Rules Light Games Require Trust (And a Good GM) To Work

Of all the conversations I have with people about gaming, the one that never goes anywhere is the one about how dense a game's rules system is. Because for a lot of players (and a lot of game masters, too) rules are always an impediment to their fun, their stories, or both. They see them as unnecessary boundaries that micro-manage their creativity, and even worse require them to read stacks of tomes or memorize large swaths of text to understand how their own character works.

That's a valid opinion to have. It's one I don't share, because as I mentioned in Rules Might Limit Dungeon Masters, But They Also Protect Players, roleplaying games are still games. Games, by their nature, have rules, victory conditions, and mechanics that determine who wins whenever there is a conflict. Rules are what keep things fair, and stop a session from becoming a playground game of make-believe where someone can out-creative you. Math plays no favorites, in other words.

However, there is something else I'd like to point out this week that I think often gets overlooked. It is that, simply put, games with fewer rules require you to have a greater trust in the person running the game that they will be fair. Not only that, but they require a GM who is willing to spin a lot of absolute nonsense out of thin air in order to roll with the punches, and keep the game going.

Hold on, hold on... I got this...

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Let's Talk Improvisation

No game is going to be able to cover everything players want to try. Sooner or later someone is always going to make a suggestion there are no rules for, and when that happens you either need to say, "There's no rules for that, you can't do it," or, "There's no rules for that, but let's make some!"

What the hell, let's make it happen!

What you're going to find is that the simpler a game's rules are, the more often the game master is going to have to come up with some way to allow the players to do things they didn't account for. Sometimes it's simple, like repurposing an existing type of skill check to use in a very different situation, but other times it can feel like you're building a whole new wing onto a house that you thought was done when you bought it.

And just like how someone who owns a home isn't necessarily someone who can build a home, so too there's no guarantee that someone who runs a good game can actually build a good game.

Don't get me wrong, here. There are some GMs who can whip out their toolbox and come up with smooth, well-fitting mechanics that run just like they were part of the original game. What I can tell you from experience, though, is that the number of GMs who think they can do this is very different from the number who actually can. And even if a GM is really good, an untested idea come up with on the spur is almost never going to be as good as something that was planned, workshopped, and put through playtesting before it was included in a rulebook.

And if your GM isn't actually good at this? Or worse, they purposefully skew things to put players at a disadvantage because the existing rules don't tell them they can't do that? That's going to create a bad time really fast.

As An Example

For those who want something concrete as an example, I'd suggest reading the rules for necromancy in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. While that might not be what some folks think of as a rules light game, I'd argue that it's right on the borderline since it has very rigid limits on what characters can and can't be, and you have relatively few meaningful options when it comes to customization. Especially when you compare it to more rules-dense games.

This is particularly true when it comes to what you can actually do with necromancers as a player.

Seriously, ya'll, black cloaks get hosed.

What do you think of when you think of necromancers? Typically it's someone who can raise or control large numbers of undead to do their bidding. And if you're playing a necromancer in Pathfinder, then it's like being at a buffet! If a creature has a corpse, then you can make it into a skeleton or a zombie, raising all sorts of strange and bizarre creatures to do your bidding, from skeletal orcs, to a zombie T-Rex that follows you around like a foul-smelling puppy! And as you go up in level you can create (and control) more powerful undead, applying templates to all kinds of bodies and creatures as long as their hit dice falls under your caster level, and ability to inflict your will.

In Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, necromancers can make no more than a few basic kinds of undead, even fewer forms of advanced undead, they lose control of them within a day after the casting, and they can only be made from human corpses (though one would assume any humanoid would work).

Now, I will freely admit that I don't have access to the entire trove that Wizards has put out from 5E, because unlike Pathfinder the entire archive isn't online for free where I can triple check my numbers. But this particular difference cropped up while I was working on Moüd, The City of Bones for my Sundara campaign setting. The city is run by a guild of necromancers called the Silver Wraiths, and one of the most obvious examples of their arts at work are the massive sand trains that tirelessly pull goods and people across the wasteland where their city is built. The creatures that haul these trains are skeletal mammoths, directed and controlled by a Silver Wraiths drover.

In Pathfinder, you can basically do this as a mid-level character with a few extra boosts to tweak your caster level, as long as you have access to the bones and materials to cast the spell. In DND 5E, as far as I was able to find, there's no way to do this short of GM fiat because the spells don't allow anything outside of basic undead made only from human corpses. And that's one thing that made converting the Pathfinder edition of Moüd: City of Bones to the DND 5E edition of Moüd such a pain in my behind.

And this is my job. There's no guarantee that someone who's running a game has the same skill set and experience it would take to design those kinds of options, even if they want to make them available for their players. And while there's nothing saying the GM has to do that, the simpler a game's rules are, the less support they're going to have when a player wants to step beyond the basics that's available.

Just Some Food For Thought

As I said in How The Trend in Rules Light RPGs Has Affected Me, I understand why these games are so popular. And not just popular, but thriving. These games require less investment of time and energy, they allow faster play, and less overall system mastery for someone to actually sit down and start rolling dice. And that is what a lot of players want, or need, and there's nothing wrong with that.

However, it's important to understand a rules-light game is like a knife. A good-quality knife can stand you in good stead, and it can accomplish a lot of different tasks. However, if you want one tool that can do even more tasks, even if said tool is a little fiddly, then a Swiss army knife, or a multitool is going to be the better option.

Because it's entirely possible that your GM is skilled enough to saw off a tree branch, pick their teeth, clean their nails, and open a wine bottle with a survival knife... but if that's the sort of task they're looking to do, it might be better to use a broader toolbox to avoid problems, frustrations, and accidents.

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