All rules are bad, but many are necessary.
A game about travel without rules for carrying things just forces the GM to come up with rules on the fly.
But needing rules to resolve a lot of situations doesn’t mean a lot rules.
Designers can cheat by folding rules over each other, so they cover more area, without taking up more space in the toolkit.
Folding Rules in BIND
Unsure if a character knows some obscure fact about the local ruins?
This means - unsurprisingly - an Intelligence + Academics roll.
But we don’t need a new Skill for everything anyone does.
So if characters want to forge a letter, they can use Dexterity + Academics.
This begs the question, ‘what do the other Attributes do?’, and a few other tasks fell out naturally.
Nobody struggles to roll a D6 and add +2 in their head, but there’s something nice and immediate to any system that lets you just read the dice as they are.
Here’s a random proposal for a system which takes things into account, without any mental arithmetic.
This whole thing will follow the format of my thinking on systems, but that’s not required reading.
The system recognizes Attributes, Skills, and Equipment.
I can’t remember most of what playtesting taught me over the last ten years, but I remember these things:
XP on the Sheet
Players didn’t like having to look up the cost to buy Traits with experience points.
This seems a bit ridiculous, given that you only look up costs (at most) once per session and there are only a few traits to buy, and every experience ladder has an easy pattern as you increase the levels (e.g. ‘5/ 10/ 15’).
When your turn comes, play as many cards as you want, then pick up one.
If you draw an exploding kitten, you die.
These rules are a rare treat, because they avoid the nasty element of so many games: reading and remembering.
The first pitfall these rules avoid is any special notion of turn-order.
By just saying ‘your turn’, players can use their understanding of other games which have turn order.
This might not sound like much, but imagine stating the rules in full.
Of course, the Greek-laden formula is just a vector to tell the audience about Maths, but I still can’t approve, because I couldn’t follow any of the Maths.
So here’s some easier Maths for people who like RPGs, but don’t like Maths:
Standard RPG Setup
Each player has a 5-in-6 chance of showing up to a game.
Before the game, the gods roll 5D6, and if any die lands on a ‘1’, the game is cancelled.
The RPG scene has repeatedly laughed, cried, or tooted about the various ‘indie RPGs’ made by corporations with with multiple accountants.
But wherever you want to draw the line, it can’t be a single author, because nobody makes a standard RPG alone.
Even the smallest, the most indie of the indie-RPGs, has a credits page at the start.
Any book with only one person to credit wouldn’t have an editor; and any book without an editor desperately needs one.1
This is a response to Robgoblin’s post on hex maps.
It should have been an email, but Robgoblin has no contact details on the blog.
Our cartographic goblin argues that a six-mile containing one settlement doesn’t map to Middle Ages European fantasy settings, as any six-mile area would contain more than a single settlement.
Even in rural Scotland, relatively sparsely populated even in the mediaeval era, such a hex containing my hometown contains:
The giants aren’t bad once you redirect their bountiful energies.
We slept soundly next to this one, who was plagued by little men with stabbing, rusted knives, who woke him with a stab every time he slept.
Once the little lights from their wicker-basked heads appeared, we woke him, Poopy died, and he smashed the lot with his great giant-hands.
The next mission was to find and retrieve a pious man called ‘Gregor’.
Every time an enemy scarred him, he would draw his blade across the scar to make a cross.
The fact that his wounds did not cause infection provides proof that the B_______ has truly blessed him (praise be, unto both heads).
Soon after, more Friends of Giants Society folk came by, and informed us of a tower where someone collects artefacts from the time of giants.
This is a true and honest account of the events leading to my recognition as royalty (pending), and acceptance into the clergy (impending).
We found ourselves, as so many do, brought together by slavers, who have always lived up to their official mission statement - ‘connecting people’.
The slavers shunted into some abandoned space under a false pretence, so I crafted an ingenious plan to circumvent the journey, which my new companions misunderstood, and so proceeded into the black depths, to speak with an animated skull who desperately wanted to hold onto his sanity, despite his insane condition.
