Rules Light vs Crunch

The only thing I like about crunchy games is character generation. Having lots of options is legitimately kind of fun. In theory, of course, you have all of those options in a rules light game, but in actual practice, you probably can't think of them on the fly when creating a character. I often like to browse prestige classes or other character options from very rules heavy systems like 3.5 or Pathfinder archetypes, etc. skim what they're all about, and then take that idea and concept and the idea and concept only and turn that into a rules light character. My last post about supervillains was done this way. Amrruk the Ancient, the Oozemaster, has nothing to do with the actual Oozemaster prestige class as found in whatever 3e book it was in (Masters of the Wild, I think? or possibly Tome and Blood.) I just took the idea of a powerful sorcerer (lich, as it turned out) who had a focus on slime and shoggoth-like shapelessness. It amuses me somewhat that the AI generative art seems to want to put a soggy Gandalf-style hat on him most of the time too.

Rules light works for me (and for Professor Dungeon Master) because we both prioritize and enjoy the same thing in the game; immersive role-playing. Stopping to play a reasonably complex mathematics based mini-game inside the game of D&D (or whatever) has become much less attractive to me over the years. And not even because the mini-game might not be fun; in general, I've had fun playing 3.5 combat. But it is not immersive roleplaying, and in fact it is just a tactical minigame, and you care much more about the rules of the minigame than you do about immersing yourself in the experience from the point of view of your character as if it were real. Naturally, if that's not your priority, than rules-light may well be unsatisfying to you. This is why who you game with, and making sure that you actually have compatible goals for the whole endeavor is the number one way to make sure you have a good roleplaying experience. A roleplayer playing with a powergamer or a beer and pretzels goof-off is probably going to be frustrated with the experience, or at best, it won't live up to his expectations even if it's still fun enough, because he's just not out for the same thing.

I've also never understood the idea of "rules light games are great for one-shots, but I don't know how you get a long-term campaign out of them" which I inevitably see repeatedly. This is one of those weird cases where someone believes something in spite of black and white empirical evidence that they're running into like a brick wall, and yet somehow refusing to change their opinion that they can go that way. In every version of D&D, but especially AD&D, and 3e, 4e and 5e, the game breaks down at higher level under the weight of its own complexity and poor scaling. Hardly anyone, according to data released by Wizards, actually plays the game over about 7th or 8th level or so, because it isn't fun anymore, so they stop those campaigns and start over when everything is fresh and fun again at lower level; y'know, when the game is less complex. Few consider that if they prolonged the sweet spot, made leveling slower, or even capped it completely, that they could in theory play that same campaign indefinitely. The amount of obtuseness necessary to make that claim is boggling to me; it's like claiming that Dr. No was fine and all, but James Bond doesn't have a complex enough character arc to be a franchise; he's a one and done. In theory yes, but, well... clearly not.

Anyway, here's the older Dungeon Craft video that I'm referring to.

That super tactical, slow-moving combat mini-game also isn't really very tense or exciting, ironically, in almost every version of D&D. Nor is it very tactically interesting, except in the context of the game rules, which bear very little relationship to anything that feels realistic about actual fighting. Not that I'm an expert or anything. I have two sons who do MMA, and I did a fair bit of fencing (the sport, with the white suits and mesh facemasks, not HEMA or anything) but even so. It doesn't take a genius to understand that the rules of D&D combat encourage tactics, because they're successful in the game, that have little to do with real life. Plus, they're kind of repetitive and boring after a while.

This is exactly why I have a weird fascination with the OSR. Not that I stand with or for many of the principles of OSR play, but because they've embraced, to a greater or lesser degree, two principles that are super important to my play: 1) DIY. If the rules aren't working for you, replace them with some that do. My embrace of Lovecraftian vs. Vancian magic was the single biggest change that could make an OSR-style game actually work for me but it requires some pretty significant house-ruling to the nature of spellcasting, and 2) rulings, not rules, and a rules-light structure, but one still based on a D&D chassis. It's curious to me that in the 90s and 00s, indie-games were rules-light and often positioned themselves in contrast to D&D and D&D-like games, yet with the OSR, the two have come together. And frankly, I like the D&D-like chassis. Doing all kinds of things differently for the sake of being different is kind of obnoxious. (As an aside, I'm kind of gratified and maybe even vindicated to see that rules that are much less Vancian and much more Lovecraftian are really gaining steam in the OSR. By which I mean mostly the roll to cast and some kind of mishap table for failures. My own rules are even more Lovecraftian than that, particularly in how you acquire spells, but that's OK.)

That said, I've rambled about the OSR many times before, and determined that although I actually have a game that's more or less compatible with modules, spells, monsters, etc. from OSR sources, that's just a coincidence. My game is based on 3.5, but codified in exactly how to ignore most of the rules and just keep the underlying structure of it. In this respect, it's most similar to Microlite, or m20. Which isn't surprising, since earlier versions of the game were literally Microlite variants. And I was gradually drawn into the concepts of Lovecraftian magic from other compatible magic systems, particularly the spells in the d20 Call of Cthulhu book and the Incantations from the Urban Arcana book in the d20 Modern line. DIY doesn't have to mean innovative creation; it can also—and often does—mean creative kit-bashing more than scratch-building. To use modeling terms. Another hobby that I never quite had but had an interest in for a long time.

Anyway, yeah, I'm absolutely in the rules-light camp, and I have little patience with rules-heavy games anymore. I never really did; even when playing or running them, I usually did so in a pretty handwavey manner. It helps that games like 3e and above D&D had a pretty sensible and simple universal task resolution mechanic, and the rules heaviness was mostly about running feats, spells, and other edge cases that distorted or broke the basic rules. Those can be socialized or delegated to the player that's using them, for the most part, and ignored otherwise.