Too Many Rules

I haven't updated things in a while (and I know you're still waiting on that Galaxy Prime review) but work on Renaissance and table-top role playing have been on unintentional hiatus for a while. In part because of scheduling issues preventing everyone from being able to get together and also partly because of SKYRIM!!! I'm 100 hours or so in (on one of my characters) and I'm still psyched about it every time I think about it. I'm sure this excitement will die down eventually, but maybe not.

Returning to my original topic, though, I was making a note to myself about some table-top thoughts I'd been mulling over and thought they'd make a good article, maybe something others could benefit from as well.

I've been reading a lot of articles by Monte Cook (Legends and Lore) and Stephen Radney-MacFarland (Save My Game) in the D&D article archive for the magazines "Dungeon" and "Dragon". The last Save My Game article (from 12/2011) and a number of Cook's latest articles have addressed an issue that I think Renaissance is suffering from. Mechanics Creep or Rules Creep. I enjoy designing mechanics and can come up with them on the fly on a fairly regular basis but often these mechanics, while they are fun at the time, end up getting codified into writing in the book.

This is good because then those mechanics are available for reference and we can expect the same situation to work the same way every time thereafter. However, it also results in yet one more thing for the DM to have to remember or, far worse, reference, during gameplay. Constant references to the book (or even a summary sheet) during gameplay slows down the game and interrupts the fun, which is what the game is all about. I don't have a solution for it yet, but I need to take a long hard look at the mechanics in the book and see what can be removed, what can be categorized into "optional" rules in a separate section and what rules need to stay to preserve the core flow of the game.