Something about tomes full of rules
This week on the NSR Discord (which my readers should have noticed by now is the place I spend the most time online when engaging with ttrpg stuff), I stumbled upon a really nice comment by Brandon which I will quote here:
One potential thing about chunky trad games is that it provides this feeling that there's just a lot there. Kind of even better if you don't commit it all to memory because then there's this feeling at the table of playing this arcane, esoteric thing. Like these books are in a very real way magic. We sit at the table an perform the rituals and consult the texts and there's power to that. Cheesy for sure, but that doesn't make it less real for a lot of people.
This is so good! I love it! I think it's a parallel to one of the main appeals of ttrpgs for me, which is entrusting fate to, well, a magical object. The obvious case is the the die roll, but there is also some real magic in reaching a situation in the fiction which is resolved via consulting a tome.
Like, don't get me wrong, I don't think I'd ever favor rules-heavy games over lighter ones at this day and age1, especially if I'm running the game, but after playing a lot of games where I'm focusing on the fiction and the diegesis, it's nice to change the pace for a bit. Variety is the spice of life or something like that. Ever since Vaesen2, I've been thinking if I should run something on the heavier side again - but without having the weight of creating a mystery on my shoulders.
This is mostly to say that I've been reading the rules of The One Ring 2e for a game a friend will be running and I'm looking forward to rolling the wonky dice with the Eye of Sauron in it, searching for the rules for Councils in the book, and all that jazz. Just throwing the Core book and the Moria book at the table is energizing.
So while I think the endeavour of trying to create a dense game, full of rules for all kinds of situations and simulations, is rationally a flawed premise, there is a lot of charm to it. It's very hard for me to look at a rules-heavy game and think it's nice design, but there are very few rules-heavy games that I looked at and didn't think "damn, that's a vibe".
anb
Except Forged in the Dark games, which are rules-heavy (fight me). I still think a lot of them have things to be simplified while still maintaing the core ideas and goals of play.↩
The Vaesen review has been cooking for some time, which is good to kill recency bias but also bad since my memory is not the greatest. Let's see how that works out, one day.↩