The debate about rules density in roleplaying games is a bit of a mess, frankly. What should be a relatively simple continuum (more, more detailed mechanics to fewer, higher-level mechanics) is conflated with story-first versus gameplay-first, indie versus traditional, and even in some cases old versus new. Actually pulling together a comparison where you’re actually looking at rules density and nothing else is difficult; controlling for these factors is hard because while they aren’t causal, they are correlated.

When it comes to actually running games, though, I’m going to make full use of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines here. Running light games can be very complicated indeed, for the simple reason that anything the rules aren’t laying out for you, you have to do yourself. Now…is that a simple reason? One of the reasons we have seen rulesets trend lighter over time is that the number of ‘things’ that players consider necessary to track or perform in a game session has gone down as games have become more specific. Furthermore, one of the reasons that more narrative driven games often have lighter rulesets is that the number of elements that a ruleset needs to codify in order to maintain fairness and consistency can often be much lower. But, if we’re looking across games of roughly similar style and intent, then we often see that more rules-dense, ‘crunchy’ games can be more approachable. That is for one broad reason.