I hate rules, and I want as few of them as possible in my game.

Guidelines I’ve used when making rules for this game, not the Correct Way of Doing Things.

Every mechanic and every rule introduced to a game imposes a cost. The game becomes heavier. Everything you do now has more friction. You're in a tense fight, you duck behind a crate and shoot at your assailants. Then someone remembers a rule about half cover, maybe this counts as full cover, how tall is this crate exactly? Someone else remembers that there is a rule about shooting from behind cover, anyway can you really take cover twice in a move? Shouldn't you just shoot and then take cover? Or do you count as "in-cover" the entire time? Does taking cover count as your movement for the turn? So it begins, the rulebooks come out. Your cool move is now being deliberated by the Supreme Court.

I'm told that once everyone has spent long enough with a system, everything runs smoothly. Maybe. More often it seems that everyone remembers slightly different versions of the same rule. At least two people will disagree and the rulebooks come out. The rules in question might add to the detail or realism of the world but not enough to make up for the friction they cause just by existing.

While I’ve been stumbling around in the dark working on this game I’ve found a couple of meta-rules that help me decide which rules or mechanics to keep and which to throw away. Here are some of the half-baked ideas I’ve been working with.

Rules should be load-bearing

If every new rule introduces friction, then we want to get as much out of every rule as we can. We want to be stingy with our rule-making because all of these rules have to go in the heads of people trying to have fun. And there is a good chance they’re not sober. So small rules that people mess up or that they forget are discouraged. We should prefer broad mechanics that are more like tools, mechanics that players interact with often enough to remember. The smaller and more specialized the rule or mechanic, the harder this is to achieve.

This idea of “load-bearing” mechanics also applies to things you ask your players to do. Actions should feel meaningful. Rolls should not tend to cascade into other rolls unless they are very important. This is why smaller faster weapons tend to do flat damage and bigger weapons get to roll for damage. This is also why attack rolls do can also activate effects, depending on the face values rolled with each die. If you’re asking players to do a task you should make sure they get a lot out of it, there shouldn’t be a whole lot of mechanical build up for no reason.

This is one of the reasons AP is used. AP is fungible; it can be used for any action. Almost all actions cost 1 AP so we don’t need several action types and action specific rules. An AP system is a big ask. It attaches a resource to your ability to do anything. If we already have a system for managing actions, then we should be able to use it to control initiative order as well, so AP is represented by cards that are shuffled together and dealt. Getting a card means you have the opportunity to act. If the AP deck controls the pace of the fight then characters should be able to manipulate it, the deck could be used to trigger all kinds of effects. This way AP feels less like a chore and more like an opportunity to do something cool. Hopefully.

When working on this game I had a friend who would ask me “why” any time I mentioned any rule or mechanic. Why can’t I act out of turn? Why can’t I run past that guy? It was useful to keep me from making rules that felt obligatory.

Rules should be modular

You should be able to swap rules or mechanics out with some homebrew replacement without causing a cascading effect where you to have to homebrew many other rules so the system keeps working. Each rule or mechanic should be able to stand on its own. This is in pretty direct tension with the last goal, that rules should be load bearing! The ideal rule or mechanic is relatively simple, has a clear role, and does not depend “too much” on other rules or mechanics to handle whatever situation it is supposed to handle. The rules should feel like parts of a bigger machine where each part has a well defined role and can be replaced or adjusted. Rules shouldn’t feel like a big tangle of patches and special cases that rely on one another.¹

Skills are structured the way they are to allow relatively basic mechanics to be modular. If you really like melee combat you should be able to opt-in to a complex melee system with special moves and situational bonuses. You should also be able to just put points into picking up the biggest object you can find and hurling it very far. You should be able to ignore melee entirely.

Everything should matter

Small bonuses that are unlikely to change the outcome of an event on their own are tiring to keep track of. Constantly ratcheting your health up or down a couple points is annoying for encounters in which you are in no real danger. Players aren’t even very good at tracking gold or experience points; these are the things they should be the most incentivized to track! Anytime you ask players to do bookkeeping it should be more than busy work. Every bonus should matter, including a +1.

Health and damage numbers in this game are relatively small so that every change matters. Even relatively non-threatening enemies can do serious damage with a lucky crit. The shape of the 2d6 probability curve is also very useful for making small bonuses meaningful, especially small differences in bonuses, but that's for another post.

End

Using small rigid rules over broad reusable mechanics tends to shape the game into one that is built around the rules. These rules corral players into coloring within the lines and thinking that the only options they have are what there are rules for. This is an attempt to find some set of rules that should only ever encourage players to engage with the tactile detail of the world.

It’s, uh, about the notes you don’t play, maaan.

1. See: loose coupling.