Rules, Rules, and More Rules

I'm currently refereeing three different campaigns at the moment: House of Worms, using Empire of the Petal Throne; Barrett's Raiders, using the Free League edition of Twilight: 2000; and Dolmenwood, using the rules of the same name. Of the three, only two – EPT and Dolmenwood – can be called "old school" in the usual sense of the term, though T2K has a lot in common with many old school games, specifically its focus on hexcrawling and resource management. That said, I wouldn't really call Twilight: 2000 "old school" without some big caveats. That's no knock against it, since my players and I have been enjoying ourselves with it for more than three years now, but I think it's important to note these things, particularly in light of the topic of this post.

Empire of the Petal Throne is a very early RPG. Released in 1975, it's a close cousin to OD&D in terms of rules, meaning that it's not very mechanically complex. Dolmenwood is a little bit heftier, being largely derived from Moldvay/Cook Dungeons & Dragons (1981), itself a clarification and expansion of OD&D. Twilight: 2000 (2021) uses a variation of Free League's "Year Zero" rules, versions of which can be found in most of the company's games, like Forbidden Lands or Vaesen. The T2K variant is a bit more complex than the others, owing to its inclusion of modern firearms and vehicles.

In each campaign, I rarely use the game's rules as written. I don't mean that I've introduced lots of house rules (though I have in a few cases). I mean that I often ignore the rules. When playing, I often don't want to slow down the flow of the session by having to refer to a rulebook or a chart. Instead, I prefer to rely on my memory and that of the players, which means that we're more likely to strictly apply those that we remember than those we don't. I call these kinds of rules "sticky" rules, because they stick in your memory. 

One of the reasons I prefer old school RPGs like D&D is that I find their rules much stickier than those of newer games. To some extent, that's simply a function of familiarity. I've been playing D&D and Traveller for more than four decades; I know them almost like the back of my hand. I lack this familiarity with games I learned more recently. On the other hand, there's no question that most older roleplaying games are much more mechanically simple than those that came later. Again, this is a generalization and there are plenty of counterexamples. My point is that, as both a referee and a player, I'm much more comfortable with fewer and simpler rules, since I'm much more likely to remember and, therefore, use them.

But, as I already noted, even in games like EPT or Dolmenwood, I regularly handwave or outright ignore rules in the heat of play. For example, Empire of the Petal Throne includes spell failure rules. Depending on a character's level, psychic ability, and the type of spell, there's a chance a spell might not function. At mid to higher levels, this chance is minute, but there's still a chance of failure. Despite this, I don't always make the players roll, since there are many occasions when I feel it unnecessary or disruptive to the flow of the action. I defer to my own judgment here rather than the rules and the players have never complained. Were they to do so, I wouldn't hesitate to use the rules as written, but I like to think that, after a decade of play, we've built up enough trust that that no players worries much about how I'd adjudicate in-game situations.

I think about this question a lot, because many aspects of the new Twilight: 2000 rules, chiefly the combat system, are more complex than I like. There's nothing wrong with them and, by many measures, they're much simpler than the original GDW T2K combat rules. However, I'm not fond of them and I frequently dispense with many persnickety aspects of them in the interests of speed and simplicity. Again, the players rare complain about this and accept my judgments. Had I the ability to start this campaign over again, I might have opted for simpler, more straightforward rules, but, after more than three years, it's too late for that, so we muddle through. 

That's more or less where I am with rules these days: when give the option, I prefer simple, even simplistic, rules over more elaborate and complex ones. I'm not opposed to trying to model complicated situations and activities mechanically and, under the right circumstances, could even find that enjoyable. However, as a referee running a weekly game over the course of many years, I have come to find that rules I can't keep in my head without recourse to a book or a chart or a table don't hold a lot of appeal for me anymore. Consequently, my latest drafts of the rules for Secrets of sha-Arthan are decidedly much simpler than earlier ones. It's yet another way that my experiences as a referee have colored my own design work – and for the better, I hope.