I have seen the suggestion that the amount of attention paid to rules for a given subject is in proportion to the amount of play time devoted to it.

Now, if you write your text that way, taking it as a principle of design, then I reckon you've got a self-fulfilling prophecy; see 4E D&D for example. This may actually qualify as a new school of RPG design generally (as opposed to things that are strikingly novel in the D&D context but not so much elsewhere).

However, what I see in the many rules sets with which I am acquainted is that the attention paid is in proportion to how much interest there is in detailed treatment when the subject does arise, and how little is likely to be inferred from common knowledge.

A handful of random observations regarding mechanics:

(1) People generally want a great deal of precision and specificity for any rules which can result in a character being removed from play.

(2) The complexity or amount of rules seems to have little effect on how often people use them, unless the rules are so complex that people don't want to use them at all. (For example, people avoiding grappling in D&D because the grappling rules have always sucked.)

(3) Rules which are directly applicable and meaningful to clear game structures will be frequently used. Rules which exist without a clear game structure will generally wither and die. (See here for a more detailed discussion of this.)

(4) What people do seems to have little impact on the mechanics. The presence (and prominence) of mechanics, on the other hand, tends to have a large impact on what people do. For example, OD&D has a very limited selection of mechanics for dungeon-crawling:

- How far you can move in a turn/round.
- How often you need to rest.
- How long it takes to search/ESP.
- How to detect secret doors
- How to open/shut/secure doors.
- How traps are triggered.
- How to listen at doors.
- Light sources and infravision.
- Torches can be blown out.
- Two ways of adjudicating Fire Balls and Lightning Bolts in enclosed spaces.

In 60+ sessions of my Ptolus campaign, the players have listened at doors to see what might be beyond them maybe a half dozen times. These exact same players in OD&D? They listen at doors all the time.

The notable thing here is that, obviously, rules for listening at doors didn't disappear from the game. But they no longer have the same, central importance in the rulebook that they did in OD&D. (By virtue of being included among a very short list of actual mechanics.)

In a similar fashion, the rule that "torches can be blown out by a strong gust of wind" is fascinating from a bibliographic standpoint. If you look at adventure modules from the 1970′s, you'll find strong gusts of wind all over the place. It was a ubiquitous part of the game.

Why? Again, I think it's because of the prominent place the rule for gusting wind had in OD&D.

What's specifically interesting about torch-extinguishing winds is that, by '79, they were essentially gone from the rulebooks. (3E includes rules for this. I suspect AD&D must, too, but if so they're so deeply buried I can't figure out where they are.) Despite this, torch-extinguishing winds continue to crop up in published scenarios for several more years before slowly fading away.

There are several possibilities for why this might have happened. But I'd like to propose that Occam's Razor suggests that this bibliographic trail indicates that the playing-style of including torch-extinguishing winds faded away because the rules were removed from the rulebook (and not that the rules were removed from the rulebook because the torch-extinguishing winds weren't being used any more).

The other interesting implication of this sort of thing is that, contrary to our gut instincts, rules-light systems can actually have a much larger influence (or even inhibiting effect) on the players than complex systems.

More specifically, if you have a completely neutral rules-light system (a universal mechanic and little more) then you won't see much influence on the players. Similarly, if you give the players a panoply of mechanical support, you won't see as much influence on chosen actions because the menu of options is so large.

But if you take a rules-light system and, like old school D&D, bolt on just a handful of specific mechanics... the players are going to grab onto those mechanics like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver.

I'd argue that you see a similar effect in 3E combat: 3E gives you a small list of very specific maneuvers for which it provides concrete mechanics. Players grab onto that small list of specific maneuvers and do those and nothing else. (4E, similarly, gives a different list of very specific maneuvers to each character... and you see lots of people complaining about people just using their powers instead of thinking outside the box.)

OD&D combat, on the other hand, doesn't give you much more than a universal "point and hit" mechanic. Players in OD&D campaigns will start trying all kinds of wacky stuff. (Similarly, in 3E, I see new players or players less familiar with the actual combat rules being more flexible and creative in the actions they choose. As they learn the specific mechanics, they zone into those mechanics.)

To add to what JA said, combat rules are kind of a special case in that they can be very detailed while also using few turns and having high risk. So players might avoid combat, and when it does come up its time-impact depends more on the number of turns, rolls, and players. Complex rules don't necessarily have more rolls, and they can very easily have fewer turns.

Nice post, Justin!

I think that the key for me is that I'd like to reference the rules as little as possible during play. If it can't be placed on a GM screen, it's probably too complex for my liking. (My favorite GM screen, by the way, is the old Judges Guild one -- it had combat charts, saving throws, basic stats for 100 or so monsters, and more. Sadly, now my vision is so bad I can't really read the tiny font on the monster entries any more. )

Now I just want to include a torch extinguishing wind in my next session. Unfortunately the PC's have a flaming sword they use as their primary light source so it wouldn't accomplish much if I did

More generally to the topic - I think it's a reasonable truism that if you include rules for something in an RPG, people will use them. This is perhaps more true in old fashioned multiple subsystem based RPGs than more modern universal mechanics ones (because by definition the older style of games have more discrete rules modules for things, rather than a simple "here's how to use the general rules to referee jousting contests on flying mounts" note).

There's a corollary to this of course, which is that if you have an exception-based design which includes a power/feat/charm for doing a thing, then people will assume you can't do that thing without the specific power/feat/charm, even if the designer's intent was simply that the power/feat/charm allowed you to do it better.

But yeah. TORG is the only RPG I've played which includes rules for disarming a nuclear bomb during a pitched firefight, and it's certainly true that I've run more scenarios which required bomb disarming in TORG than any other RPG.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;659618The other interesting implication of this sort of thing is that, contrary to our gut instincts, rules-light systems can actually have a much larger influence (or even inhibiting effect) on the players than complex systems.

More specifically, if you have a completely neutral rules-light system (a universal mechanic and little more) then you won’t see much influence on the players. Similarly, if you give the players a panoply of mechanical support, you won’t see as much influence on chosen actions because the menu of options is so large.

But if you take a rules-light system and, like old school D&D, bolt on just a handful of specific mechanics… the players are going to grab onto those mechanics like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver.

I’d argue that you see a similar effect in 3E combat: 3E gives you a small list of very specific maneuvers for which it provides concrete mechanics. Players grab onto that small list of specific maneuvers and do those and nothing else. (4E, similarly, gives a different list of very specific maneuvers to each character… and you see lots of people complaining about people just using their powers instead of thinking outside the box.)

OD&D combat, on the other hand, doesn’t give you much more than a universal “point and hit” mechanic. Players in OD&D campaigns will start trying all kinds of wacky stuff. (Similarly, in 3E, I see new players or players less familiar with the actual combat rules being more flexible and creative in the actions they choose. As they learn the specific mechanics, they zone into those mechanics.)

This is interesting, and kind of crystallises a lot of stuff that was floating around I think. Basically the best rulesets for enhancing player involvement/freedom of expression are extremely minimal or quite complex.

However I would qualify that slightly in the case of 'rulings not rules' tables, where I'd imagine that enhanced player involvement goes all the way up to moderately complex systems then drops off drastically as it's too difficult for the GM to handle more than that single handedly. These are groups where the players have as little involvement with the rules as possible in any case so the availability of mechanics or lack thereof is not very important.

It would be fun to design an optimal 'rulings not rules' game. Technically that's probably the simplest system imaginable but surely there must be ways to support that method of play which go beyond 'make it up as you go along'.

Interesting topic. Agree with both Philip and Justin.
A couple of other thoughts on possible factors:

-complexity. Some things are more complex and so take more space to handle. Particularly if you're dealing with older rulesets that may have been around before someone thought of a way deal with something more abstractly. Something taking lots of pages, might not be because its something the designer thought was critically important be played out step by step, so much as that its something the designer couldn't see how to do more easily. (flanking vs. facing, maybe). It also depends on how many 'corner case' situations the developer can foresee that get listed in the next.

Conversely I could imagine something could be important to the game but be beyond the ability of the designer to figure out to model, and be left out of the rules as a result. In which case you might get only some GM notes or something on how its cool, without any particular rules to back these up. Of course you can then argue whether that would indeed, be part of the game.
As far as examples for this goes, I can only think of a couple of rulesets with sections on 'going beyond the rules' - for instance in (IIRC) Creative Campaigning in 2E (the section where the PCs are scaring away bandits from a tower by using a dead minotaur to impersonate a fiend).

-legacy. Across editions a ruleset can change in focus while still keeping a lot of details relating to the old focus. I guess 2nd Edition still has quite a few dungeon crawl rules, while trying to be a broader non-dungeon-based fantasy game.

The next question I think logically is if you can't tell how important a given rule is by how much space it occupies, how ARE you supposed to know how important it is? My best guess so far being, you can make some sort of judgment by seeing how much other rules have to be compromised or adjusted to keep it. Or by playing it I guess.

The more I think about it the more I think there's a pretty weak connection between page count and use.

The role of GMs and players? You can describe it in about a paragraph. And you use it pretty much for every single aspect of the game.

If you've got a core mechanic like D20 roll high? Likewise.

And so on.

Quote from: beejazz;659865The more I think about it the more I think there's a pretty weak connection between page count and use.

Page count is odd, I noticed it when formallly writing up my homebrew. As a wargame/story-game hybrid with no setting and a page count of over 250 one would think it would be full of rules.

But entire sections are really nothing but examples of the rules being used (i.e. creature write ups) or description of when the rules are to be used (much of the skill and spell section). True actual 'new' content makes up a rather small percentage of the total which is why the game can be ran from a GM Screen with but rare exception.

More impactful than page count is what the rules are calling for you to do, how complex that action might be, and if you want to do it at all.

If you're not interesting in what the rules are asking for but you're forced to use them, they will appear heavier and in the way and thus more 'important'. If however they're something you want to do, even the most complex and page heavy mechanics become second nature and fade into the background.