Less Rules To Do More

Hanging out on forums, game design communities, discord servers and the like I come across a lot of people trying to hack games, old school D&D in particular to do more than what it currently does for them.

Some examples include things like:

• Differentiating between “kinds” of hit-points, often breaking out concepts of luck, stress, actual physical damage into a variety of classes.
• De-abstracting armor class, clearly defining between the kinds of armor that keeps blows from hurting you, and actions you perform to completely avoid these blows (such as dodging and parrying).
• Adding concrete actions and reactions to combat – rules for called shots, active parries, specific classes of strikes, etc.
• Various implementations and adjustments to the magic system.
• Skills in general.
• More nuances to the experience systems.

This is all great – hacking is very much in the spirit of D&D and roleplaying and definitely should be done. Some really awesome games have developed out of the tradition of grabbing D&D, removing stuff you don’t like, adding stuff you do, and putting your own mark on it.

What I want to do is make an argument for removing rules to do what you want, before adding them in. This may seem counter-intuitive – how can you establish something as a priority if you don’t have a concrete rule for it?

Roleplaying games are interesting things in that they all occur in our minds. Its a bunch of shared fiction we’re all imaging. The rules can do a lot of things for us, like verify the imaginative stuff we’re saying, distribute authority, simulate genre conventions of hypothetical physics.

But the truth of the game really lies in what we all imagine it to be, and you don’t need a concrete rule to enforce that.

Say you want to have more moment-to-moment tactics on the kinds of strikes a character can perform in combat than D&D traditionally does. You can start adding in rules for lunges, whirlwind attacks, fighting defensively – or you can just let the player tell you what they’re doing and make a ruling.

How can you have a detailed wound system without clearly delineating what kinds of attacks do what kinds of hp damage? Just remove hp all together and make a ruling on the kind of wound someone would suffer from the fictional blow.

Differentiate characters based on what we know about them within in the fiction, instead of numbers slotted into an arbitrary skill list on a sheet.

As you start defining things concretely on a mechanical level you begin to add limitations – you set up requirements, trigger conditions to utilize these things, restrictions on who and what can perform them, and so forth.

This may have an advantage for you – you might want a 3.x-esque feat system to allow players to optimize build chains for. You might want Burning Wheel or Riddle of Steel’s nuanced combat mechanics to express system mastery through.

But when you set up these structures you start encouraging your players to play their character sheets in some way. You start drawing the players attention away from the fiction by asking them to focus on the numbers and phases and details of the system you create.

I think there is merit in keeping as much of the focus on the fiction as possible. I love games of all sorts, but the more the group talks about the fictional details during a game, the more fun I generally have.

I’m not going to profess that true immersion can really exist, we all know at some level we’re just dorks making silly voices coming up with Goblin Draculas, and that we only game for a few hours a week, we probably know the personalities of everyone we’re playing with, and we get the tropes of the particular genres and settings we’re playing in. And I am absolutely not arguing one style of gaming is better or more pure than another for everyone all the time.

But I think before you set down to add more to the game, see if you can instead get the effect you want by trimming the mechanics around your problem area and just negotiating it fictionally – maybe make a ruling, maybe roll some dice, but try to keep the energy on the fiction and less on the procedures.