All rules are bad, but many are necessary. A game about travel without rules for carrying things just forces the GM to come up with rules on the fly. But needing rules to resolve a lot of situations doesn’t mean a lot rules. Designers can cheat by folding rules over each other, so they cover more area, without taking up more space in the toolkit.

Folding Rules in BIND

Unsure if a character knows some obscure fact about the local ruins? This means - unsurprisingly - an Intelligence + Academics roll. But we don’t need a new Skill for everything anyone does. So if characters want to forge a letter, they can use Dexterity + Academics. This begs the question, ‘what do the other Attributes do?’, and a few other tasks fell out naturally.

• Strength + Academics? Oratory ability, when shouting to a full crowd.
• Charisma + Academics? Storytelling.

I quite like that last one, as cultures with an oral history could consider storytellers to be educated people. It feels like it fits different cultures.

The same reasoning worked for the other Skills. Some combinations don’t come up very often, but in theory, each Skill covers a different action when paired with each Attribute.

Folding Combat

This one’s always a horrid time-sink. I don’t like RPG combat systems. I feel like I should, but I don’t.

Initiative, Attacks & Movement

A,D&D had a rule that fighters would gain an extra attack once their level was high enough. The jump always felt a bit jarring; one moment you’re killing one goblin per round, the next day you’re killing two each round. So the first plan for the rules was to let characters ‘spend Initiative’ to attack. If an attack costs ‘5 Initiative’, then someone on Initiative 15 would not only act fast, but would be able to attack 3 times. The same thing could be done for movement. And at this point, ‘Initiative’ turned into ‘Action Points’.

Things have changed since then. Nobody rolls - everyone just receives Action Points.

Attack & Defence

If an attack roll misses, there is no result. It feels like a waste of time. So instead of ‘roll to attack’, then ‘roll to defend’, the two became one. If the player rolls high, they hit; roll low and the enemy hits them. Every roll means a result.

Shields & Weapons

Shields are weapons. They grant a massive Bonus to hit, but their Damage is in the negative. If this seems strange, remember that Attack = Defence, so responding to an attack with a shield means defending yourself.

That means no rules for shields - they just get their stats listed with the other weapons. And we don’t need rules for ‘dual-wielding’ - characters just decide which weapon to use at each parry.

Inventory Slots

BIND tracks weight with slots. But not new slots - that would mean another rule, and rules are bad. The character’s HP are also slots to carry things.

Exhaustion is also tracked with weight slots. Each ‘Exhaustion Point’ works like an item that you can’t put down, slowly filling the slots, until the character’s over-burdened.

And we get a wound-penalties system for free! Once someone loses HP, the total number of ‘carrying slots’ they have goes down, and they get penalties sooner. This is my favourite kind of rule - it’s not a rule, it’s just a result of the rules.

This rule, is a good rule.

Purchases

Background & Languages

PCs each start with 5 ‘ Story Points ’ to introduce element from their past into the present scene. They might know allies, or a special skill. Or, they might know a language. Now there’s no need for a new system for languages.

Fate Points and Experience Points

BIND’s original system allowed players to purchase ‘ Fate Points ’, which work like HP, except they let you avoid Damage. This is bad because it’s a rule, but also because it demands player make decisions about mechanics. So the new system removed that table, and replaced it with one rule: FP = XP / 10. No more decisions, and the rule is short enough to remember.

Magic

Lay off Hands

My adolescent mind was warped and abused by a ridiculously redundant set of systems and sub-systems for healing magic.

• Cure Lights Wounds (1D6 HP + X per Y)
  • Cure Mediocre Wounds (same, but more)
  • Cure Massive Wounds
• Cure Disease
• Restoration
• Resurrection
• Resurrection but you change race or possibly become a goat
• Lay on Hands
• Ring of healing (1 per turn)

That’s nine systems from memory. I suppose there are more.

Just make the fucking number go up!

Or don’t. This one’s getting folded up and put away like an embarrassing t-shirt. BIND has no healing magic except standard spells to increase Fate Points. The spells work just like other spells, but instead of inflicting 1D6 Damage, you bestow 1D6 Fate Points.

Spheres of Magic

Elemental magic controls Earth and Wind, et c. I figured that was enough magic, and stopped making more things to learn. If a witch wants to levitate, she combines Earth and Fire. Spells to make plants grow are Life spells, but Life spells just need Earth and Water.

Components & Slots

Spell-slots are the rancid jewel atop the grand pyramid of RPG faff. You not only list fields, but fill those fields with completely different things every day. It’s a ten-point plan just to make the big spells rare, and the little spells common. The goal seems fine, but the plan stinks.

Material components turn magic from accounting into accounts payable. Excuses like ‘adventure in the caves where the bats poop’ are a waste of time.

But if we combine the two (like a magic finger-waggle and bat-shit combined to make a fireball), rare material components could be used to cast exceptionally powerful spells. This keeps those spells rare and flashy, but we can provide better adventure hooks than ‘bat-shit cave’. Instead, the bodies of monsters will have the ingredients needed to make the big once-a-game, fwoosh-bang spells.

So the monster’s treasures are on the same pile. You don’t need to go back to an owlbear’s nest for the treasure. The corpses are the treasure.

And Disease

Diseases are also Spheres. Each disease aligns to an element, and are cured by the opposite. So if the PCs find themselves cursed with some earthy disease which makes their stomach churn, they know the cure - griffin wings! Because griffin wings are Air-based, and Air opposes Earth.

In the Bag

Having a ‘bag of holding’, and a ‘portable hole’ creates needless faff, and paradoxes. The concepts fold into each other nicely, making a ‘bag of hole’. But not like the old ‘pocket-dimension’: that would be a new concept, and BIND already has a magical gateway spell. So instead of pocket-dimensions in a bag, I’m just going to hire a gnome to make a magical gateway between a bag and a his larder.

It works just as well! You put your stuff in the bag, and it rests safely, and weightlessly, in the larder.

There is the danger of the gnome taking everyone’s stuff one day, but that’s more of a political complication, not a systematic one. So it’s none of my business.