In video games, players can attempt any action that the designers programmed... but in role-playing games, players can theoretically attempt any action at all. Often, new players are drawn to role-playing games because of the freedom it offers. Video games have programming limitations, things like invisible walls, NPCs that don't act realistically, only a few dialogue choices(none of which you like), a wall that should be able to be climbed, a door that should be able to be opened, a space ship that you want to be able to pilot, the list goes on. So players come to role-playing games thinking that they will finally be able to do all of these things. But the most popular game, which most new players end up playing first, is Dungeons and Dragons, a "Rules-Heavy" game. And the detailed rules end up getting in the way of this freedom. With tables and charts that need to be looked up and referenced, with modifiers to attempted actions based on difficulty, with a list of skills that determine whether or not your character is able to perform an action in the first place, etc. In response to this issue, the game design trend has been to create "Rules-Lite" games, where the rigid detailed rules are removed, and the action is centered on the story, or narrative. This makes the game play faster and smoother than Rules-Heavy games, and in most cases the players really can attempt anything, but this can start to feel like less of a game since the players have more control over the game than the rules do. At the extreme end, this type of game starts to fall into the realm of collaborative storytelling, and sure enough, games like this are now being called "Story" games. These games almost completely remove the rules of the game, and rely on the players to tell a story together, which stretches the concept of it even being called a game.
In designing Nightmares, it wasn't really possible to designate it as rules-heavy, rules-lite, or narrative-based game. There are elements of each that I wanted to keep. Starting with rules-heavy games, I wanted to make sure that the game is mechanically challenging, and that there is enough substance to the combat system that it would retain the character customization and tactical depth of rules-heavy games, being able to choose unique abilities that have unique rules to create a unique character build. One of my favorite video games, Path of Exile, influenced my design decisions for this part of the game. Path of Exile has a very large skill tree and most of the skill nodes are just value increases to statistics, but there are several unique nodes across the skill tree that change the mechanics of the character. It is these unique nodes that inspired the "rules-heavy" character building aspect of Nightmares. Here are some examples:
Dark Hunger: By causing injuries, you recover injuries, but can no longer heal naturally. Remove the least important injury from any body location any time you roll a critical hit.
Mountain: Your armor rating is doubled, but you lose the ability to perform active defense tests.
Bloodletting: Remove 1 Stress any time you suffer an injury in combat, but you can no longer recover Stress naturally, and you now gain twice as much Blood Loss from injuries.
Berserk: Your successful attacks affect all enemies within range of your attack, but you gain 1 Stress point for every enemy that you hit.
There is a large list of abilities just like these, called Psychic Anomalies, with synergies between them that can allow for a wide variety of combinations and character builds, and adds depth to the combat system. So, as I mentioned in the last design post, combat maintains its realism and depth, but has been streamlined, and a large reason for this is the inspiration I took from "rules-lite" games. This streamlined design decision has been applied to all aspects of the game. There is no reason to have pages and pages of rules for every possible situation that the players can come across. The human mind is the key difference between a video game and a role-playing game. And to this extent, there is a degree of "story" game design in deciding what fits into the game and what doesn't.
As opposed to other games that modify actions with various rules, there is no question about an action being easy or difficult here, there is instead only the question of it being possible. This is where it becomes similar to story games. If the GM feels that an action isn't possible, the GM asks the group of players if they think it seems realistically possible. The players have the final say on what is realistic to them, and if the players decide it is possible then the action may be attempted. The only rule to stop this from getting out of hand is a warning that this game is intended to be gritty. If the players want to go beyond the realm of gritty realism, then this is probably not the right game to be playing.
Another point that relates to rules-lite and story games is the fact that skill lists have been removed from this game. The characters instead have words that describe their character's background, and the players can use those words to attempt anything that makes sense. For example, a character may have come from a Forest, and has Forest as a Rank 1 skill. That means the character can use the Forest skill for anything related to Forests, and essentially any actions attempted while in a Forest. If the character doesn't have a skill that applies to the situation, the character can still attempt the action using a rank 0 skill called Struggle, which applies to any possible action. Characters then advance in those skills with more specific versions of them, such as Forest Hunting. This system removes the unnecessary overlap of skills and allows for players to be creative with their actions.
The last point I will make about the rules complexity is that I absolutely did not want the game to become a storytelling game without any mechanical difficulty. This is intended to be a game where the players are challenged by the rules of the game itself, similar to how a board game is played, but with rules that only take a few minutes to read in their entirety. As an end result, the game has simple rules that are easy to learn, but challenging to win against, requiring careful and skilled play.
