Rules Design: Say It Once, Keep It Simple

I was working on the next version of SBRPG and doing clean-up work to the document. What struck me were the places where something was said once, restated in a second place, and further expanded upon in an area it shouldn't have been. We have always had a golden rule when designing rules:

Say it Once, and in One Place

If you change it, you don't worry about breaking something else somewhere else. The D&D 3.0 and 3.5 rules felt like they had this problem, especially in the skills, where you had to hunt down special cases in skill descriptions and ruling on what CR applied to what action in skill X given action Y.

When you design, you tend to use your rules document as a collection of ideas. Things get worked out, you start making rulings on different actions, and you come up with mechanical procedures. It is all good, and you need that free-form creativity and room to experiment and do the messy work of game design. You are going to get lots of repetition in a draft rules document because you are working through things.

There is an equally important step after you design, and that is refinement. I wished Paizo would have went more along the direction of their Pathfinder Beginner's Box with that simplification, that boxed set is a really well-designed and streamlined game, and a standout in the entire D&D 3 rules history of presentation and simplification. They took a lot out, and I feel the game runs better as a result.

You don't need that many special cases most of the time. If you eliminate a rule and make it unnecessary, that is just as important as designing a new rule for a new special case - and often it is more important to streamline and simplify. D&D 5 did a bunch of that and the game runs better as a result (it is less options that Pathfinder, but you give some to get some).

Refinement and simplification are excellent ideals, and a step where I feel many rules designers skip. The goal shouldn't be to design rules that cover every little case, with exceptions and one-off rules for a multitude of special cases. It should be for broader rules that cover more situations, and handle many situations with a broader and all-encompassing guideline. Special cases in rules should be seen as places where the base mechanics fail and need to be patched. Ideally, the special case should not exist, and the general case should handle every situation.

Perhaps there isn't a simple way to handle a special case, and you need the special one-off case ruling. Perhaps this is tied to some specific mechanic that you want, so the extra complexity is worth the time. I am just a big believer in elegant and simple core game mechanics, where how something is handled is self-evident and easily discover-able by players. If X works like Y, then Z should follow suit. You shouldn't have to hunt for a special case in a skill description. There shouldn't be long lists of special to-hit modifiers for every conceivable situation. Elegant is simple, and simple is elegant.