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hpr_transcripts/hpr3325.txt

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+Episode: 3325
+Title: HPR3325: Games and rules
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3325/hpr3325.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:50:38
+
+---
+
+This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,325 for Friday,
+the 30th of April 2021.
+To its show is entitled, games and rules and is part
+of the series table top gaming it is hosted by Clot 2
+and is about 25 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
+The summary is talking about the conundrum of rules light
+and rules heavy game systems.
+This episode of HBR is brought to you by
+An Honesthost.com.
+Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code
+HBR15. That's HBR15.
+Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
+Everybody you're listening to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Clot 2
+and in this game I want to talk about gaming.
+Actually specifically I want to talk about game rules
+and the quantity of rules in a game.
+We've been playing a lot. I've been doing the Hacker Public Radio
+RPG club in which we play a bunch of everyone's invited by the way
+if you want to ever play a tabletop role playing game.
+Every month we or so we swap out what system we're playing
+and just play a different game every month or four to five to six sessions
+and then we swap. We switch systems so it might not be exactly a month
+might be a little bit over whatever doesn't matter.
+Point is that's what we've been doing. It's been a lot of fun
+and it's exposed all of us to a lot of different game systems
+that we may or may not have any experience with before and it's been great for me
+because I've been so far game mastering the games
+and that's been great because some of these games I've played but never
+game mastered or I've only game mastered once and really want to
+game master again so it's been it's been fun all around but one of the
+things that it really does highlight are the rules of a game.
+How a game is kind of constructed and put together and what makes it a game
+and all of these big questions and this isn't a question that
+I have come up with myself this is a classic question and conundrum
+within the tabletop role playing community or even and even any tabletop game really
+is it's the question of how many rules are too many rules or how many
+aren't enough and this applies for like I say lots of different games
+you have board games that have a lot of maintenance sometimes
+like between turns you have to move tokens around or shuffle decks of cards
+or or you have turns that require lots of different stages
+or whatever it can become a lot to think about and for some people that really
+kind of kills the fun that that kind of high maintenance
+makes it not really feel like a game anymore and it feels more like work.
+For other people that's like that's the fun part the fun part is the maintenance
+is the the moving of different tokens or the removing of elements or the
+shuffling of decks or whatever it is that's the fun part that's the computation
+kind of programming your your obstacles that's why it's a game
+and this is true in role playing games as well the most popular role playing
+game in the world and the first one the one that started the the the whole idea
+of it is Dungeons and Dragons and it's it's main
+player hand like the book that you have to buy in order to play the game
+is something like 250 pages long so that's um 314 or so pages long
+that's that's a lot of pages and of course not every single page has a new rule on it it's not
+it's not necessarily 314 rules to remember but there is a there there's a lot in here
+providing context about how the game is played
+and what happens under certain situations and what certain terms mean in context of the game
+and what kind of abilities you can choose from and so on so that's that's a lot of rules you could
+call this a fairly rules heavy game and of course the intent isn't for you to know all all of the
+rules when you start playing the the idea is that you can play with basically the the one rule
+over writing rule which is roll a 20-sided die adds add add some kind of bonus to it based on
+on your character and if you if you hit a certain number then you succeed and if you failed to
+get that get that number or greater you you fail that's it that's that's the game it's it's a
+kin to flipping a coin and choosing heads or tails except instead of flipping a coin you're rolling
+a die and adding some numbers to it and that's that's the main thing that you need to know once
+you know that you can start playing D&D and if that was the only rule that you took away from
+from D&D then you would have sort of created a subset of D&D that is particularly rules light
+because you would only have that one rule and there are games that champion themselves for being
+light on their rules now to be fair as I as I say this Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder and
+Starfiend and all these other rules heavy games even shadow run to be fair if you condense the
+rules down without all of the contextual text kind of explaining what the rule means and and
+maybe adding some some some some flavor to the to the game world if you condensed it all down you'd
+probably only have about five or ten pages of rules and you can do that and they do that I mean
+they have dungeon master screens which are usually about I don't know four panels of of
+approximately letter sized pages you know so four pages with a bunch of rule summaries written
+on them so that a dungeon master can kind of prop that up on the table in front of them as they're
+playing the game and refer to just these quick summaries of of the rules and that is very useful
+and it does show I think it demonstrates that even though we're looking at a 300 page book if you
+condense it down into just the stuff just the facts into the almost the pseudo code of that game
+then it's not anywhere near 300 pages so that's a good thing but it's still considered a rules
+heavy system because there are other games out there that are literally distributed on one page
+or two pages like front and back and that's it so there can be really really rules light games
+and of course such as that it's the nature of humans you don't really need to use any of these
+systems you can as I've already said literally just flip a coin if you want if you want to play a
+pretend storytelling game with a bunch of friends and you decide well what we'll do is anytime
+that the the imaginary characters that we talk about together anytime that there's a a conflict
+of interest or a a conflict of well I guess that would be a conflict of interest whether it's
+between us the players or our characters and some imaginary element in the world will flip a coin
+will assign a value to the heads and the tails and we'll do whatever the coin tells us to do so if
+we come up to a river and we want to cross that river there's no bridge we'll we'll say if its
+heads will swim if its tails will try to find a route around the river by just going heading north
+and looking for a bridge and so you flip the coin and you do whatever it tells you to do then once
+you're in if if you've got heads and you're swimming well maybe someone has the idea that there's a
+monster in the water and it's going to attack your character now you need to decide whether you
+fight back successfully or not you flip a coin and so on so it can be very rules light doesn't
+need to be a big deal but conflict I think in in this question of whether you want lots of rules
+or next to no rules is well a couple of things first of all whether or not you like rules like some
+people like the rules that's the code of the game quite literally and and that's the part of the
+game that makes the experience fun for them I'm one of those people I quite like rules I really
+enjoy processing them I enjoy seeing what happens when different situations invoke several rules
+and you have to figure out what in that situation would actually sort of take precedence and so on
+so I I enjoy that that's part of the fun for me now there's all there's also I mean for some
+people I should say that's not the fun part right that that feels like homework it feels like labor
+it is not fun it is something that you have to work at and it just takes away from the fun part which
+is maybe chatting and laughing and having fun with your friends so I understand why people would
+not like rules aside from rules though there is that element of other humans that you're playing a
+game with and I'm gonna call this element trust so if you play role playing games in tabletop games
+just with friends with like really good friends then you probably maybe let's say probably for now
+you probably have a high level of trust in those friends and I'm I'm using trust it meaning it's
+sort of in a very broad sense you have trust in them that they are going to work as hard as you
+are working to to both have fun and to ensure that your that that everyone else at the table is
+having fun so that's that's kind of the expectation among friends we we got together this evening
+to play this game and everyone here should be having as much fun as anyone else and we're all
+going to try to ensure that that happens and I'm sure that I mean I hope you've been in that
+situation before where you're just with a bunch of trusted pals and everyone is concerned about
+everyone else making sure that everyone's having fun if they don't like the drinks that they got
+you make sure that they get a drink that they like if they don't like the game that you're playing
+you make sure that the next game you play they they they really really enjoy they get to choose the
+next one or whatever the situation might be whatever it may be there's just that sense of trust
+for one another that everyone has everyone else's best interests in mind and if you don't have that
+then in theory it could be a lot less fun because now you've got people sort of almost working against
+each other potentially and that's not fun um although that is part of a game traditionally speaking
+in a game there is that um well there's a competitive spirit there is the game the the game part
+the game is a funny word I'm I'm discovering because we could just say well we're playing a game
+meaning well we're doing a fun activity and that's the game we're doing a fun activity to other people
+game that term it means we are doing an activity that we find nominally fun and we are both very very
+invested in who wins and who loses and that's a very kind of that's a different kind of game right
+I mean there's playing a game and then there's playing a game almost a sport almost so game is a
+funny word but but this this idea that that people at the table are not only having fun but also
+sort of they're being competitive that is an important element of gameplay like for it to be a game
+there has to be stakes someone must be able to win or lose and indungeons and dragons and
+mini tabletop role-playing games well in most all I would almost say all role-playing games um
+that that there's this weird turn of events where it's a cooperative game so you're not actually
+playing against the other people at the table and some people find that very hard to understand
+as to why you would gather and play a game in which you're not playing against each other you're
+playing together to win some sort of imaginary obstacle or to conquer some imaginary obstacle
+so there's not really that sense of winning and losing in a role-playing game although there is as
+well there's there is the imaginary obstacle that you've chosen to try to defeat but you're not
+being competitive towards one another but the competitive spirit that is the generation of
+it being a game with highest stakes and risks and that sort of thing is an important element
+of role-playing so I've got in my head sort of one of those triangle logic things of where you've
+got the three nodes and you can choose any two of them so the nodes are rules trust and competition
+and I think when considering whether you I don't know prefer or whether you would like to try or
+whether the game that you should take to to your friends would be rules light or rules heavy
+I think that you can choose two of these things so for instance if you are quite into rules
+such as I am then you're going to find yourself in a situation where you can choose to play with
+people that you trust in which case you're not going to really need to force competition you
+got people who you trust and you've got a book of rules that essentially create competition because
+there are a bunch of rules there and everyone trusts one another and so they they they feel
+confident that we're all going to make sure that this game is fun for everyone else we don't need
+to impose competition according to a book because that sense of risk and of struggle and ultimately
+hopefully success is going to come from the players and the game master themselves they're going to
+generate the game-iness of this experience by following the rules that we've decided so you
+can take your rules and you can play with people you trust and you don't have to worry so much
+about whether there's a game being generated you just you you have that taken care of between
+rules and trust on the other hand maybe you're taking your rules heavy system to a convention
+and you're playing with complete strangers you've never met before you don't particularly trust
+them you don't know why they're here other than they want they say they want to play this rules
+heavy game so you can't necessarily necessarily rely on them to make this an enjoyable experience
+for you you're going to have to lean on the rules and on the the the game system itself to ensure
+that there is a game there that there is conflict enough conflict for the players to have to work
+at at six to to to work for their success enough competition for the game master to enjoy
+running the game that the monsters are going to be well-defined and they're going to have tactics
+described and exciting abilities and things like that so the game master isn't going to get bored or
+just feel like they're a they're a machine just doling out the the text of the game so you have
+your rules and your your your competition and and you don't need the trust because should anyone
+I don't know try to game the system and cheat I guess gaming the system and cheating aren't
+necessarily the same thing anyway if someone tries to cheat it's not going to be like a problem really
+because you have the rules right there and they're going to tell you that no you can't do that
+and by the same token if someone's just sitting there not really interacting it doesn't matter
+because you've got everything laid out you've got competition sort of baked into your gaming
+system so that's that's everything descending from the rules node I guess in a rules heavy system
+so now let's look at what would happen if you got rid of that rules node so you're you're going to
+play a rules light system meaning that you're left with trust and competition meaning that in order
+to have an enjoyable experience I think this is my opinion I guess but my logic is that in order to
+have a fun experience with rules light you need you need those two other nodes you need trust
+and competition you need to trust the people you're playing with that they're going to make
+this experience fun for you and that you're going to make this experience fun for them and that
+there's the competitive spirit present to some degree and I know that rules light I think a lot of
+people who enjoy rules light actually one of the things that they associate I think with rules is
+sort of a negative competitiveness and so the word competitive here is is a little bit awkward
+but essentially I just mean there there once again needs to be some kind of of positive in-game
+conflict to make this more than a bunch of imaginary characters just sitting around their living room
+sleeping like there there needs to be something happening in the game world to make it some kind of
+game like to to there there needs to be a purpose to this scenario and as long as you trust the
+people that you're playing with and someone's got a good idea of what's going to stand in the way
+of the of the game characters to create conflict or competition or whatever then you'll do
+fine with rules because when something comes up that isn't defined in your your your your the
+couple of rules that you're using then you trust each other to make honest and earnest calls that
+both that that that make the game fun but possibly also ties into that that conflict again it's
+the difference between for instance saying that your character has to go into an office and try to
+uncover some recover some secret classified information so your character's in there
+rooting around in the in the desk and a secretary returns from his lunch break outside in the
+outer office now in a rules heavy system there'd be some there'd be some check to negotiate
+whether that secretary hears your character rummaging around in the in the inner office and the
+the results of that die roll would determine exactly what happens next or maybe not exactly what
+happens next that's what the game master would be for but but certainly it would determine whether
+the secretary detects your character or not in rules light though you've got people you can trust
+and you got people who are going to keep the game a game and so rather than doing a die roll someone
+whether it's the game master or just another player kind of depends on what kind of system you're
+playing someone decides that the secretary does hear you now first of all if you don't trust your
+your your your fellow players or your your game master then that seems very arbitrary and sort of
+like a little bit of a betrayal right I mean why did the secretary hear surely the secretary is
+distracted right now there's phones ringing and and he just came back with his coffee he's
+concentrating on his coffee like any sane person would oblivious to the rest of the world so
+obviously in your mind the secretary would not have heard it heard you so the trust factor
+is important here because that means that even though the secretary heard you you trust that your
+players have a good or that your game master somebody has a good reason for deciding that the
+secretary has detect and that good reason according to my little triangle logic here is the
+competitive spirit and that is to to to make sure that there's just enough conflict to make
+this a fun experience and so not only has the secretary heard you with a good group that you
+trust and who has a competitive spirit not only has the secretary heard has heard you but by some
+unlikely chance it happens that today was the day that the district manager was going to stop by
+and check out the operations here so the secretary walks in mistakes you for the district manager
+who is imminently going to arrive and inspect the facility hands you a coffee and a super nice to
+you and tries to get you to come to the the meeting room for the important one o'clock meeting and
+boy now you're in a pickle because now you're impersonating the district manager you still need to
+get that classified information back in the other office and everyone's being super nice to you and
+is trying to make sure that you give them high marks on their review so that would be for instance a
+way of i mean that's probably went on with that example a little bit longer than necessary but
+but the the idea here is that you can rely on your players on your fellow players to make up for
+things that just aren't in the rules and even even in in what you might think are our violations
+of of fairness things that you think are not fair in the end it becomes totally worth it and
+that that's an important thing to to keep in mind i think because there is there's another way
+without this triangle of logic um there's a way of just looking at this and and saying rules light
+rules heavy rules light rules heavy let's do rules like because that seems really easy and rules
+heavy seems like homework which is a fair call like that's totally fair if that's the way you feel
+or you may apparently think you might you might like rules heavy games normally but you might think
+well i don't have a whole lot of time to prep for this game or you know these people haven't really
+played a lot of role-playing games so i should just choose something rules light to keep it simple
+and you might think that's a very reasonable call to make and it might be but you do have to
+realize that if you're foregoing the rules then you do need to have that trust in that competitive
+sensibility or else things may not go as expected people might call you out on a certain ruling or
+whatever or you may you may find problems with the way that someone's playing the game maybe they're
+they're taking advantage of a situation or whatever and that's that's it that's rules light rules
+heavy i'll tell you how i i sort of i i got a little bit anti-rules light for a while i mean
+i guess deep down i still am if i'm honest um but there was a a game that i was playing with someone
+or with a bunch of people and the game master was new to me and he he had this game that he was
+playing that was said to be rules light i guess it was i mean there there there's lighter but he had a
+fairly light system that he was playing and i had attacked a monster my character attacked a monster
+with a shotgun uh my character with a shotgun had attacked a monster the monster didn't have a
+shotgun shot it in the face or whatever and it had apparently no effect on the monster whatsoever
+now granted if it's part of the lore of that world that shotguns don't hurt these monsters i can
+accept that but that wasn't the case or if it was there wasn't a ruling about that and as far as
+i could tell it was simply an arbitrary is it convenient for that shotgun to have slowed down
+the mountain that the monster right now or is the monster going to continue doing the action that
+the game master wanted it to go through to do anyway and there wasn't really any way to tell
+i didn't know the game master enough to know whether it was simply inconvenient for a shotgun to have
+his monster at that point or whether there was something about the world that dictated that the
+shotgun had no effect and so all i really had i was losing two nodes right i i had no rules and
+i had no trust so all i had was this competitive edge that i was feeling like there's conflict
+right here in the game and and this needs to be solved i shot a gun at it and and it didn't work
+and that was pretty frustrating so i think that rules light can be really really fun but it can
+also be very very dangerous without those two other nodes just as a rules heavy game can be out
+of place sometimes in certain settings with with the wrong people so it depends on situational
+factors and preferences and things like that just keep in mind the the different elements at play
+because it's very frequently not as simple as this has too many rules or this doesn't have enough
+rules there's i guess a bigger context to consider outside of this thing and as i've said already but
+we'll say again here you are invited to the hacker public radio rpg club if you've never played a
+role playing game and want to try then you are welcome to play with us you are at a distinct
+advantage in a way by playing with the hpr rpg club because we are switching out the game every month
+so everyone in the group becomes a complete newbie once once every 30 days or or they're about
+so if you've never played then this is a great opportunity to get in where where everyone at
+the table is equally as mystified as you will be and certainly i think a lot of us are very very
+eager to teach and help other people discover this really fun hobby so you are certainly certainly
+welcome anytime you want um subscribe to the hacker public mailing list for updates on when the
+next game is going to be it's a fairly low traffic mailing list and i just post my notifications
+there for now thanks for listening talk to you next time
+you've been listening to hrpublic radio at hrpublicradio.org we are a community podcast network
+that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday today's show like all our shows was
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