Tiny rulebooks are all the rage, and it’s great. The game of go has (arguably) 3 rules. Chess has a dozen rules. Monopoly has that little booklet-thing which nobody reads. RPGs often have 400 pages of rules without counting an adventure module, and often lack proper indexing. This hobby is mad, and the backlash against that madness feels refreshing.

But some of those refreshments cut out so much that they can’t satisfy a game’s requirements, while others just make life more efficient. Time for the terminology…¹

Minimalist Rules are just small. They present an absence of rules.

For example, Mörk Bórg introduces a brief (but punchy) setting, dishes out a minimalist ruleset. It begins with rules for bad-ass names, then hitting things, then it stops. Mörk Bórg has no kind of Skill system, except perhaps ‘roll Presence’.

Minified Rules do the same with less. Instead of saying this:

• ‘you have Strength 14, so on the Attribute table you can see that it grants a +2 Bonus to Strength-related actions’

…games can just say this:

• ‘you have Strength +2’

In other words, I mean Occam’s Razor:

Plurality should not be posited without necessity

- William of Ockham

…but then I went and minified the Razor, so it’s just ‘do the same with less’.

Standard Minimalisms

An empty room, with blanks walls, and a single chair, somehow feels posh. The lack of clutter feels like a relief. Add a single painting, and now it looks elegant. But, as we all know, these rooms cannot last. Everyone who wants minimalist spaces soon fills them again - perhaps with less than they had, but they never remain with ‘1 chair’, or ‘3 Attribute monster statblocks’.

Despite the doom, the effort rewards us with a slightly less cluttered house, and the final death of ‘Treasure Type P’ (which haunted the A,D&D Monstrous Manual).

Standard Requirements

And the effort really is doomed, because that reading room with a single chair has nowhere to rest the books. It also has no lamp - something which many people need for a comfortable reading experience after the Sun goes down.

And certain questions will come up again in the minimalist rulesets.

How far can we travel each day?

The rulebook doesn’t say, because it is ‘minimalist’. So now the GM must say how far the characters can go in a day. And maybe that works for you, for a bit. But the players will ask more soon enough:

We want to go faster. Can we push it? Can we march all night?

What do you say? Another ruling? Do they get tired? How do they get tired, if the minimalist rules have nothing to show fatigue? Perhaps you could give them all a -1 penalty until they rest…and with that, you have added rules for fatigue, and you will shortly add rules for resting.

I want to buy twenty rations for the long march.

Now we need a ruling on how much that character can carry. And then another for the next character, and soon you notice it’ll be easier to have one rule for everyone’s carrying capacity, presumably based on their Strength.

We always get lost in the wilderness. Can we hire a guide? Someone who reads the stars and knows the area?

It’s hard to say ’no’, here. Some people know how to not get lost. Even in a desert - the closest land we have to a featureless void - people manage to learn how to navigate reliably.

So now we need to put away the ‘minimalist travel rules’ (which just say ‘you have a 1 in 6 chance of getting lost), and create a new NPC, who can reliably navigate. We have an exception to

Can I ask how the guide how to navigate, so I can learn how to do it?

And with another completely reasonable question, a new rule is born. It must be born, or the minimalist room quickly looks like a prison, with harsh prison rules.

Minified Rules

Occam’s Razor makes a good goal, but it’s not a method. The method I’ve adopted is something ‘reinterpret, recycle, and layer’.

Instead of empty rooms, threatening to fill up with tat, a single, functional room can do everything with less space; kitchen, dining room, and living room, as a single space. It’s a lot more comfortable, and easier to maintain.

Reinterpretation

The dining table is also a gaming table. There’s no need for another table.

World of Darkness doesn’t agree. It has a Subterfuge skill, and another skill called ‘Intimidation’. All those skills took up half the character sheet, just so you could roll ‘Strength + Intimidation’, then ‘Manipulation + Subterfuge’! Instead of having an ‘Intimidation’ skill, they could have just said ‘Strength + Subterfuge’ is the intimidation skill. And Intelligence + Empathy lets you investigate a crime scene, without a separate Investigation skill.

So that’s what I’ve done for BIND. The Skills are not a list, but a table. Each one does different tasks, depending on the Attribute you pair it with.

Recycling

The bookshelf can store the board games. The games need more room, but they don’t need a new type of storage.

Cairn pulled this move by using Strength as HP. Or rather, Damage reduces a character’s HP, and then reduces Strength. This means it can serious wounds as a reduction in Strength, which means characters gain penalties for having serious wounds. However, the penalties are not an extra system, and it doesn’t need a second type of HP. Strength is simply used twice.

BIND makes a similar move with weight, and recycles it to track fatigue (or ’exhaustion points’).

• Each point of Weight over your current HP inflicts a Penalty.
• An exhaustion point has a weight of 1.

That’s just two rules, but it does a lot:

• A big person with 8 HP can now carry more than a small person with 4 HP (without any additional rules).
• If a character carries a total Weight of 5 takes some Damage, and goes down to 3 HP, they have a -2 Penalty. So wounds can inflict penalties, and characters can remove penalties by dropping some items.
• Exhaustion also inflicts penalties, and threatens to inflict penalties before it actually does anything.
• Resting ‘heals’ a penalty, assuming you have some exhaustion points.

Layers

This is the extendable table and couch which folds out into a bed for guests, and I’ve been using the principle extensively for BIND. Almost everything in the modules has a second layer, waiting to provide extra details on request.

• Layer 1 of character creation is just the pre-generated characters that come with each module.
• Layer 2 is when you roll random attributes for a character, and look up a concept in the Book of Stories.
• Layer 3 is the complete rules for making a character, slightly later in the same book.

Those characters from the first layer - the modules - were made with the complete rules from the Book of Stories. So were the characters you can look up. So the system does not have extra rules for character creation - it only has layer 3, but creating smaller versions means it takes up less space when it has to.

The layers are made to anticipate standard questions.

Looks like I’m dead. Can I roll my own character?

‘Yes’, the rules say. ‘Turn to layer 2’.

Can I make my own character, and all the decisions?

‘Yes’, they say again. ‘Here are the rules that you were already using’.

And spells work the same.

• Layer 1 just lists some spells on the back of a character sheet.
• Layer 2 lets players pick up new spells, and soon (hopefully) they will notice some strong patterns.
  • Level 1 spells always have the same range.
  • Level 2 spells always have one of 2 ranges.
  • Level 2 spells always have one target, or four.
• Layer 3 lets players create spells.

Again, it’s made to provide, rather than instruct. It waits for questions.

Can I learn more spells?

‘Of course. And you can make special ‘concoctions’ which let you cast more powerful spells, far beyond your normal abilities.’

Can I make my own spells?

‘You can make a spell in five steps. Every spell you have ever cast was made by going through these five steps’

And of course, GMs (’the Judge’) need layers too.

• Layer 1 for the Judge is a module, with the rules included.
  • And if the module needs some obscure rule for ‘hypoxia’, then that’s included front-and-centre.
• Layer 2 is the extended rules, which have a collection of all the obscure rules from every module, and plenty more.
• Layer 3 is background details on the worlds and gods, and how those modules were made, and how undead creatures communicate with each other.

Inevitable Mess

The minified rules are not impressively small. Putting the rules in the core book takes up an extra three pages. Adding 10 pre-generated characters takes up 20 pages. And making complete NPC statblocks, with every reasonable Skill takes more pages.

The modules don’t look like something out of a magazine, and they’re certainly not ‘zines’ with 50 pages of A4. But they’re easy to maintain, and don’t cry out for anything more, because they’re made to be complete.