Simplicity Encourages Imagination

I found a good video today by a fun channel. At 5:36 Sebastian says:

I feel the minimalistic nature of the old basic D&D rules nurtures creativity in both the players and the GM.

He goes on to elaborate not having character classes and races for every possible option, and not having rules for everything. The reference time for simplistic rules is reduced and making a die roll and ruling from ability scores is the way things are done. Watch the video and subscribe!

This statement brings up some thoughts.

In some games, your mage sees an ancient rune from a long lost empire of mages. The GM goes into quiz mode, "Does your character have the correct ancient cultures lore skill?" The answer is usually no. The players then feel they weren't told the information they needed during character creation, so they get blindsided.

In an OSR game, the question goes from, "Did the player screw up their 4-hour character design session?" to, "How should we handle this using what we have?' Let's use our imagination. Could the character know this? Well, if the character was a magic user, possibly yes. If the character came from a region once conquered by this empire, possibly yes again. We are using our imagination to make a ruling! Then, we do the same sort of thing to determine difficulty, pick an ability score, in this case INT, and d20 roll equal or under, modified, degree of success determines the information given.

Maybe the information given is colored by the experiences of the characters. The mage may get more cold, historical information, while the character with the once-subjugated culture may have information colored by the brutality of the regime.

We didn't need a book telling us this. We did not need to reference dozens of books, such as an Ultimate Backgrounds style book to see if we had the "recall specific historical details" feat. I kid with this example, but once you start down the ultra-detailed game design road, there is no stopping with how specific and minute in detail you can go while holding the book up and selling it as "even more options!"

In that case, more options really means more reference time, more limitations, and guaranteeing the player who bought Ultimate Backgrounds at my game table will use it to argue with another player at my table who didn't buy the book and wants his character to remember a specific historical detail without the feat. We will stop the game for 30 minutes to reference the book, try and please both sides, and come up with a ruling that makes nobody happy.

Back to B/X with another type of check. Does the party fall into raging rapids and need to make swimming checks to avoid being pulled under? STR check modified by the armor worn and weight of gear carried. Seems reasonable. Want to ditch the armor in the rapids? DEX check modified by how tough the armor is to remove. Need to keep treading water for a long time, or survive in cold water? CON check, modified by the same.

Done. We used our imagination to make those rulings, often the GM came up with the rule out in the open and the players agreed with the ruling - a communal ruling that involves players - and the ability score, modifiers, and consequences were agreed upon by all before the dice were rolled.

Perhaps a player came up with a better way to handle the check or ruling, and everyone agrees. Maybe one player comes up with a cool helpful suggestion for another player to get a bonus to a roll with a clever course of action. Maybe another says, ""But if you fail there should be a chance of this happening..."

The game becomes less about the GM and the game's designers, and more about the players and the group's shared interpretation of how to handle a situation. The rules, and making the rulings, are a part of playing the game, and constantly change depending on the group, adventure, players, and situation.

The rules and how different events should be handled should be made up on the spot for most situations in the game using creativity and the group coming up with a  fair ruling. In OSR, these creativity-based non-rules are the rules. It is a form of negative space game design that purposely leaves a lot up to the group, and thus the group is encouraged to use their imagination and fill the rest of the story - and even the rules - in themselves.