Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Rules-Lite RPG.

I consider myself a stickler for rules when it comes to games, video or tabletop. In my opinion, players must adhere to the rules or else things will descend into chaos. Having begun my gaming career with a playstation 2, and having not discovered the wonders of tabletop roleplaying games until I was well into my teens, I had always been predisposed to having the rules well structured and already put together for me, where all the props were predetermined objects within the game world and little was left to chance.

That is, until I tried DM’ing d20 with some High School friends at an academic meet.

I discovered, quite quickly, that they didn’t want to read any rules or build characters. Partially because we were pressed for time and partially because they misunderstood the premise going into it. They expected the gaming experience to come prepackaged, and they immediately turned their noses up at any additional reading or bookkeeping they might have had to do. I couldn’t understand, I LOVED it. Making characters, filling out character sheets, and getting all of the feats and numbers just how I liked them.

This is also when I discovered that I was a colossal nerd beyond professional help.

From that point on, I tried to compromise with people who I tried to rope into playing with me. I wanted to create, myself, a tabletop RPG system that had everything I wanted in just a couple pages that could be easily digested by my players and still provided that rigid structure that I craved so much. I spend hours combing d20srd.org, learning everything I could about what made the game so good, then I looked to examples of people who had the same idea I did. Microlite20 was one such game, but even with all the neat and condensed rules, my games never made it past a single session. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong and I thought I was just a terrible GM.

But, even with all my failures as a GM, I still had some funny stories to tell. About such heroes as Poor Jorgen, who got his nuts chomped on by a cyclops when he failed a couple rolls in a row, or of Teddfort Rosenvelt, who converted 25 feet of rope into marijuana and used it to get an entire tavern in the next town over high so he could rob them blind. These were all funny and memorable stories that made the gaming experience fun, but I wrote these characters off as total goons who didn’t take my game seriously. I thought that if I could just get my formulas right for the rules, I could hook my players in and MAKE them want to be serious heroes.

I made systems. One after another I spend hundreds of hours looking up rules, building tables, bugging my friends to try and break my character creation systems so that I knew deep down that nobody could mess my game up and they would be forced to sit there and be a hero dammit. I tried, and I tried, each time nearing completion and then giving up when the rules became a complicated haywire mess. At this point I was stubborn. I didn’t want to use some game people had already made, I wanted a creation of my OWN that I could say I created. But each time, it was a bust.

Until one day,I happened upon this page. I had some friends coming over who were waiting on my next cacophony of a game to slide out of my brain and hit their table once again, but I wanted to at least get them used to roleplaying. So, I built a modified version of the game I affectionately called Advanced Roll For Shoes 1st Edition. I expected that the game would devolve into madness within a half-hour, but what actually happened was much different, and changed how I see role-playing as a whole.

I had a party of three players, an insatiably silver-tongued Fighter named Dixon Cider a cocaine addicted wizard named Hamish “Bump” Flannery, and a character wasn’t even a character: It was just literally the guy playing as himself. Instead of going on a single, hour long funny dungeon crawl, we had an epic five-hour hardline session where they busted up a drug ring, double-crossed a dealer, tore through a dungeon, and then rescued a princess and sold her to the neighboring kingdom for thousands of gold and a ship, which they sailed away in towards the next session.

I had never had more fun playing any game before in my entire life, and to my immense surprise, my players begged me to improve the game with even more rules.

That’s when I realized what I had been doing wrong for years and why what I was trying wasn’t going to work. The whole point of a role-playing game isn’t the game, it’s the roleplaying. The game is just a container for the adventure, and the actual adventure itself happens at the table, not in the rulebooks. Instead of starting with the players and letting them shape their ideas into a set of rules, I tried to build my rules container first and then try and force the players to go along with what I thought their fun should look like. I saw that it’s that concept, starting with the players and not the game, that made the Dungeons & Dragons series so immensely popular, that drew people into the Call of Cthulu and World of Darkness series, and made those games of Microlite20 so fun and interesting.

So, despite having sunk hundreds of hours into game design and coming up short, I found the exact thing I was looking for in a page of rules that’s less than seventeen lines long. I grew closer to my friends because of it, and I feel that I have finally earned my wings as a true Dungeon Master. And now that my friends have asked me to create an even better version of the role-playing experience we all shared, I at least have hundreds of hours of failed game design experience to help me out. ~~