less rules to do more

Less Rules To Do More: Advancement

Advancement rules are another aspect of roleplaying that sees heavy mechanization. Which I totally get – I agree that games are about what they reward. How these rewards are illustrated, handed out, and utilized, however, has a variety of methods they can be handled with – and like everything else in this series I think you can get away having a fully featured and rich set of rewards without explicitly mechanizing them.

Less Rules to Do More: Wounds

One of the things I have done when running Primeval 2D6 is to get rid of the more abstract notion of hit points, number of hits, etc. in favor of a more descriptive form of injuries.

This has coincided with my attempt to move all of my old school-styled gaming away from discussions of numbers and mechanics, and instead towards a discussion of the fiction as much as possible.

details follow

Less Rules To Do More: Combat Maneuvers

In my previous post I suggest removing mechanics around the important parts of the game to see if a more freeform rulings style of play will give you what you looking for, instead of defaulting to adding new mechanics.

Let’s look at one of the most popular areas to begin to add rules to games: combat maneuvers.

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?