Are rules-light systems more accessible?

[Zuras]

I have been looking at different rules-light systems lately, and was really impressed with the rules-light OSR/NSR systems like Knave and The Black Hack that boil the rules down into just a few pages. I’ve gone as far as prepping some Knave material and an old-school dungeon crawl for the next time someone can’t make it and we run a one-shot instead.

This week I’ve been reading similar “light” rule sets for non-D&D games, like Cepheus FTL (which is a rules-light implementation of Traveller) and I don’t feel anywhere near as confident at my ability to run a sci-fi campaign as I did at running my players through a dungeon with just six pages of rules.

Obviously the difference is that I’ve played a lot more D&D than Traveller, but it got me wondering if rules-light games might actually be less accessible to new players than more complex games, at least in situations where the GM is new themselves, and doesn’t have the implicit knowledge needed to run the game?

Is a game really “rules light” if it only has two pages of rules, but you have to watch several hours of actual plays before you’re actually sure how to play it? Or is this universal to all RPGs (light, heavy, whatever) and I just haven’t noticed it before?

[animorte]

In my little bit of experience of just recently looking into other not D&D games, rules light is much more accessible. Even if it takes a little bit of additional time, it's a lot less reading to begin with. Sometimes it just takes multiple perspectives to understand different parts.

It certainly helps bringing in new (or young, or both) players for a random night of rpg. There's a lot less time required to invest in character building and overall comprehension.

[Marcloure]

As an experienced GM, a rules light game can be harder and more frightening to me than a rules heavy game. When I picked up PF2 or Mythras, I could easily understand how to run it because I have years of experience playing D&D, and the rules leave little room for questions. Opposite to that, running Scum and Villainy was quite a challenge to me, because I don't have the same amount of experience with space opera fiction.

However, is learning PF2 from zero experience harder than learning Scum and Villainy from zero experience? I think not. I think it would be harder for me to run FFG Star Wars or Starfinder than SnV, but I could be wrong. No way to know really.

[Pex]

Not inherently. It's possible the lack of a rule or guidance can be detrimental. Not every DM enjoys having to be their own game designer to make a ruling for everything. They bought the rules to play the game. It's the point of having the rules. If the DM has to make everything up why bother playing that game?

For DMs/players who enjoy such games of improv hooray for them. The point is it's not a universal love affair.

[SpanielBear]

I don’t think games have to be simple to be accessible, but I think they can be off-putting when they’re overly complex. Traveller is a case in point; even though I loved the game my group played in that setting, the only way the combat flowed at all was because the DM, during some sick leave, had built an entire excel programme to run the various systems… and that’s more dedication I think than a lot of new players are going to be willing to work through.

[noob]

Not inherently. It's possible the lack of a rule or guidance can be detrimental. Not every DM enjoys having to be their own game designer to make a ruling for everything. They bought the rules to play the game. It's the point of having the rules. If the DM has to make everything up why bother playing that game?

For DMs/players who enjoy such games of improv hooray for them. The point is it's not a universal love affair.

Rule light does not means "with holes everywhere in the rules" some rule light systems have quite clear rules that leaves no holes (ex: nice marines an 1 page rpg describes how to resolve situation with rolls and how they end up, the only thing to pick after a roll is the specifics of how it went wrong, the amount of dead and mayhem is already determined by the roll)
I feel you are confusing rules light with "letting all the work to the gm by having no functional rules therefore forcing gms to improvise all the things"(like most editions of dnd) or "have rules only for a few specific aspects of roleplaying then let all the rest be handled by the gm".

[Anonymouswizard]

is a game really “rules light” if it only has two pages of rules, but you have to watch several hours of actual plays before you’re actually sure how to play it? Or is this universal to all RPGs (light, heavy, whatever) and I just haven’t noticed it before?

It's the latter, and you probably don't remember the struggle to pick up D&D. If you want a midpoint look at Advanced Fighting Fantasy/Stellar Adventures, I picked it up instantly because these books were a big part of my childhood, but I'm sure you'd also grok it quickly.

Cepheus is also possibly one of the worst to pick, I'd have really recommend one of the stripped down Fate rulebooks or Those Dark Places over it.

But in practice, I never really to bother to learn the subsystems for crunchy games, because that's more work than I'm willing to put in. Unless it's from Jenna Moran of course, but her games have a tendency to flow together in a way other designers' don't.


As an experienced GM, a rules light game can be harder and more frightening to me than a rules heavy game. When I picked up PF2 or Mythras, I could easily understand how to run it because I have years of experience playing D&D, and the rules leave little room for questions. Opposite to that, running Scum and Villainy was quite a challenge to me, because I don't have the same amount of experience with space opera fiction.

S&V is also a very different type of game to D&D, being an improv-focused player-first fiction-first descendant of Apocalypse World. Of course it's going to be more difficult to learn than Pathfinder if you're very used to D&D style games, at the same time Stars Without Number and White Star will be easier to learn than Band of Blades.

[stoutstien]

It's the latter, and you probably don't remember the struggle to pick up D&D. If you want a midpoint look at Advanced Fighting Fantasy/Stellar Adventures, I picked it up instantly because these books were a big part of my childhood, but I'm sure you'd also grok it quickly.

Cepheus is also possibly one of the worst to pick, I'd have really recommend one of the stripped down Fate rulebooks or Those Dark Places over it.

But in practice, I never really to bother to learn the subsystems for crunchy games, because that's more work than I'm willing to put in. Unless it's from Jenna Moran of course, but her games have a tendency to flow together in a way other designers' don't.



S&V is also a very different type of game to D&D, being an improv-focused player-first fiction-first descendant of Apocalypse World. Of course it's going to be more difficult to learn than Pathfinder if you're very used to D&D style games, at the same time Stars Without Number and White Star will be easier to learn than Band of Blades.


I have been looking at different rules-light systems lately, and was really impressed with the rules-light OSR/NSR systems like Knave and The Black Hack that boil the rules down into just a few pages. I’ve gone as far as prepping some Knave material and an old-school dungeon crawl for the next time someone can’t make it and we run a one-shot instead.

This week I’ve been reading similar “light” rule sets for non-D&D games, like Cepheus FTL (which is a rules-light implementation of Traveller) and I don’t feel anywhere near as confident at my ability to run a sci-fi campaign as I did at running my players through a dungeon with just six pages of rules.

Obviously the difference is that I’ve played a lot more D&D than Traveller, but it got me wondering if rules-light games might actually be less accessible to new players than more complex games, at least in situations where the GM is new themselves, and doesn’t have the implicit knowledge needed to run the game?

Is a game really “rules light” if it only has two pages of rules, but you have to watch several hours of actual plays before you’re actually sure how to play it? Or is this universal to all RPGs (light, heavy, whatever) and I just haven’t noticed it before?

It depends on what the system is actually trying to accomplish. Lite systems are great for lite games.
Most games have two axis, complexity/simple and shallow/deep. Open ended resolution systems are inherently going to be deep regardless of how complex they just like fixed resolution games are going to be shallow regardless of how simple they are.

[Tanarii]

I'd say: the lighter the rules, the more confident the GM has to be in their ability to improvise rulings, as opposed to their understanding the rules.

[kyoryu]

For players, yes.

For experienced GMs? Yes.

For new GMs? Maaaaaybe. Crunchy games require more learning, while lighter games require more confidence in your judgement, so that's a bit of a wash.

For new GMs I think the most important thing is strong guidance and perhaps procedures about how to GM. Too many games just give you the rules, and no idea of when/where/how to apply them, how to actually structure things, etc. I think PbtA games do a good job of this, which is why I typically recommend them for new GMs.

[Grod_The_Giant]

It depends on the system. Some rules-light games depend heavily on narrative elements, which can be confusing for people who are used to more simulationist systems like D&D. And a lot of one/two-page RPGs (Lasers and Feelings, Crab Truckers, etc) depend less on you understanding the rules (because they don't really exist) and more on understanding the gag. If you read the page and go "ooh, I have the best idea," you'll be fine; if you say "okay, I guess that's a neat idea" you'll probably struggle.

[Zuras]

Rule light does not means "with holes everywhere in the rules" some rule light systems have quite clear rules that leaves no holes (ex: nice marines an 1 page rpg describes how to resolve situation with rolls and how they end up, the only thing to pick after a roll is the specifics of how it went wrong, the amount of dead and mayhem is already determined by the roll)
I feel you are confusing rules light with "letting all the work to the gm by having no functional rules therefore forcing gms to improvise all the things"(like most editions of dnd) or "have rules only for a few specific aspects of roleplaying then let all the rest be handled by the gm".


Most of the rules light systems I’m comfortable with (Knave, TBH, FATE) have rules that theoretically cover most situations, but the procedures or tropes they run on are all in the players’ and GM’s heads, and (for OSR games especially) a lot of the guidance for how scenes play out *has* to come from the adventure/module. Is that stuff actually part of the “rules of the game” too?

I’m reluctant to categorize understanding the procedures and tropes as part of the rules, because that would seem to make many games with the same surface rule set into different games. You can play AD&D 1e OSR style, of course, but you can obviously play it as episodic, scene based adventures as well, since the DragonLance modules that marked the shift away from old-school play were written for 1e.

Is Keep on the Borderlands plus the 1e books a different game from Dragons of Despair plus those same books? I would say no.

On the other hand, I know FATE pretty well, but I’d definitely have a much easier time running a FATE campaign based on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies than a sci-fi free trader campaign. It’s not a matter of genre familiarity, I’m just far more familiar with setting up game-able content and dramatic scenes in a regency era zombie apocalypse, as it’s far more analogous to a D&D campaign. If I had a well detailed adventure to run (and players who didn’t mind a bit of railroading to ease the GMs load), actually resolving the situations according to the rules wouldn’t be difficult, it’s developing and connecting the scenes.

Maybe a better way to phrase it is that a rule set can comprehensively cover how to resolve any conceivable player actions and still not tell you how to play the game.

There’s also the issue of needing genre-specific knowledge to apply the rules. Most obviously, lots of rules light OSR systems use attribute tests to resolve any player action with a chance of failure. It works great, but under the surface it’s relying on the GM and players to have a solid headcanon of which stats apply to various categories of actions. That’s one reason designers keep using the six original D&D core stats or a subset of them for new games.

[Tanarii]

I’m reluctant to categorize understanding the procedures and tropes as part of the rules, because that would seem to make many games with the same surface rule set into different games. You can play AD&D 1e OSR style, of course, but you can obviously play it as episodic, scene based adventures as well, since the DragonLance modules that marked the shift away from old-school play were written for 1e.
I think the answer is yes and the example you gave is a good one.

They sold dragonlance for 1e but it never really worked properly. Because the D&D rules weren't geared right for scene based plot driven adventures with a small party, with deaths being a problem to incorporate. They were geared for episodic adventuring site raiding by a large party, with deaths being normal.

Dragonlance marked the start of the decline of TSR, as they tried to incorporate a new style of play but never successfully adapted the rules to it. And they missed the mark by a mile with 2e, which did nothing significant to adapt to it. Even WotC didn't really adapt properly for it with 3e, although they took some baby steps. It wasn't until 4e that the rules really changed sufficiently to handle that kind of thing.

[BRC]

I'd say it really depends on the game and the players, and I think on the gap between "Ability to execute the rules" and "Ability to engage with the rules". Which is to say that theoretically rules light systems probably have a lower barrier to entry for executing the rules, but once you know how to execute the rules of a crunchier system, you've probably got a better idea of how to engage with them.


A rules heavy RPG tends to present itself as a world-simulator, with rules focused on executing a specific type of story. "You are a person in this world, the rules technically SUPPORT running a bed and breakfast, but most of the rules are about going to fight Dragons". The result is that the rules are generally easier to engage with, even if they're mechanically complex, because a player's interactions with the game are directly informed by the abilities and skillset of their character. You approach the game by thinking "What would my Elf Ranger do? here".


Rules Light games can have a lot more abstraction to them, and are frequently anchored in something beyond a simulation of a fictional scenario, and if you don't quite click with the mindset it may be a challenge to actually interact with the game.

Consider a rules heavy game and a rules light game, both intended for playing out hardboiled noir stories.

In our Rules Heavy game, the Detective chases a suspect down the street. The player is asked to roll their character's "Quickness" stat (one of 30 stats) to see if their gumshoe runs fast enough to catch up with the suspect.

In our rules light game, the Detective in the same scenario doesn't have a Quickness stat. Instead they've got an ever-shifting statline based around "Make a Buck" "Crack the Case" and "Set Right what has gone wrong", and gameplay involves engaging with genre tropes and character motivation to determine which stat is most appropriate.


So even though one game has 30 stats and the other has only 3, the second game may be less accessible simply because it expects the players to engage with the mechanics in a way besides "How good is my character at doing this thing"

[Easy e]

An experienced GM can make any game work, regardless of the rules. I have been able to run total noobs through a game of Shadowrun before, and Shadowrun is not a lite system.

Now, from a new player perspective Rules-Lite can work really well IF the players are all ready familiar with the base tropes the game is trying to mimic. I have played several Monster-of-the-Week games where the players knew nothing about RPGs, but knew about TV shows like Buffy, Supernatural, Etc. so were easily able to grasp what was supposed to be happening in the game.

All they needed was their playbook individually, and the quick reference sheet as a group and they were ready to play in about 5-10 minutes. I have had board or card games take longer to learn!

[kyoryu]

I strongly disagree with the description of Rules Light games made above. That may be true of some, but is hardly universal.

The big thing that most Rules Light games don't do is provide results, and leave that instead to the GM. In many other ways, many/most rules light games use fairly straightforward skill check mechanics.... even if the skills used may look weird.

Also, in terms of genre, I think that's mostly about improvised content. I'm not going to improvise a superhero game. I just don't get the genre enough to do so. That's true no matter how heavy or light the game is - running it in Champions doesn't make it viable. But I might run a heroes game given prepared content, and would probably be more likely to do so in a rules light system just due to having to learn less.

[Pixel_Kitsune]

I'm going to go with "It Depends".

There's clearly two (or more) types of players when it comes to the relationship between flavor and mechanics. If you feel Flavor is relevant and the Mechanics just support that, rules light systems are great fun. Look at Savage Worlds, or Mutants and Masterminds. If lack of crunch dictated use they'd have slipped away instead of running solid.

But, as I'm learning in the 5e forum, there are a fair number of people who just NEED that crunch to give details and specifics for them to play. They can't imagine being a two weapon fighter, they need the rules to specifically tell them how they are able to roll extra or do something because they're fighting with two weapons.

[noob]

I'm going to go with "It Depends".

There's clearly two (or more) types of players when it comes to the relationship between flavor and mechanics. If you feel Flavor is relevant and the Mechanics just support that, rules light systems are great fun. Look at Savage Worlds, or Mutants and Masterminds. If lack of crunch dictated use they'd have slipped away instead of running solid.

But, as I'm learning in the 5e forum, there are a fair number of people who just NEED that crunch to give details and specifics for them to play. They can't imagine being a two weapon fighter, they need the rules to specifically tell them how they are able to roll extra or do something because they're fighting with two weapons.

Mutants and masterminds is in fact rules heavy due to the high amount of powers each with its own rules and a whole bunch of interactions(ex: descriptors and power targeting descriptors, modifiers for powers and so on).

[Anonymouswizard]

I'm going to go with "It Depends".

There's clearly two (or more) types of players when it comes to the relationship between flavor and mechanics. If you feel Flavor is relevant and the Mechanics just support that, rules light systems are great fun. Look at Savage Worlds, or Mutants and Masterminds. If lack of crunch dictated use they'd have slipped away instead of running solid.

I remember them both being pretty crunchy, with both having a relatively freeform element with power trappings (although the fifth edition of SW crunchifies that). In fact I'd hesitate to call Forged in the Dark or Fate rules-light, although Fate does have two rules-light treatments (Accelerated and Condensed).

Hell Fate has something many rules-light games just straight up couldn't manage, and that's crunchy supplements. Most of the purple Toolkit series are discussions and examples on how to model X in your gameline, with the Adversary Toolkit being the best damn antagonist focused book I've seen.

Fate Core has a lot of moving parts that the book explains kind of poorly. It (and by extension Fudge) actually kind of a precursor to Cortex Prime, more of a toolkit to make your own game with an included example than a complete system. I suspect most of the reason Accelerated was so popular is that there was just less tuning required.

[llama-hedge]

I'm going to have to agree with 'it depends'. For a concrete example, my main group started with Fate Accelerated and bounced off it pretty hard (or at least I did) because it was hard to get the measure of what our characters could actually do. It was fun, but in spite of rather than because of the system and it ended up being a free-for-all that the rules didn't particularly help with. Part of that though was inexperience coming with good aspects though, and I suspect that if we tried it again today we'd do better. 5e worked much better for us in the beginning due to the extra structure and clear buttons to push. To someone totally new to the genre, I wouldn't recommend something at either end of the spectrum.

[Zuras]

An experienced GM can make any game work, regardless of the rules. I have been able to run total noobs through a game of Shadowrun before, and Shadowrun is not a lite system.

Now, from a new player perspective Rules-Lite can work really well IF the players are all ready familiar with the base tropes the game is trying to mimic. I have played several Monster-of-the-Week games where the players knew nothing about RPGs, but knew about TV shows like Buffy, Supernatural, Etc. so were easily able to grasp what was supposed to be happening in the game.

All they needed was their playbook individually, and the quick reference sheet as a group and they were ready to play in about 5-10 minutes. I have had board or card games take longer to learn!

This is the impression I have gotten from playing FATE as well. Not sure it works well without an experienced GM or other players, but if players are familiar with the genre, they have a general idea of what they want to do and can basically tell the GM “I want to do X”, and the GM explains how to do it mechanically within the system. So is all that extra genre information players carry around in their heads part of the rules, given that it’s necessary to play the game?

[Pauly]

For me what makes a rule set accessible.

1.) Clarity. Things explained in easy to understand language, arranged in a logical order and without ambiguity.

2) Completeness. The rules cover what players will engage with on a regular basis,

3) Lack of esoterica. The rules don’t cover everything. You don’t get bogged down with pages and pages of rules covering things most players won’t engage with.

4) An engaging hook. Do I want to play in this setting with these rules? This often involves art, fluff and layout.

5) Logical consistency in the rules. Things like high numbers good, not you sometimes roll over for a success and other times roll under for a success.

[Cluedrew]

I'm going to go with yes but also there are enough other factors that you can't really judge a system's accessibility by its rules light. Having fewer rules to learn will help, but guidance and clarity of those rules is also a big deal. Along with all sorts of subjective factors like if you have played a system that uses a similar paradigm.


Some rules-light games depend heavily on narrative elements, which can be confusing for people who are used to more simulationist systems like D&D.Oh yeah, people being so into D&D they cannot play anything else is a real problem. I hate that. (Also D&D is "simulationist"?)

[stoutstien]

Oh yeah, people being so into D&D they cannot play anything else is a real problem. I hate that. (Also D&D is "simulationist"?)

D&d is always had a strong simulationist vibe. It has an equally strong gamist vibe in more recent editions but it doesn't override the prior.
People often confuse this with saying that the game is a simulation representing something else like the real world which all it really means is it's simulating itself.

When players take actions they have a direct result in game. When people are talking about the metagame they're really complaining about challenging this simulationist approach. You're supposed to use in-game knowledge for in-game action and try to prevent too much of an overlap with the gamist barriers. It's going to exist out of necessity but the idea is to keep the ripples down. That's why some people are strongly against meta-currencies or plot points.

The gamist portion of the game is just covering things like balance and fairness in making sure that the players are having fun while running this simulationist system.

[Gnoman]

Any RPG system needs to provide a minimum of three things

1. It has to tell you how to do things
2. It has to define the kind of things you can do
3. It has to give you some idea of why you're doing the thing in the first place


#3 is the part where a rules-light system can (but is not guaranteed to) easily fail new players. People with RPG experience can infer the context from the rules themselves, and very likely picked the new system entirely because it fit context they already had. New players, however, who might have picked it up based on the cover art, or subject matter (somebody might, for example, pick up Flying Circus because "oh, this is a game about airplanes!"), need to have "what is the goal of this game" explained to them.

Rules-heavy systems generally define what you can do enough that context comes naturally - by the time you're finished skimming the D&D character classes, you get the idea that you're a group going into dark places, fighting monsters, and taking their stuff. A hypothetical rules-light version with all abilities less defined (to maximize player freedom, counting on the archetype you want to play constraining your actions)? That might not come across.

That said, #2 can also be a big stumbling block. I've had a lot of new players, unable to come up with what their characters would do, start going through their class abilities like a checklist until they find an action that fits. A lot of rules light systems depend on "well, the players will come up with what they want to do, the GM decides which of the small number of skills apply, and you roll for it", which can lead to boring play if the players haven't started coming up with "these are the kind of things I should be able to do" yet.

#1 is pretty much the least difficult to do, not least because most resolution mechanics can be explained in a paragraph no matter how light or heavy the rest of the rules are. In most cases, they can be expressed in a sentence.

[noob]

Any RPG system needs to provide a minimum of three things

1. It has to tell you how to do things
2. It has to define the kind of things you can do
3. It has to give you some idea of why you're doing the thing in the first place


#3 is the part where a rules-light system can (but is not guaranteed to) easily fail new players. People with RPG experience can infer the context from the rules themselves, and very likely picked the new system entirely because it fit context they already had. New players, however, who might have picked it up based on the cover art, or subject matter (somebody might, for example, pick up Flying Circus because "oh, this is a game about airplanes!"), need to have "what is the goal of this game" explained to them.

Rules-heavy systems generally define what you can do enough that context comes naturally - by the time you're finished skimming the D&D character classes, you get the idea that you're a group going into dark places, fighting monsters, and taking their stuff. A hypothetical rules-light version with all abilities less defined (to maximize player freedom, counting on the archetype you want to play constraining your actions)? That might not come across.

That said, #2 can also be a big stumbling block. I've had a lot of new players, unable to come up with what their characters would do, start going through their class abilities like a checklist until they find an action that fits. A lot of rules light systems depend on "well, the players will come up with what they want to do, the GM decides which of the small number of skills apply, and you roll for it", which can lead to boring play if the players haven't started coming up with "these are the kind of things I should be able to do" yet.

#1 is pretty much the least difficult to do, not least because most resolution mechanics can be explained in a paragraph no matter how light or heavy the rest of the rules are. In most cases, they can be expressed in a sentence.
Some 1 page rpgs do present all the three mentioned elements in a short space.

[False God]

Is a game really “rules light” if it only has two pages of rules, but you have to watch several hours of actual plays before you’re actually sure how to play it? Or is this universal to all RPGs (light, heavy, whatever) and I just haven’t noticed it before?

So, I am pretty terrible at learning a game by reading the rules. I almost always learn better "by doing" and actually playing the game.

So I guess my measure is "Do I understand how to play the game by the end of the first session?" With a "session" being about 4 hours. And I'm not saying "know every spell" or "be able to play every class", but know which dice to roll when asked, know how to create the dice pool if the game calls for one and generally understand common terms of play.

So to your question, I would probably say "no", thats not actually a rules light system. My experience is that rules "lite" systems tend to achieve their lite-nature by:
A: relying on what they assume is common knowledge about TTRPGing.
B: relying on DM rulings or player creativity to fill-in or trump the rules.
C: simply skipping over what the designers think "doesn't need to be explained".*
*This is different from A in that there is often an attitude among the designers & players to refuse explain the feature, a sort of arrogance that if you can't understand the rule or can't read between the lines to understand its unwritten meaning, you're too dumb to play; as opposed to simply assuming you're familiar with "generic"(read: D&D) TTRPG play.

IME: A lot of "lite" games focus too heavily on the page count instead of the actual ease of understanding the rules. IMO, rules don't need to be simplistic to be lite, they need to be clear to understand and generally quick to play. It's better to explain your rules well, than it is to worry about taking up more than X number of pages.

[KorvinStarmast]

Dragonlance marked the start of the decline of TSR, as they tried to incorporate a new style of play but never successfully adapted the rules to it. And they missed the mark by a mile with 2e, which did nothing significant to adapt to it. Even WotC didn't really adapt properly for it with 3e, although they took some baby steps. It wasn't until 4e that the rules really changed sufficiently to handle that kind of thing. I may keep this as a reference. But the real problem was Kender ... :smallbiggrin:


Oh yeah, people being so into D&D they cannot play anything else is a real problem. I hate that. (Also D&D is "simulationist"?) It (that bolded part) is not a real problem; it's something you just invented. To assert that "they cannot play anything else" requires far more evidence than a discussion forum can possibly fit.

Might want to lay off the hyperbole there. (Or improve your "elevator pitch" technique)

Now "are not interested in trying something else" may be what you meant to capture with that careless remark.

Any RPG system needs to provide a minimum of three things

1. It has to tell you how to do things
2. It has to define the kind of things you can do
3. It has to give you some idea of why you're doing the thing in the first place

#3 is the part where a rules-light system can (but is not guaranteed to) easily fail new players. That's an interesting thought to chew on, thanks for presenting it that way.

[MoiMagnus]

Most of my personal experiences with rule-light systems is that they work a little like "Uno" or similar card games:
+ Nobody around the table ever read the rules (often including the GM themself), and the game just propagates by peoples playing with each others and becoming GM to other tables, without ever reading much about the rules.
+ Outside of what's directly used for playing, like the character sheets, the details of the rules change from a table to another, or even from a campaign to another on the same table. And if someone at some point bother to read the written rules, they'll discover that we don't actually use them but nobody cares (though we might take some inspiration of them for the next campaign).

In particular, the one rule-light TTRPG I've played the most, I'm not sure it exists outside of my country, and I'm not sure just reading the rules would be enough to understand how to play it in an interesting way. By that metric it is not accessible.

But on the other hand, it's by far the easiest game I've had to teach "how to GM" after a campaign to a player wanting to be a new GM. By that metric, it is very accessible.

[Burley]

I ran a one-shot of D&D with a few friends who hadn't done TTRPGs before. I played it very rules-lite, veering more toward "rule of cool." Even still, most players, most turns, spent more time staring at their character sheet, looking for answers, than they spent being and controlling their characters.

Then, I ran a game of Monster of the Week for the same group and they flourished. They all had a concrete understanding of their abilities and spent time roleplaying and developing their characters.

Especially for new players, less is more.

[Zuras]

Any RPG system needs to provide a minimum of three things

1. It has to tell you how to do things
2. It has to define the kind of things you can do
3. It has to give you some idea of why you're doing the thing in the first place


#3 is the part where a rules-light system can (but is not guaranteed to) easily fail new players. People with RPG experience can infer the context from the rules themselves, and very likely picked the new system entirely because it fit context they already had. New players, however, who might have picked it up based on the cover art, or subject matter (somebody might, for example, pick up Flying Circus because "oh, this is a game about airplanes!"), need to have "what is the goal of this game" explained to them.

Rules-heavy systems generally define what you can do enough that context comes naturally - by the time you're finished skimming the D&D character classes, you get the idea that you're a group going into dark places, fighting monsters, and taking their stuff. A hypothetical rules-light version with all abilities less defined (to maximize player freedom, counting on the archetype you want to play constraining your actions)? That might not come across.

That said, #2 can also be a big stumbling block. I've had a lot of new players, unable to come up with what their characters would do, start going through their class abilities like a checklist until they find an action that fits. A lot of rules light systems depend on "well, the players will come up with what they want to do, the GM decides which of the small number of skills apply, and you roll for it", which can lead to boring play if the players haven't started coming up with "these are the kind of things I should be able to do" yet.

#1 is pretty much the least difficult to do, not least because most resolution mechanics can be explained in a paragraph no matter how light or heavy the rest of the rules are. In most cases, they can be expressed in a sentence.

I think this is one great way to summarize the situation. I note that you specify “system” and not “rule set”, so maybe the point is that you can have a game with only two pages of rules, but the game system is significantly more than those two pages of rules.

To give a concrete example: Knave, an excellent light OSR system, fits its rules on six pages (arguable less, since some of the pages are random tables). Knave manages this because it is an attribute-based roll-under system. The vast majority of the complexity of the system boils down to two questions: what attribute applies to a given task, and whether the task is more or less difficult than average.

Knave succeeds in meeting requirement #1 (for me and presumably many others) because we already have well-established head canons for what the six D&D stats represent (although the Knave rules specifically call out a few differences with base D&D to balance the utility of all stats equally), and 5e DMs have been stuck assigning difficulty on the fly for ages already.

Additionally, because Knave is intended primarily as a tool to run a cool OSR dungeon, it doesn’t even attempt to fully answer requirement #2. Instead it expects the dungeon you’re running to specify many of the details needed to let the players interact with it. If you’re trying to use it for a dungeon with traps described as “pit trap, DC 12, 2d6+2 damage” instead of one describing how the traps actually work, it’s not going to work very well.

As an OSR dungeon-crawler, #3 is also easy to answer, as your goal is simply to get to the next room without ending up dead, and extract as much treasure from the dungeon as possible.

[Tanarii]

That said, #2 can also be a big stumbling block. I've had a lot of new players, unable to come up with what their characters would do, start going through their class abilities like a checklist until they find an action that fits. A lot of rules light systems depend on "well, the players will come up with what they want to do, the GM decides which of the small number of skills apply, and you roll for it", which can lead to boring play if the players haven't started coming up with "these are the kind of things I should be able to do" yet.

It's a pretty big thing if the rules don't give the players an idea of the scope of the things that are expected to be possible.

Can my warrior leap 60ft to make an attack?
Can my martial artist run up walls, jump off a cloud, or bend elements?
Can I cast spells? How powerful?
Can I shoot a superhero blast of some kind?

[Gnoman]

Some 1 page rpgs do present all the three mentioned elements in a short space.

Correct - I didn't say this was a universal failure of rules-light or even rules-minimum systems. I labeled it as a potential pitfall that means rules-light systems are not inherently easier to comprehend for new players just by virtue of being rules light. Individual player mindsets also matter - some people can't really learn a game just by reading the rules, some need exhaustive rules for things to make sense.

[Cluedrew]

D&d is always had a strong simulationist vibe. It has an equally strong gamist vibe in more recent editions but it doesn't override the prior.I'm going to just need an longer explanation of how you are using these terms to make sense of this.


It (that bolded part) is not a real problem; it's something you just invented. To assert that "they cannot play anything else" requires far more evidence than a discussion forum can possibly fit.I'm not making that up. Now, for clarity, I don't mean there is no theoretical situation where they couldn't learn with enough time and energy. But I have played with someone who, even with us actively teaching them, could make no forward progress before they killed the campaign. So practically speaking, I don't think it is going to happen and I am willing to use the word "cannot" in that situation.

[KorvinStarmast]

Now, for clarity, I don't mean there is no theoretical situation where they couldn't learn with enough time and energy. But I have played with someone who, even with us actively teaching them, could make no forward progress before they killed the campaign. So practically speaking, I don't think it is going to happen and I am willing to use the word "cannot" in that situation. You presented this as something true, as a fact, not an outlier - which is what it appears to be. My experience is that most people are easily able to handle multiple kinds of games.
Hence my response as regards your hyperbole.
Gee, you met one player who can't handle a different game.
Well, tell the truth. That's one player.

[stoutstien]

I'm going to just need an longer explanation of how you are using these terms to make sense of this.


gamist is the style which values setting up a fair challenge for the players (as opposed to the PCs). The challenges may be tactical combat, intellectual mysteries, politics, or anything else. The players will try to solve the problems they are presented with, and in turn the GM will make these challenges solvable if they act intelligently within the contract.

simulationist is the style which values resolving in-game events based solely on game-world considerations, without allowing any meta-game concerns to affect the decision. Thus, a fully simulationist GM will not fudge results to save PCs or to save her plot, or even change facts unknown to the players. Such a GM may use meta-game considerations to decide meta-game issues like who is playing which character, whether to play out a conversation word for word, and so forth, but she will resolve actual in-game events based on what would "really" happen.

It's often confused for realism-simulation where the game is meant to model close to real life.



In short content that is designed for the player is gamist and content designed for the character is simulationist. I think most would agree that they're both important components when dealing with games there is broad as DND.

[Cluedrew]

To KorvinStarmast: In addition I would like to clarify that this is more common with D&D than with other systems simply because the player base is larger and because the chance having only played D&D is larger. It is not because of any innate qualities of the system itself.

To stoutstien: Yes, under that model I would argue that D&D is definitely more focused on the game than the simulation. From the "remember to check for traps" of the old days, to the 1-20 character progressions of 3rd and the continued presence of a squad tactics mini-game across editions (peaking of course in 4th), D&D is loaded with player facing challenges.

[Zuras]

It's a pretty big thing if the rules don't give the players an idea of the scope of the things that are expected to be possible.

Can my warrior leap 60ft to make an attack?
Can my martial artist run up walls, jump off a cloud, or bend elements?
Can I cast spells? How powerful?
Can I shoot a superhero blast of some kind?

Isn’t this the case with most “generic” rule systems? The rules in FATE don’t tell you how to interpret the levels on the high end of the difficulty scale without a feel for the genre conventions.

The issue with players is more when they don’t have a good reference point to start the conversation with the GM. I’ve played in sci-fi FATE games where I wasn’t sure if the limits of what I could do as a science officer, but I knew enough to start by asking the GM ridiculous things like “can I reverse the polarity?” and “can I de-modulate the carrier wave the enemy weapon is using” so the GM could figure things out and present narrative problems.

In the examples you gave, the GM can simply say yes, yes-but (it will cost a metacurrency point or other resource), no, or maybe (providing a DC or other estimate of their odds). We talk a lot about how a good GM can cover a multitude of sins for a system, but the one thing they can’t do is get the players to make the initial ask.

[Jay R]

That depends on what “accessible” means to you.

It’s easier to learn the rules of a rules-light system. Go is more accessible in that sense than chess is. You can learn the rules in two minutes.

But it’s just as hard to become a master of one of them than the other. [Actually, it may be harder to become good at Go than at Chess.]

Similarly, it’s easier to learn the rules of original D&D (printed on 29 8½” x 11” sheets of paper) than to learn all the rules of 3.5e. But system mastery of original D&D is purely based on imagination, cleverness, and reading the DM; merely knowing the rules does not make you a good player.

And original D&D and D&D 3.5e with poor DMs are equally inaccessible to new players

But the crucial observation is this: “accessibility” isn’t an automatic quality of a game system. Obviously, I want my players to be able to play the game, but if the GM is good, he will make that happen with any system. I’ve run several games, and I know that I can make the game accessible. When I ran (or played) Champions, I knew I would have to create the character sheets for one or two other players, since the arithmetic involved wasn’t “accessible” to them. No problem; grade-school arithmetic is not a barrier for me. I was able to make them characters (from their ideas) that they were able to play and enjoy. But that game would not have been accessible to them without me there.

So in a very simplistic sense, yes, of course it’s easier to learn a few rules than a lot of rules. But the GM's expertise has a lot to do with it as well, and getting good at any game requires some effort.

[Lucas Yew]

(...)

In short content that is designed for the player is gamist and content designed for the character is simulationist. I think most would agree that they're both important components when dealing with games there is broad as DND.

May I poach the bolded quote for my enlightening, please? :o

[stoutstien]

May I poach the bolded quote for my enlightening, please? :o

Lol sure. I probably spend way too much time thinking about this stuff.

[Kurald Galain]

Is a game really “rules light” if it only has two pages of rules, but you have to watch several hours of actual plays before you’re actually sure how to play it? Or is this universal to all RPGs (light, heavy, whatever) and I just haven’t noticed it before?
It is pretty universal (and has been for a long time) that RPGs are easiest to pick up when you can watch someone play, or when you have at least one experienced person in the group. It's just that D&D'esque games have a ton of podcasts that make them easy to watch, and have a ton of derived games (most any MMORPG, or boardgames like Arkham Horror) that have a broader audience. So D&D'esque games are accessible in the sense that non-roleplayers are likely to be sort-of-familiar with them already.

It is also pretty universal that almost all RPGs (including rules-heavy ones) can be played by players that don't know any of the rules, in the sense that "you tell me what you want to do, and I'll tell you what (and if) to roll". Of course, this does require that the GM knows the rules, and in this case D&D'esque games are probably more accessible than anything rules-light.

But, for experienced RPG players who want to pick up a new system, yeah, rules-light is generally going to be more accessible than asking them to read yet another 300-plus-page rulebook.

[Duff]

Yes. But only if they are for a game that has limited scope.

As others have said, rules lite games often fail to give inexperienced players enough prompts about what they can do, enough limits so they don't suffer from decision paralysis.

Limited games "You're a private detective and friends, trying to solve the mystery and not get shot" usually limit the options and are easier to write in such a way that characters have the needed prompts without needing too much bulk.

The other thing rules lite games probably need is a GM willing and able to do more of the lifting.
In a rules dense game, the GM will just look up the rule, or look up the difficulty table, and they can tell the player what's going on. What's the difficulty? What will the need to roll? What was the result?

That's either an experienced GM, or a naturally strong one

[Shackled Slayer]

If i may weigh in, I would offer the short answer to your initial question is No.
i feel that almost every RPG has a learning curve, and it takes time for any system to get it's meaning across. rules lite systems aim to minimize that by simplifying chunks of crunch, but they still require a level of familiarization to fully understand. Hell, back when i ran my lasers and feelings game i had to explain the core mechanics about 3 times to get the group to understand how it worked, and that's a game that's SO rules lite that it may as well just be called "Make believe with 3 dice"

another part of it is, in fact, genre familiarity (in direct opposition to an above comment, somewhere). If you haven't played or run more than a couple cyberpunk games, of course it's going to be difficult to play any kind of cyberpunk system. do you know how many D&D campaign obstacles could be overcome with cell phone service? my current pathfinder campaign would simply not work if instant communication over any distance were a thing anyone had access to, as it features the players being messengers for both a courtly romance and political tension between the region capital and a province. that doesn't even touch on the actual meat and potatoes of body augmentations and a setting that doesn't have magic, but does have high technology, science, and advanced medicine. Which is to say, any system that is outside of the genre your familiar with is going to take some time to adapt to, let alone on top of the underlying mechanical rules that dictate how you interface with that sort of thing.

On top of that, every game system represents an entirely different mind set and framework for what players have adapted to already, in the case of D&D players/GMs trying a new, rules lite system. D&D has very strict rules dictating when you can move, take an action, use a bonus action and for what, whether pulling a lever is an action or a free action, how far you can move in a given turn, ECT ECT.
Where as in a more rules lite game, none of that is explicitly written out, and how much you can do in a single turn is much more open to conversation, and can allow players at baseline to do things D&D would require 3 feats and a racial feature to do.
in short, if a player is used to having every possible course of action have a ruling, a system that just says "you can do almost anything you want." seems like a featureless wall to scale, when in fact it's a canvas of possibility.

which is to say that every game ingrains modes of thinking that condition players to think along certain lines, and being presented with something that works radically different can be disorienting and create an artificial sense of inaccessibility, even when it would seem the opposite for one unacquainted with other TTRPG experiences.

[Devils_Advocate]

You presented this as something true, as a fact, not an outlier - which is what it appears to be. My experience is that most people are easily able to handle multiple kinds of games.
Hence my response as regards your hyperbole.
Gee, you met one player who can't handle a different game.
Well, tell the truth. That's one player.
It's statistically very unlikely that that one player is the only person on Earth who fits that description. Even assuming for the sake of argument that Cluedrew has only encountered the one, there are almost certainly others. And using "people" to refer to more than one person isn't really hyperbole, it's just normal use of pluralization. (If you really want to get prescriptive about it, the proper plural is "persons", but I don't think that's your objection here.) Cluedrew didn't say "most people", just "people".

If you acknowledge that someone doesn't believe something and isn't trying to convince anyone else of it, and that's not what they literally said... at that point, there's no non-contrived sense in which that's what they meant, is there?


(Also D&D is "simulationist"?)
D&D is faux-simulationist gamist. It tracks various quantities that can be assumed to very roughly correspond to stuff on the fiction layer, but the gamey details are by default assumed not to correspond. E.g., the player characters "really do" gradually improve their capabilities by testing them against increasingly difficult challenges. But getting better at picking locks just by killing enough kobolds, to borrow an example from On the Origin of PCs, probably isn't how the setting "actually" works.


D&d is always had a strong simulationist vibe. It has an equally strong gamist vibe in more recent editions but it doesn't override the prior.
People often confuse this with saying that the game is a simulation representing something else like the real world which all it really means is it's simulating itself.
Everything is a perfect simulation of itself. If that alone were simulationism, nothing would be any more simulationist than anything else.


But, as I'm learning in the 5e forum, there are a fair number of people who just NEED that crunch to give details and specifics for them to play. They can't imagine being a two weapon fighter, they need the rules to specifically tell them how they are able to roll extra or do something because they're fighting with two weapons.
An RPG's fiction is shared. It's not about whether one person can imagine something at all, it's about getting multiple people to imagine something, if not in the same way, at least in ways that don't contradict each other.

Is fighting with two weapons at once generally worse than using just one, as evidenced by humans usually not doing that? Is it instead twice as effective, because this is flashy cinematic fiction that eschews boring realism? Is there a trade-off that makes dual-wielding sometimes worth it and sometimes not, because different options should have different pros and cons? Or does it work exactly the same as fighting with one weapon, because it's just an aesthetic choice?

It's not even that it's not obvious which approach to use, it's that each approach is obviously the right one to some contingent of gamers. Personally, I'm fine with any of the above, but I do want to have some level of extremely basic understanding of what broad paradigm we're operating under before we even get to the "Ask the GM" stage.

A system may lay out a general approach like "gritty and realistic", "advantages should have costs", or whatever. Failing that, it may be easy to generalize the "correct" approach from examples or setting fiction. Failing that, it's an incomplete "build-a-game" system at that point. Possibly deliberately so, especially if the system is supposed to be genre-neutral. That may even be desirable to a GM who understands how a genre functions. To someone looking for advice on how to achieve a certain sort of tone or aesthetic, on the other hand, "Do it yourself" is rather less than useful.

[Satinavian]

ImE rules light systems are not more accessable.

They require far more common expectations to actually work. It is way easier to skim a couple hundred rule pages and later look things up you don't remember than to develop such an understanding.
Furthermore rules light systems tend to be bad when some people want to subvert genre expectations. Or when themes shift during a game.


And to the side discourse : D&D is not simulationist at all. It is full of monsters that don't work in any proper ecology or make sense in any of its official settings. Its economy is the most wonky i have ever seen in any game. It's magic is purely built for the game loop and PC challenges and mostly ignored for worldbuilding. It's combat system ... sure, it once had many pole-arms etc, but compared to competitors there is very little proper simulation. And how the class system should work in societies is hardly adressed.
Basically nothing in this game is crafted to properly play based on in-game considerations. If it has any focus at all, it is about gameplay loops and appropriate challenges. But actually it is just a pretty unfocused game.

Sure, traditionally people who wanted a more story focused experienced called D&D simulationist and used it as example for how it didn't provide what they needed, but they were pretty much wrong with this assessment.

Just contrast it with another of the old, big systems : SR. Think about how deeply connected the SR rules and the setting traditionally have been and how easy it is to play the game based on what makes sense in the world.

[kyoryu]

Is fighting with two weapons at once generally worse than using just one, as evidenced by humans usually not doing that? Is it instead twice as effective, because this is flashy cinematic fiction that eschews boring realism? Is there a trade-off that makes dual-wielding sometimes worth it and sometimes not, because different options should have different pros and cons? Or does it work exactly the same as fighting with one weapon, because it's just an aesthetic choice?

It's not even that it's not obvious which approach to use, it's that each approach is obviously the right one to some contingent of gamers.

Even beyond that, each approach is right for some specific games and scenarios. As a gamer, the approach I'd prefer depends heavily on what game (not system) I'm playing.


ImE rules light systems are not more accessable.

They require far more common expectations to actually work. It is way easier to skim a couple hundred rule pages and later look things up you don't remember than to develop such an understanding.
Furthermore rules light systems tend to be bad when some people want to subvert genre expectations. Or when themes shift during a game.

I think that's very heavily player dependent. I play mostly rules-light games, and those are issues I just don't have. I think as long as you have a reasonably flexible GM, and reasonably flexible players, and a system that is reasonably set up to allow for the appropriate flexibility, it doesn't come up very much, and is pretty easily resolved when it does.

IOW, it's not really so much about having a shared understanding up front, it's about coming to a shared understanding through play. As a GM, you have to calibrate your "this isn't how it works" meter fairly high, and presume that if a player suggests something, it's consistent with the world to them. Sure, you can override that, but do so when it really really really conflicts with the setting or known facts. And on the same side, as a player you need to accept that on occasion your assumptions will be wrong, and roll with that.

For some players and GMs, this absolutely doesn't work. And those players should probably avoid rules light games.

Two examples from actual play: In one case, a player wanted to go to the Mage's Guild. I hadn't planned or designed a mage's guild. But, there wasn't any strong reason why there couldn't be one, so boom, we went to the Mage's Guild.

On the other side, at one point a runecaster character wanted to do some rune magic on the run. That didn't jibe with my understanding of how runecasting would work, so I said that and asked the table for their opinions. The table agreed with that, the player accepted it, and we moved forward, and made some concessions to the player after about how runecasting would work, and gave an opportunity to modify the character as needed.

One of the biggest tricks as a GM in a scenario like this is to avoid just saying "no" to players. Instead, tell them the requirements to do what they want to do.

[truemane]

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