Early tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) were an offshoot of miniature wargaming. In the era in question, there was often a sense that complexity and verisimilitude were interchangeable terms. It was fine if rules were arcane1. Other factors led to steady escalations in rules page counts, with the result that TTRPG materials could be (and sometimes still are) arcane tomes, heavy enough to cause debilitating lower-back injuries and as complex as the post-graduate work players were neglecting in order to play TTRPGs.
Not everyone enjoys investing into their entertainment the same degree of cognitive effort required to translate Finnegans Wake into Sanskrit. How to cope? Some players simply focus on the specific rules pertaining to their characters, leaving the rest to their gamemaster and fellow players. Another, just as valid, solution, is for the game company to provide streamlined rulesets, as suitable for new players are they are for experienced players who don’t want to have to look up Rule 8.9.1, subsection Q, paragraph Aleph again.
Perhaps examples might help…
Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set
By J. Eric Holmes, et al
While TSR transformed Gygax and Arneson’s original rules into the increasingly complex Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D), Holmes offered a streamlined version suitable for novices. The Basic box, which covered characters from level 1 to 3, came with useful accessories while eschewing Gygax and Arneson’s open-minded approach to grammar and sentence construction.
As I understand it, the original intent was that once characters exceeded level 3, campaigns would transition to AD&D. However, Holmes’ rules proved popular enough that Basic became its own D&D lineage. Under Holmes’ successors—Tom Moldvay (1981), Frank Mentzer (1983), Troy Denning (1991), and Doug Stewart (1994)—the line offered players straightforward rules, initially as a series of affordably priced box sets, later as a single-volume book, the justly famed D&D Rules Cyclopedia.
Basic Roleplaying
By Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis
By modern standards, Steve Perrin and Ray Turney’s RuneQuest isn’t that long at 144 pages. RuneQuest was created to showcase Greg Stafford’s Glorantha secondary fantasy universe, and the game reflected that. Certain aspects of the rules are very Glorantha-specific. However, the core of the system seemed to offer the potential for a much broader, one might even say universal2, game system.
Enter Stafford and Willis’ Basic Roleplaying3 or BRP. BRP boiled RuneQuest’s 144 pages down to a setting-neutral 16 pages. Not only was BRP a perfectly functional, if lean, system on its own, it was the seed from which many, many roleplaying games have grown. That list would include, but not be limited to, Elfquest, Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, Call of Cthulhu, and Drakar och Demoner.
One curious descendent: the 2008 Big Gold Book edition of Basic Roleplaying collected all of the extant rules from various iterations of BRP in a single, 400-page volume. 400 pages is somewhat longer than 16 and it could be that “lean and efficient” no longer applied. Jason Durall and Steve Perrin’s 2023 Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine (BRUGE) is only 264 pages, but 264 is still larger than 16. I see that there is a 48-page quickstart available, which presumably is to BRUGE as BRP was to RuneQuest. Have we come full circle?
Fate Accelerated
By PK Sullivan, Lara Turner, Fred Hicks, Sophie Lagacé, Richard Bellingham, Robert Hanz, Leonard Balsera, and Ryan Macklin
USENET4 discussions begat Steffan O’Sullivan’s FUDGE5, which in turn begat Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks’ FATE6. Even in its most complex presentation, Fate Core is comparatively7 streamlined and elegant, and the mechanics are flexible enough to support a variety of genres. Still, some new players might find the prospect of reading the 308 6″x9″ pages intimidating.
Enter Fate Accelerated. Compatible with other Fate products, Fate Accelerated is a slender 68 pages… including the quick reference system. Even better, Fate Accelerated is very affordably priced, with the PDF going for as little as $4.00.
Tribes in the Dark
By Wil Hutton, Chris Czerniak, Logan Rollins, Oscar Simmons, and Jim Pinto
Philippe R. Boulle, Stéphane Brochu, and Joshua Mosqueira-Asheim’s Tribe 8, from the 1990s, offered players an enticing post-apocalyptic Montreal in which to adventure, a setting effectively conveyed by Ghislain Barbe’s visuals. The core game engine was Dream Pod 9’s Silhouette System. Now, while I am a fan of Silhouette, I admit it was originally designed to simulate mecha, not eldritch creatures, and is a product of another era—an era when players were perfectly happy with ten attributes, five secondary traits, and a vast number of skills.
Tribes in the Dark preserves the original Tribe 8 setting, but replaces Silhouette with Evil Hat’s Forged in the Dark playbook-centred rules. The playtest rules for Tribes in the Dark have been available since 2022 for the very affordable price of free. The Kickstarter went live/will soon go live (depending on when this piece is published) here.
Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game
By Dominic McDowall and Pádraig Murphy et al.
Richard Halliwell, Rick Priestley, Graeme Davis, Jim Bambra, and Phil Gallagher’s 1986 Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WHFRP) offered players the chance to explore the grimy, violence-filled world previously introduced in Games Workshop’s ever-expanding, income-consuming miniatures game. Focusing as it did on characters well out of their depth as they contended with horrors and worse, WHFRP was in interesting contrast to other, more hero-focused TTRPGs.
What WHFRP wasn’t was particularly user-friendly. One could argue that the complexity of certain rules—magic rules, in particular—reflected the bewildering world in which the characters were trapped until their inevitable demises at the claws of a monster, a miscast spell, or the blast of an insufficiently firmly thrown grenade. One could argue that games were like that back in the 1980s. Ask me about THACO.
Cubicle 7’s Warhammer: The Old World (due out the first quarter of 2026, if we’re all still here8) is set many decades before WHFRP, in an era when people believe (or at least really want to believe) that supernatural threats are a thing of the past, leaving the population free to focus on mundane issues such as making a living, superstitious xenophobia, and which of the three or four emperors is the true emperor. The rules are more user-friendly than WHFRP and will be presented in two convenient volumes: a Player’s Guide, with the rules and such that are of immediate utility to players, and a Gamemaster’s Guide, filled with details about the setting with which the GM can surprise and delight their players once the players have grown attached to their characters.
Of course, these are only a few of the works though which companies have made their games more accessible to players. No doubt many of you have favourites not mentioned above. Feel free to name them and extol their virtues in comments below.
- But not always. The original Classic Traveller was three straightforward slender black books: Book 1 Characters and Combat, Book 2 Starships, and Book 3 Worlds and Adventures. 44 pages, 48 pages, and 48 pages respectively, they contained universes… but not many rules. ↩︎
- If I still thought universal game engines were possible, which I don’t. ↩︎
- Yes, it sure was helpful that the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set and Basic Roleplaying have such similar titles. That absolutely didn’t cause confusion back in the day. ↩︎
- A worldwide distributed discussion system that, while venerable, still supports thriving communities greater than the communities of MySpace, Ello, and Shelfari combined. ↩︎
- Originally, that stood for Freeform Universal Donated Gaming Engine. Now, it’s Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment. ↩︎
- FUDGE Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment. ↩︎
- Bearing in mind that I am comparing games to chonky bois such as RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, Champions (4th Edition), and Aquelarre. ↩︎
- Cubicle 7 was kind enough to send me preliminary PDFs. ↩︎
This can be a dicey topic.