...Or almost anything.  You know what I mean: mechanics that you can pull out whole-hog from a game, and to your surprise the changes are either effectively nil, or so minor as to not be a problem.  I don't mean house-ruling something its place, I just mean saying "I'm not going to use that".

Alignment is often the most common example of this. But are there others? Ones you've found really unexpected?

RPGPundit

Hi!
  I would say Encumbrance. And to a lesser extent, movement rules. Tactical movement rules can be fun, but you can play a good game without them.

  Also, Training times. these rules usually don't add much and can be an un-fun obstacle to time-sensitive plots (save the princess before the full moon, etc).

  Situational roll modifiers (+1 for higher ground, etc), I find that play does not change substantially if I forget to apply them. When I GM, I try hard to remember them, but I know that some GMs only use them to jolt players back into reality (you wanna do what!? Well according to the rules, that's a -20...).

  I've heard you can strip advancement out, but I feel like that would get noticed.

In Exalted 1e/Scion, I have seen most STs (including myself) ignore the limit break rules as they are hard to describe or make sense of. I have seen some STs forget about Willpower rules and the game seemed to progress smoothly.

Christ we get away with out using vast swaths of the game, and still have fun. We generally disregard a lot of rules until people start learning the system, then we add or change the ones we like.

So as people master the basics of character generation and the combat system, maybe then we worry about say the movement system, or whatever. Balancing the game is perhaps the simplest job I have as a Game Master, after all I get to make all of the important decisions on that front.

1st Ed D&D: everything in the DMG except for the to hit and saving throw tables and magic item lists. Worked for us for years, too much disorganized shit to keep track of however fun Gygax's writing style was to read...

1 - Not starting at 1st level or the base point total
2 - Throwing out XP counting
3 - Measuring ranges except by melee, short, medium and long

You can remove all of the Psionics rules from any version of Traveller and it will not effect the game.

Also, to my horror, several math-phobic gamers have shown me that you can remove the interplanetary travel rules from Traveller and not ruin the game.

In most games I throw out XP and level advancement. I understand and respect that for a lot of players character progression is a key aspect of roleplaying games, but it's never worked for me.

The way I see it in fiction for every Luke Skywalker that goes from farm boy to Jedi there are many, mnay more characters who start competent and remain so throughout the whole story arc.

In most games you can throw away the initiative system.

 I tend to prefer to handle things the way ORE, Star Wars d6, or The Riddle of Steel did things. i.e.: a slightly organized way of just declareing your action and rolling.

I find it makes combat more free flowing and cinematic. But it can take a little getting used to for some.

 My hat no no limit for games that have the mechanics heavily tied to a strict initiative system.


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When I was still playing Vampire: the Masquerade back in the early '90s, my friends and I fell into simply ignoring the vast majority of the blood related rules.  I mean, that's exactly what defined you as a vampire, but we just absent-mindedly came to realise that they were secondary, or even tertiary to the sort of game we were playing.  The GM would generally just hand-wave the whole hunting business, then we'd get on to having the fun of the real campaign.

In Traveller, we never once used the standard ship-to-ship combat rules as written -- we just abstracted the whole thing, because that's all the really mattered to us, the sense that we were locked in a battle, not the excruciating detail (which I later indulged in WWI miniature biplane games).

!i!

Can you take passions out of Pendragon? I'm doubtful, but if you want to play a strictly man-at-arms game, you might be able to.

Bards.