No More Massive Tomes of Rules

[Celebrim]

Heck, I've been playing and gamemastering for nigh on 40 years and I wouldn't play that scene with confidence, whether the rules were D&D or Dragobane.

You don't learn about the weaknesses in the rules until you actually use them. I remember this scene because it wasn't really planned it just sort of happened and it suddenly required me to make so many ad hoc rulings to play it out. Fortunately, I already had a lot of the tools I needed to pull it together, but yeah, that's not an easy scene to run well.

It annoys me that people don't seem to understand why you need rules. What I find is that what really happens is just that if you play the game described by the rules you end up just constraining what happens to what the rules describe well. That becomes the game. Things that the rules don't describe don't happen. No one chases someone and tackles them because "tackle" doesn't appear in the rules, even though every American boy played tackle football in the backyard at some point probably. (At least, when I was growing up.) Or else you end up with the GM basically being solely in charge of the story and always deciding what happens based on what he thinks is fun, which is fine but has its limitations.

A good part of my opinion comes from having taught so many new players to game over the years and new players approach the game completely differently than older players. They don't read the rules to find out what to do or what game that the rules want them to play. They just imagine things and try to do them.

Older players are content to let rules beat the imagination out of them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

My suspicion is that Shadowdark could be a lot smaller already: cut all the inspirational and encounter tables, boil monsters down to a 1 or 2 page spread ala Sly Flourish's Forge of Foes, probably do something similar with magic items, and condense the procedures into numbered (or checkbox) lists, and you could probably cut that book into 1/3 or 1/2 the size it is now.

I create a lot of Shadowdark monsters, and yeah, they almost all boil down to stats working off a very simple formula (or guidelines, for damage output) and a large handful of abilities, 99% of the time -- and nearly all monsters only get one such ability.

If I was better with Google Sheets, I would create an online tool to build them on the fly by adjusting hit dice, basic stats and choosing special abilities from a drop-down.

All the monster write-ups are basically Kelsey doing the work for DMs who aren't comfortable rolling their own.

 

[timbannock]

I create a lot of Shadowdark monsters, and yeah, they almost all boil down to stats working off a very simple formula (or guidelines, for damage output) and a large handful of abilities, 99% of the time -- and nearly all monsters only get one such ability.

If I was better with Google Sheets, I would create an online tool to build them on the fly by adjusting hit dice, basic stats and choosing special abilities from a drop-down.

All the monster write-ups are basically Kelsey doing the work for DMs who aren't comfortable rolling their own.

Since Mike Shea loves Shadowdark so much, I wonder if we'll ever see a "Forge of Foes but Shadowdark" from him?

He's already built online tools for FoF accessible via his Patreon, so it seems like it'd be a somewhat easy (maybe somewhat tedious, too, though) exercise to reapply it to Shadowdark.

 

[schneeland]

Do you like games in "long form" -- by that I mean the multiple rulebook, dense prose form common in the industry and exemplified by D&D and Pathfinder? Do you prefer a singular book but of the same form, like we usually get from Free League and Modiphius? Or do you like short and concise books?

Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of large tomes. And that applies even when I like the game (e.g. DCC).

This applies to book size, where I favour digest size books (best is German B5, but A5, half letter or 6"x9" are fine, too) over larger ones (or rather their PDF version, since my preferred reading device is an 11" tablet), and to page count, where I prefer it if the core rules stay below 300, maybe 350 pages.

However, there are a few additional considerations:

• I personally prefer medium crunch systems (Year Zero, Savage Worlds, DCC,...) for my regular games, and I feel a certain page count is required to make sure the rules cover enough ground
• I do like it when games (especially fantasy games) come with a larger bestiary, which can easily blow up the page count (so ideally this goes to a dedicated book, but for some smaller publishers the added cost might be too high)
• For books than contain maps or a lot of art (e.g. the upcoming Dolmenwood monster and setting books) it sometimes makes sense to go for a larger format to make sure information can be put concisely on a page or a spread
• PDFs with bookmarks and a good index make it a bit easier to navigate larger books, and VTT modules can reduce the need to look up rules during sessions

But still, if I get a choice between a large tome and a smaller book, I will almost always opt for the latter. And if I get the choice between a large tome and a box set with multiple booklets, the box set easily wins (Goodman Games should really do this for the DCC base game).

 

[Celebrim]

True. And so what you need are rules that can be applied broadly with consistency and fun. You do not need specific subsystems if your core is strong.

I obviously disagree. This idea that you don't need subsystems if you just have a strong core rule is why so many modern game rules are just so bad and fall apart so quickly when you move away from the toy examples of play that were carefully chosen to illustrate the rules because the designer was carefully constraining play tests to what the rules work for and not paying attention to how much fiat he was using, or perhaps just assuming that fiat is how RPGs work so why do the rules matter since every GM is going to fudge them anyway?

Yes, in general, having strong core mechanics that can be adapted to many different situations is a good thing, but it is not the end all be all of good design, and the reality is that those tests represent things and simulate things that differ wildly from each other. Some of them degree of success matter, and some of them it doesn't. Some of them are better thought of as a linear range of equally plausible outcomes, and others of them cluster more strongly around a mean. Some of them simulate something that is abstract, and others something more concrete. Some of them are pass/fail, and some of them produce a quantified result. Some of them passage of time matters, and some of them it doesn't. Some of them have different time scales. There are a whole bunch of things that go into this if you want a system that helps a GM produce plausible outcomes to propositions. The more things you try to cover, the more you find exceptions where the abstractions of the system doesn't suit the imagined fiction.

Like in 3e D&D you can nicely abstract away facing if you are assuming a typical melee, and it just works. But you might find that abstracting away facing when you are in aerial combat and so maybe can't turn 360 freely doesn't feel right and produce answers that feel right. Or in an RPG you might find that abstracting away simultaneous action and taking turns works fine in a typical melee combat and produce a nice transcript of play, but that if you do a chase then that doesn't work so well.

The situation should govern the minigames. It doesn't work well the other way around, and generally I find people avoid this unconsciously by just only doing the limited things that the rules actually work for.

 

[Autumnal]

You don't learn about the weaknesses in the rules until you actually use them. I remember this scene because it wasn't really planned it just sort of happened and it suddenly required me to make so many ad hoc rulings to play it out. Fortunately, I already had a lot of the tools I needed to pull it together, but yeah, that's not an easy scene to run well.

I would prefer to run that kind of something pretty light and fairly abstract, like Fate or Ironsworn. Or possibly something that would let me make use of character imperatives, like Pendragon or Burning Wheel. Resting the scene as an instance of general principles driven by character and genre is how it would be enjoyable for me as either GM or player. You wouldn’t have a good time at any table of mine, and I wouldn’t seek out a campaign of yours, without either of us being wrong about what’s wrong for us.

Please don’t tell me I don’t understand what rules are for. If I start telling anecdotes about my Bushido and Chivalry & Sorcery 1st/2nd edition, no one’s getting out this while still conscious. I am telling you what rules do and don’t do for me. I trust you to you to understand your interests and what helps get you to them. But it’d be nice if it sounded more like you trusted any of us the same way, rather than writing at us as if we were all just inferior versions of you.

 

[Celebrim]

I would prefer to run that kind of something pretty light and fairly abstract, like Fate or Ironsworn. Or possibly something that would let me make use of character imperatives, like Pendragon or Burning Wheel. Resting the scene as an instance of general principles driven by character and genre is how it would be enjoyable for me as either GM or player. You wouldn’t have a good time at any table of mine, and I wouldn’t seek out a campaign of yours, without either of us being wrong about what’s wrong for us.

Seems like we've come a long way from "There is no reason that 5E (or any other edition for that matter) can't be presented in a concise, complete, robust form like Dragonbane."

I guess the OP was just saying they like Dragonbane.

 

[Emberashh]

I feel its appropriate to share a quote from this handy dandy Blog.

This is ironic, but in order to encourage freedom, you have to limit options. You have to say, here are five tasks, so they can make a meaningful choice between the five—or reject them and forge their own. If you were to tell them "do anything you want" the excessive freedom limits their agency by making their choices meaningless

While having a universal resolution mechanic is good to have as a broad tool, when you start chasing Pinky the Magic Minimalism Dragon you eventually start robbing the game of its meaning and depth. You may still find it satisfactory to just hone in on the improv game, but that doesn't automatically mean the rest of it was superflous.

The issue just tends to be that most RPG designers don't ever actually bother to learn about game design beyond just copying what other games do or getting sucked into the Forge's phoneyness, so a lot of these systems and mechanics that exist beyond the basic resolution mechanic can often be disjointed, poorly designed, and poorly integrated as part of a cohesive whole. Especially if the would be designer is just doing a hack or reskin rather than trying to build something new.

All issues of formatting, layout, and concision aside, a game having a lot of rules isn't the issue. Its a matter of whether or not all those rules meant to form a cohesive whole or are many of them just there to check boxes or add a new subsystem that doesn't actually interact with the rest of the game?

That actually tends to be part of why I think not everyone appreciates the things my game does, because its so deeply integrated you won't actually appreciate it unless you can play it, or become intimately aware of how all these systems tie into each other in multiple layers, so when I post some part of it in isolation, you're losing all that lovely context unless I go out of my way to add it via blog post, which then nobody reads because its not as nice as a rules doc.

 

[Autumnal]

Agh. An unexpected browser refresh ate a couple paragraphs. I’m going to go sulk about it, and come back later.

 

[Reynard]

Seems like we've come a long way from "There is no reason that 5E (or any other edition for that matter) can't be presented in a concise, complete, robust form like Dragonbane."

I guess the OP was just saying they like Dragonbane.

That's a funny take since you are the one who wanted to drill down on Dragonbane as a way to prove that you need more subsystems.

First of all, I don't have a problem with subsystems in general. I don't think you need a subsystem for everything but they can be helpful now and again. But like all rules, the should be presented in a clean, concise, usable, robust manner IMO.

Remember that you are the one who said quite clearly that you can't conceive of a worthwhile game that doesn't need 1000 pages of rules.