My marble visage wrinkles with an Ozymandian sneer when I read the countless posts advocating the disposal of this rule or that procedure because they are, and I'm trying my best to be charitable, "not fun." Perhaps even "tedious." People who toss out exactness in favor of abstraction without a second thought.
To those who feel that counting grid squares and tracking resources, light, and encounters separately represents some overwhelming cognitive task, and instead choose to handwave them with abstract movement and overloaded encounter dice: Do you complain a cast-iron pan lacks teflon? Do you curse that a fine linen shirt must be pressed? Do you bemoan that a Stradivarius need be tuned?
"No one really tracks rest turns," they convince themselves. "No one likes beancounting." As though a dice telling you whether a torch exhausts is more enlightened than writing a note six rows down your notepage. No, this proletarian note-taking is too much work. These people prefer plastic dice, probably because they're brightly colored and don't leave graphite on your fingers.
I have, for a long time now, been a lover of old school D&D. Every night I pray at my alter of B and X, Moldvay and Cook the red and blue onis who sit on my shoulders as I run. Before a session I arm myself with the Commentaries of St. Gavin, the OSE Rules Tome, which I have wrapped in black gaffers tape as a sign of reverence and because I dislike the front cover illustration. I know the BX rules with an intimacy of an old lover; the shine of novelty has long worn off, but in its place a deeper and more honest understanding blooms. The obtuse mechanics, the references to spells that don't exist, the example of play that violates the rules set out not a few pages earlier, the inconsistent and nebulous phrasing throughout—no longer are these issues off-putting but instead part of the indelible whole.
Of course, I am but a man. I too have made modifications to the game over the years to suit my preferences and those of my table. I borrow liberally from OD&D, the "truest" instantiation of the game, and AD&D, whose DMG demands talmudic study yet rewards great wisdom. I lift a house rule here and there and make my own when the need arises. I drink deeply from the well of collective wisdom fed by OSR-heads from across the ages. I've said elsewhere and I maintain that the slot encumbrance system in Carcass Crawler #2 is the closest to the platonic ideal of encumbrance systems I ever care to get.
But all that is done not because I wish the game be something it's not, but because I want it to be what it is more readily.
What differentiates a change that makes the game something it's not vs. one that keeps it what it is? What the game, the pastiche of old school D&D systems and derived games, "is" is different for everyone. But one thing that holds true is the game invites work.
A number of posts crossed my desk recently that praise rolling your sleeves up and embracing the work of DMing. Do legwork, chew your own damn food, eat the book, and while you're at it stop writing like a robot! These are all focused on subjects and make different arguments, but they trace the same idea: working through a task grants you better understanding and greater discovery than using shortcuts. Shortcuts have their place, but the work is often worth it.
I contend that rules that obviate tracking, be they usage dice, overloaded encounter rolls, abstract distance, freeform magic, and everything else that follows the same tack, are in same broad category of "shortcut design."
Now the point of critical nuance: Shortcuts, be they generators, bullet points, or simplified mechanics, are not by their nature bad, and crunchy text-heavy work-filled works are not by their nature good. These are value neutral tools the writer-designer-GM may draw upon to suit the dictates of taste demands of the project.
But one must acknowledge what is lost with such shortcuts.
You are a GM for OSR/NSR/DIY D&D-style games. You are MASTER of the game. When you do the work and track the game state faithfully, you have every detail of the world at your disposal. Your creation exists in its own right, yet you know everything about it you need to. And when the rules are stretched and the limits of game-reality tested, you know exactly where best to let them yield. Because you are the Master.
When you shirk your responsibility for sake of ease, you become a subject of the system. The conveniences free you from the need to track, yes. But you are no longer master of the game world, because the game world is but a fog of uncertainty. And when you need solid assurance of when and where things are, as inevitably you will, the game world will not tell you. You haven't been listening. You have only yourself, and so you must hand-wave, make-up, GM-fiat an answer. And in those moments the game world ceases to exist. It's just you, making a decision in front of the players at the table. And if you decide something difficult the players will think you unfair and if you decide something easy they will think you are letting them off.
The same concept holds true for players.
Look to the Blorb Principles. Specifically the principle of Diegetical Mechanics. Specifically, this one part:
Not every genre is about meticulous inventory—you can run an office romantic drama without knowing exactly how many staplers are on every desk—but for situations when gear is important, it’s one of the few moments where what the player should be caring about matches with what the character should be caring about.
The same is true generally for diegetical mechanics. You get transported to the game world.
Replace gear with movement speed, torch duration, how many arrows you have in your quiver. All these things are useful to know because all these things are relevant to the game. When it's time to rest, your torch is sputtering, and you hear a wandering monster shambling down the hall, you know you're character is in the shit because you are in the shit. And you know when you use your last arrow it's because you decided to, just like you decided to use each and every one before that; it was you who decided and not some dice.
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