I found out about a post on B/X Blackrazor (via Dennis Laffey ): Why “Light Games” Suck. JB’s post started a minor cross-blog discussion about who likes “rules lite” and who doesn’t. I don’t deny JB the right to like the games he likes and dislike the games he dislikes. I’m pretty turned off by the current endless retreads of the “rules lite dungeon crawl” concept, although there were a couple rules lite games I played and liked (TOON, InSpectres.)
But that’s not what I want to address. Especially since that’s not even the main point of JB’s post.
The Quest for Crunch
JB’s main point is that the current OSR is obsessed with creating rules lite dungeon crawls, when many of the prospective players, both now and Back in the Day, are actually searching for more rules, not less. D&D players like crunch, because that’s what we were all looking for when D&D first became a phenomenon. Here’s a highly-edited series of quotes that introduces that point:
See, Back In The Day (that’s the 1980s for me but, presumably, the late 70s also) Dungeons & Dragons was a game for NERDS […] SO…Dungeons & Dragons was totally our jam. Here was a game that appealed to our interest in all the fantasy literature we enjoyed reading […] AND required a high degree of intelligence to parse and make sense of […] But here’s the thing, Youngsters: “light rules” was ZERO part of the appeal of these games. We WANTED our rules “crunchy.” The more crunch, the better!
(Be sure to check out JB’s original post for comparison. I’m leaving a lot out.)
But this rubs me the wrong way. Superficially, that might resemble my own experience: I learned to play D&D from a friend back in either late 1975 or early 1976, and part of the appeal was the fantasy lit inspiration behind it. I consumed more D&D, getting AD&D as it was published, trying out other games like The Fantasy Trip that got into the nitty gritty of tactics, getting enamored with the ridiculous detail of Rolemaster and Fantasy Wargaming.
But was I really looking for a rules-heavy game? Was anyone?
Details, Details…
See, I think JB is seeing his own past D&D experiences through the lens of decades of experiences. When I look back at my own experiences and ask “How did I really feel about D&D and more rules back then, ignoring all the things I thought about and argued about and discovered later?” I think I really didn’t know what I wanted. How could I? It was all new. RPGs didn’t exist before. They were nothing like the board and card games most of us started with, and unless you played wargames, which wasn’t that well-known a hobby itself, you didn’t have any point of comparison.
Even the RPGs designers had no clue. No one had designed fantasy RPGs before, so they had no clue what would be good design and what would be bad. So they just made supplements and advanced editions and clones and other games that were “D&D, but in space/post-apocalyptic Earth/some other genre setting”.
And we were eating up these rules additions not because we wanted more rules, but because we were either curious or hypnotized. “Wait, you can add extra detail to magic with a complicated system of astrological correspondences? You can add tables and tables of weapon-specific combat results, instead of sticking with a binary hit-or-miss system? You can add a potion miscibility table to see if your alchemical experiment explodes? I want to check that out!”
I never heard the terms “rules lite” and “crunch” back in the day. They came along in the '90s, maybe the late '80s at the earliest, after people had been playing a while, trying out rules supplements, experimenting with new ideas, until they realized what they wanted. Some people wanted more improv and a lot less rules and that led to Tunnels and Trolls, TOON and eventually to “rules lite” games. Some wanted more options for character creation and a toolkit approach and you got Hero System and GURPS. Some wanted more realism and you got Fantasy Wargaming, Hârn, Guns Guns Guns, and books with real physics formulas.
A Different Kind of Crunch
And there’s also the issue that “crunch” is hard to define because it’s not really just one thing. I think deep down JB knows this, because he gives several examples of RPG complexity. Here’s my own breakdown.
- Background Detail: Some RPG supplements didn’t add any rules at all, but just described elaborate fantasy worlds in detail. Whether or not the game used was “crunchy” or “rules lite” was irrelevant.
- Options Detail: These are the books of new spells, the ever-increasing lists of character classes and fantastic races, the equipment lists, new features like skills systems for games that didn’t have them, feats, or psionics. Some of these had additional rules, some didn’t.
- Tactical Detail: Expanding conflict resolution systems beyond the binary approach-or-retreat, attack-or-defend, hit-or-miss approach. Players get several combat or magic options, any of which could be “good”, and different chains of actions could be amazingly good or amazingly bad, if you can just figure out the best choices for the current situation.
- Structural Detail: Not the rules for simulating specific tasks or resolving conflicts, but the rules surrounding those rules, that provide a framework for when to do each thing.
- Intellectual Challenge: At least, that’s how I interpret JB’s comment about how D&D “required a high degree of intelligence to parse and make sense of”, or his admonition that “it is complexity that gives a game its richness and provides a more robust experience.” Sometimes, people want the joy of figuring out something tough.
- Realism: Making sure that chances of dying from falling, drowning, or being hacked to pieces matches the real world probabilities. Or just adding a wider variety of possible outcomes to a critical hit table. A lot of “crunch” comes from wanting a game to be more “accurate”.
All RPG materials back in the day dabbled in at least a couple of these at the same time, and we all tried them out, eventually learning through trial and error what our own preferences were. Me, I think I lean more towards what Dennis Laffey said about structure. I think that’s the most important for me. I don’t necessarily need to have every rule for every remote possibility worked out beforehand; I just want to know how reuse existing rules to make up a new procedure when I need one, plus that framework that tells me how to run the game. To a lesser extent, I also want tactical detail, but not to an extreme. Even though D&D came from a gaming tradition, I actually don’t treat it like a game, and I’m not interested in being a hardcore gamer.
I struggle sometimes with my blog posts because I begin to question whether I’d actually use some of the ideas I’m spitballing in posts. I still toy around with options details like new character classes and races, or with realism, or even with just figuring out if there’s a creative way to add some feature to D&D. But I suppose what I’m really doing is working out structures that make those suggestions possible.
If you want to call that “crunch”, so be it. But I sometimes think of my approach as being “rules lite”.
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