual more serious complaints against my position when I get a break.

 

[Swanosaurus]

2) "The My Rulings Aren't Rules Because they Aren't Written Down Delusion": You could also call this the "Common Law isn't Law, Only Constitutional Law" delusion. This almost always comes alongside the Oberoni Fallacy. The idea is that if a table deals with the silence of the rules by implementing a large number of ad hoc rulings and procedures of play that somehow this isn't adding to the rules, the cognitive burden, the number of things that are memorized, just because they aren't written down. This particular delusion is often really common amongst people that have been playing 1st AD&D since the 1970s or early 1980s. I've talked with multiple 1e AD&D GMs that whenever you ask them about how they deal with something, they immediately can answer you with a procedure of play. "Oh, yeah, we just roll under strength when that comes up. Sometimes we just roll straight up under 1D20 but depending on how I judge the difficulty of the action, I might ask them to roll under attribute on 1d8+1d12 or on 2d12, and then...." And I'm not kidding, they can go on like that for literally hours. I've at one point listened to a 1e AD&D GM list his processes of play he'd developed over 30 years of gaming for over four hours. It's really impressive, but if you actually tried to document those processes of play what you'd realize is that they amount to having memorized basically another 270 pages of extra rules that form part of the core mechanics of this post 1e AD&D game system. This is actually a vastly more complex system than what I'm advocating for, because those 270 pages of methodology for how you deal with the lack of a unified skill system and challenge resolution system in 1e A&D by tacking one on with house rules ends up being a lot more elaborate if you just rebooted around a clean unified core challenge system with like a single common fortune test system instead of 20 diverse subsystems each rolling different dice combinations against different targets. The fact that you haven't documented your complex processes of play doesn't mean that they aren't rules. They are just rules you haven't written down and which the group collectively learns (or doesn't) as you communicate them to them (or don't). Your system doesn't get smaller when it depends heavily on rulings. It's bigger. Bodies of common law set by precedent tend to be much larger than constitutional or legislative law. You're actually advocating for a system that I find too complicated.

What you seem to be missing here is the possibility of playing with a ruleset that has sensible, broad rules that basically tell you "If there's no procedure and you feel that a roll ought to be made, just take the stat/skill that seems most fitting, assign a modifier according to a standard ladder of difficulties, and roll to succeed." The cognitive load of that is absolutely minimal. And in 90% of all situations, it is absolutely sufficient. Really, if you ask me how I handle stuff that's not in the rules in 1st Edition The Dark Eye or in Basic Roleplaying, that's it. There might be a few considerations beyond it (damage, for example), but nothing that would take more than two minutes to come up with or to explain. Really, I've run a lot of games in a lot of different systems and came up with a lot of rulings, but from the top of my head, I couldn't tell you one house-rule I've come up with that added complexity. I remember that I decided to run Troika! with roll-high only and not a mix of roll-high and roll under, but that was purely to simplify the process; and I probably did a lot of house-rules along the lines of "no, wo won't use the horseback fighting rules, they're a PITA, you'll just fight with advantage, and if you fumble, you make a riding check to see if you fall from your horse." If I house-rule, then typically its the decision to ignore the more specific rules and just resort to the general procedure of the given system instead, so I reduce the mental load.

Do you actually know any RPG systems besides different versions of D&D? Because that might be part of the problem here ...

 

[Celebrim]

What you seem to be missing here is the possibility of playing with a ruleset that has sensible, broad rules that basically tell you "If there's no procedure and you feel that a roll ought to be made, just take the stat/skill that seems most fitting, assign a modifier according to a standard ladder of difficulties, and roll to succeed."

Why the heck do you think I'm missing that possibility? I'm basically assuming EVERY system you'd want to play in the modern era has a single broadly applicable and robust challenge resolution system. I have already repeatedly mentioned the existence of a "core resolution mechanic" that probably occupies no more than 30 pages including in the post you are quoting!

The cognitive load of that is absolutely minimal. And in 90% of all situations, it is absolutely sufficient.

Sure! I absolutely concede the truth of that. So what? Do you think the sort of situations you find yourself in are always covered just by a core resolution mechanic? The only mechanical support you need for your games is just a core skill system mechanic? Everything is just process simulation referencing a core skill system, and that's the whole of your problems and verisimilitude issues? You never find the need to tack on sub-systems?

For example, your reference BRP. If that's so, then you are telling me that you don't need say 2000 words worth of rules describing a secondary system like CoC's Insanity rules that tell you concretely what sort of shocks and terrors impact the fragile reasoning of the heroes because you can just infer that and by rulings and fiat build it out of a core skill/challenge resolution system? Why have SAN rules for CoC at all then?

The thing about a skill/challenge resolution system is that it might can tell you pass/fail or occasionally even degree of success, but it can't really tell you how the profit you make carving a stool differs from smithing a crown. It can't tell you whether you want to be close or long range against the balrog. It can't tell you how reasonable it is to rip the doors off the hinges of a carriage versus the prison door, or how much more unreasonable it is for the superhero to punch open the warehouse door versus the vault door. In combat resolution systems you start wanting to deal with time and space and terrain in ways that are easy visualized. Suddenly as a designer you have to deal with battlemats or abstract maps or relegate combat just to theater of the mind, and that matters in the tactical richness of the system in a way fiat resolution or a simple challenge resolution can't. Challenge resolution on its own can't tell you whether the outlaw biker in the wasteland should drive up the left or right side when fighting the semi turned war machine. It can't tell how much more difficult it is to inflict some grappled condition on an ox relative to a pixie. It can't tell you which is faster the - PX38 Lighting VII or the SoroSub Super-Slasher. It can't tell you whether the shotgun is a better weapon in this situation than the battle rile. Core 30 page resolution mechanics can't describe a menagerie of creatures each with their own imaginative wrinkles on how they impact combat. That's why game designers build rich and interesting subsystems and document in detail the setting that they are envisioning.

The reality is that there are routine situations that arise in play that require a wrapper of rules around the core system that provide a framework to imagine out that situation in a way is more concrete and engages more different aesthetics of play. Combat is the most obvious such system, and in most games that intend to highlight it occupies a special subsystem of at least another 30 or so pages that is built around the core challenge system but deals with the specifics of weapons and positioning and terrain that form the basis of a tactical challenge. The same core system that tells you how to spout lore and pick a lock probably doesn't integrate the effects of distance and positioning on those rolls, so that you know when a bow or a knife is better to attack with.

Combat is just one of several pillars of play that you can as a designer or game master want to specifically highlight as a fun part of the experience of play. I won't get into again why combat is so frequently a featured system, but it isn't the only possible system. And there are a lot of things out there that may seem niche to you that turn out to not niche if you change the assumptions of play. Crafting items may seem niche to you in a typically fantasy setting or a super spy setting, but that perception totally changes if the fantasy setting is a stone age survival game where nothing can be purchased. Suddenly the robustness of our crafting system matters and we might not just want to leave it up to a pass fail core conflict resolution system.

Do you actually know any RPG systems besides different versions of D&D? Because that might be part of the problem here ...

Aside from the fact that I'm pretty sure in this thread I've already expressed familiarity with like a half-dozen systems, I wonder why you think your assumptions about my experience constitute a rational argument? It's almost like you can't imagine another person disagreeing with you except out of ignorance.

 

[Professor Murder]

Just to weigh in, for me, its the size of individual books. Buying a 500+ tome just isnt a turn on for me these days. I'd rather that be spread among 2-3, hell 4 separate releases.

 

[Emberashh]

Yeah the accusation that someone doesn't play anything other than DND is kind of a tired meme at this point. Its like TTRPG's version of Godwins law.