Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

[Quertus]

Some days, it's hard to tell. Fer ex...

My intent is/was about the "rules about the rules" and how much effort, and perhaps fiddlyness or work or fragility, there is in those. I'm not trying for a full "joules required to run a session", or even "joules required to use a rule", but more "joules required during session in order to use the rule". With the assumption that the rules are being used correctly.

Yup, I figured. Half the point of my post was to make that difference really plain, to give you the opportunity to weigh in on what the “executive summary” of your post would look like. That said,

I think a lot of this is highly subjective. For me, 5e D&D basically runs itself.

For me, ad libbed, ad hoc decisions about how things should resolve are the core of TTRPGs.

On the one hand, I agree, in that, without (the potential for) “ad libbed, ad hoc decisions”, it is not, by my definitions, an RPG. So you’re kinda definitionally correct.

Otoh, I think that one measure of a “good” RPG is that the box is sufficiently inclusive that the entirety of the core gameplay loop could instead be played entirely “inside the box”, where if the GM fell asleep and was replaced by omniscient co-GM doppelgänger, the results would be indistinguishable. (EDIT: gah, that wasn’t clear at all! What I mean is, I think a good RPG should have sufficient rules that, if the players so chose, they always had the option to take actions that involved 0 GM adjudication (when dealing with 100% public information; no “But the fire elemental is actually a troll with an illusion”, which necessitated the need for the omniscient doppelgänger).)

Regardless, 5e “make stuff up” skills place it clearly outside Zeus territory. Whether it’s Hephaestus or Atlas I guess depends on the extent to which you can and bother to plan for the actions of the PCs. And how much effort that takes depends somewhat on the GM, being subjective in that regard? But still quite objective for which camp it’s in, wrt when the rule work is actually done.