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.

Math is easy, improv is hard

If you’re a rules-light aficionado, chances are you take issue with one of the two clauses in the above statement. If you’re one of those lucky people who find improv easy, then not only will you often find really crunchy games excessive and unnecessary, but you will also find it’s more difficult to make them do what you want. This is, to a degree at least, my lived experience. That said, improv is more than a skill, it’s a creative muscle that takes a lot of practice and at least some comfort with being, frankly, a weird person (at least inside your brain). There’s an early xkcd that displays this idea succinctly. I do think that playing TTRPGs for a long time will make you better at improv, but I also concede that most of society is actively conspiring to make you worse at improv through how we are expected to work, play, and participate in culture. If you are an adult and someone asks you to tell them an interesting detail about a medieval farming village with no prompting, society expects you to freeze.

As for math, well…people hate math, but in the context of games, math is easy. Even very crunchy games are, more often than not, resistant to making their players do any math more complicated than what we learned in the sixth grade. Rolemaster’s infamous tables could to some degree be condensed to probability density functions (not the crit table, there’s no function for how much dismemberment occurs), but that would require algebra (eighth grade) and a basic understanding of statistics (if we have a very dim view of humanity, high school). So instead, we have addition. Sometimes, subtraction. Yes, you have to reference values sometimes, but when I took heat transfer all of my exams were open book and you can bet I was never looking up whether something was +1 or +2. I do know I am proficient in significantly more math than the average person, but the math required for roleplaying games is not and (with a few oft-cited exceptions) has never been difficult.

All this is to say that when you crack open a highly traditional (and fairly complete) game like Pathfinder, there may be a learning curve but ultimately the game is fairly intuitive. If you look at Fifth Edition D&D, the most criticized elements are places where there aren’t enough rules. Importantly, though, it’s not about there being too many or too few rules in an absolute sense, it’s that D&D is inconsistent, offering immense specificity in some cases and (this is a technical term) fuck-all in others. Ultimately, that is important; a GM needs to know what they’re expected to do, how much they’re expected to do, and what level of rules support they can expect to have. The more mechanics there are, the more support everything needs, and the more dangerous making stuff up on the fly can be, whether or not there is a rule for that thing to be superseded.

While the trad games are ensuring that math stays easy, a lot of the indie games are trying their damndest to make improv less hard. An entire swathe of the design ideas in Apocalypse World are built around making sure that the MC knows what they can do. The MC Moves, the Agendas and Principles, even the bias towards player-driven worldbuilding are all intended to make the MC feel like the next thing that comes out of their mouth is a good one. There’s some lightening of the creative load, as well as some establishment of when to introduce complications and new situations. There’s also some codification of highly effective stalling and narrowing techniques (‘ask questions and build upon the answers’). Both on the MC side and on the player side (through Moves and Playbooks), Apocalypse World aims to establish exactly enough in terms of both procedures but also setting and genre to give each play group free reign within those establishments and constraints. It has moved from a critically praised game to a widespread platform for writing and implementing setting, genre, and procedures. Powered by the Apocalypse is an effective use of rules for its intended design: Bounded genre, specific and limited mechanics, otherwise open play space. Needless to say there are other (many other) ways to use game rules effectively.

How can we use rules most effectively?

I would venture that if we want to see new and highly effective implementations of rules for RPGs, we need to be less afraid of building something robust. What makes a game like GURPS difficult is not the rules, it’s the lack of rules and procedures for picking a genre out of the many, many, many possibilities contained within the Basic Set, to say nothing of the rest of the library. Actually, once you start getting into the rest of that library, you’ll find some specific guidelines for genres which enable you to dive in and feel more comfortable. The same could be done for more narrative games, which haven’t explored the whole genre space as much as more traditional wargame-based RPGs have.

Powered by the Apocalypse provides a compact and extensible framework for a narrative game; a good counterpart on the traditional side would be something like Savage Worlds. And while Savage Worlds is technically playable on its lonesome (unlike PbtA), the reality is that neither of these rulesets really shine outside of their more robust implementations. What I tend to think is more interesting than a good baseline (which may have been obvious in my review of QuestWorlds) is something which builds unique rules to make for a unique experience. Although I think D&D has been done to death, I also admit that the classes in D&D and the degree to which they’ve evolved into their own paradigmatic sets of mechanics is a remarkable piece of tech for RPGs (and one other RPGs would do well to adapt instead of merely copy). On the indie side there are a few bigger, more interesting games. A few I’d want to highlight are Red Markets and the quirky siblings that are Burning Wheel and Torchbearer.

Red Markets is in a way an exemplary indie game because it puts so much effort into being a very specific game (its subtitle: A Game of Economic Horror). At the same time, it has significantly more rules than most of its contemporaries, providing a robust push-pull framework between killing zombies, caring for those who depend on you, and somehow escaping the intensely allegorical zombie capitalism that the game is actually about. While I go into more details about the systems of the game in my review, there’s something I keep coming back to even though I’ve now had the game for eight years and still haven’t gotten a group together to actually give it an honest crack. The designer Caleb Stokes says in the book that his ideal vision of a roleplaying game is a story that is told one third by the players, one third by the GM, and one third by the dice. I can’t help but agree with the sentiment; the idea is to give everyone agency and no one control. And it’s with that thought that I turn to Torchbearer.

At one point during a Dark Heresy game, Seamus said to us that he “was hoping you would be able to succeed by now”, sparking another player to quip “that’s when you know you’re screwed, when even the GM wants your dice to roll better”. No game encapsulates that sort of adversarial inversion better than Torchbearer. Torchbearer, in a way, provides a distinct worked example of Caleb Stokes’ threefold design principle: The players bring characters and backstories, the GM brings scenarios and challenges, and the dice bring profound suffering. While I am exaggerating somewhat, I still find that the game being built the way it is, with highly specific (albeit not so expansive as to be ‘crunchy’)  mechanics and tightly prescribed gameplay procedures makes for a wholly unique experience compared to other games in the genre. Since the genre is dungeon-crawling, that statement holds even more weight; while it would likely take a bit of conversion, I’d venture that you could run most B/X modules in Torchbearer without any trouble (I mean, you’d probably party wipe, but the rules wouldn’t provide much trouble). Of course you don’t need Torchbearer for a fiendishly difficult dungeon crawl experience, but by using Torchbearer instead of a different game you get more points of interaction with the mechanics and a more bounded experience, where the challenges feel more like something you solve for and less like your buddy the GM screwing with you because you forgot to put marbles and a ten-foot pole on your character sheet.

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Of course the question here is ‘why does this matter?’ I’m neither the first nor the last person to observe that games with more rules can be easier to run and play, and I don’t think I’m the only person extolling the virtues of ‘crunchy indie’ (this isn’t even my first article doing so). So if ‘games can be more accessible with more rules’ is the description, what’s the prescription?

I’ve been running an Apocalypse World game for a good chunk of 2025, and now that we’re approaching the tenth session I feel that I much more firmly understand where the system is helping me out and where it’s leaving me to flap in the wind. That ‘flap in the wind’ sensation is exactly what will turn people off of running rules-light games, especially if they have less improv or even RPG experience; this means that solving it is key to making a new, more accessible sort of narrative game. Even within PbtA designers are aiming to solve this; the use of ‘faction turn’ mechanics in Urban Shadows 2e is a great way to structure what’s going on in the broader setting without making GMs pick from a list or roll on a random table.

There is room for bigger games, though. In the case of both crunchier indie games and outright crunchy games there’s only a couple well-known examples of each; Rowan Rook And Decard’s Spire (and Heart) and Blades in the Dark would be ‘crunchier’ while Burning Wheel (and Torchbearer) would be ‘outright crunchy’. I think there’s more room in the market for games employing non-wargame mechanics like RRD’s Resistances or core elements from the Burning Wheel games like Skills or Circles. And hell, it doesn’t mean we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to trad games either; games like Grimwild and Daggerheart are taking good lessons from indie and applying it to trad, so why not take the most clever mechanics from new trad games and apply them to indie? The mainstream RPG audience gravitates towards games you can sink your teeth into, and the more mechanical structure you have the more accessible your game can be.

I’m ready for the hobby’s fads to turn a corner from light games. Games like Mothership and Mork Borg are essentially inside baseball; they’re directed at existing gamers who are looking for something that draws their eye. This is both why they’re successful but also why they won’t in the long run be sustainable. If we want to draw in new players we should follow the board game model which means being unafraid of offering some complexity. Yes, make the game easy to learn, and yes, present it as cleanly as possible, but at the same time, don’t design a game that leaves its players or GM flapping in the wind. Of course, there’s always the question of what this is going to look like. I’ve already mentioned Grimwild and Daggerheart, and both games (but especially Daggerheart) have the chance to be very successful and influence the market. This does serve to show that, more than just D&D being D&D, games with more meat on the bones are going to continue to be the bestsellers. My question, as always, is how can we do more. What is the next bigger, more robust game that really offers a different experience than D&D, and who is going to design it? I’ll be on the lookout.

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