Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1146166Dungeons Without Love or Imagination

From the rules:
Players expressing creativity will be penalized.

Monsters: What monster, if any, that lives in the room
0-None 1-Goblin 2-Gimmick 3-Giant 4-God

Heh, I like the cut of Glover's jib.
Plus, he made a form-fillable character sheet for Cyborg Commando so you know he's out on the fringe and checks off the good nerd boxes.
Something to play slightly inebriated with friendly bar friends with the KISS method:  Free beers for whom escapes the slightly flawed dungeon.

The Microlite family of games is pretty impressive. I was just puttering around and discovered they did a Microlite Tri-Stat that looks quite good. I'm reading over the MicroLite Dark Sun and it looks great for a play by post game.

Makes me wonder if these more minimal systems would be great for online gaming?

Anyone have any experience?

Quote from: finarvyn;1146170What's the advantage of going ultra-light?

Quote from: Spinachcat;1146308Makes me wonder if these more minimal systems would be great for online gaming?

My interest in these games is mainly for possible online gaming, yes, where the rules don't get in the way of rolling some dice and having some fun.

But I'm also interested in something that I can show to co-workers in-person who are not gamers.  Something that is super-simple to learn, for possible ongoing play during lunch breaks at work.

I really like how the 1974 Style game in particular is a nice, attractive, one-page game.  It seems like a nice fit for both online play and lunch break games.

I would absolutely use an ultra-light game for noobs and short sessions! AKA, why I like OD&D.

As the game progresses, you could add in a few more rules here and there (or not) once the players are comfortable and engaged.

Also, as the GM you could have the more complex stuff like monster stats, etc all be on your side of the screen.

From my personal experience of using rules-light system (particularly, my hack of Into the Odd ruleset) to run a semi-regular campaign for about a year, the advantages are thus:

1) Rules don't get in the way and are generally intuitive. If a special case arises during the session, it can be quickly resolved and afterwards refined for the further usage if needed. Generally, each specific group can generate a set of their own home rules based on a sturdy skeleton of the core ruleset without being encumbered with the bloat of preexisting ordinance.

2) When the core rules fit on one page spread, it is way easier to attract new players as they are not intimidated of amount of prerequisite reading material to start playing. Plus the huge chunk of the rules is referee-facing anyways.

3) Porting modules, monsters, and magic items from other systems is pretty easy; as well as creating your own on the fly, even during the session if needed.

4) Online play is also pretty accessible. "Generic" roll20's character sheets are more than enough (hell, even plain text document will do), and combat goes fast (especially as this particular system lacks to-hit rolls).

I'm currently running a long campaign (Tomb of Annihilation) with my minimalist 5e rules.


Going great so far. No skills, weapons are differentiated only by size, one single d20 roll per round for initiative/attack/saving throw/damage, etc.


Ultimately, it is a matter of taste. My ideal PHB is less than 50 pages; I'm trying to trim it down to 10 pages or less because that is even better IMO. But I am not really interested in playing a one page game, although there are some good ones out there.