Introduction

The Simplify Your Rules (SYR) game system is an attempt to keep the rules and game mechanics as light as possible to foster role playing from players and collaboration between the game master (GM) and the players in creating a shared story. As with any game, a set of rules and game mechanics is necessary to simulate the characters, creatures, equipment, the world around them, and how they all interact as well as add a bit of chance and luck into the game session.

However, a desire to make things as objective as possible and to cover any scenario that might ever crop up in a game often produce a mass of rules and mechanics that runs hundreds of pages and is impossible for everyone at the table to master. A game session of a few hours can easily be consumed looking up rules, endlessly debating tactics on a playing grid, calculating multiple bonuses and penalties to die rolls, and arguing about the interpretation of a little used rule. Anyone that has played a game with that kind of rule system has seen an entire game session devoted to a single combat encounter that did not really move the story forward but took hours to complete due to the complexity of the rules and the amount of math involved. A lot of people enjoy tons of options, a rule for every occurrence, and manipulating a pile of numbers for the optimum bonus, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that style of play. Others look at that massive rule book, hours devoted to creating one character, and a board full of gridlines for combat and sigh in despair.

This system is for that second group of players. The ones that are more interested in the story being told at the table and their characters actions in that story. They want to sit down for a game session and get swept up in a story and see it advance over the next couple hours and they do not want to learn a tome full of rules to accomplish this task.