VI·VIII·X KUP RPG

Well, another topic coming from a discussion in a very popular community: the starting point is (needless to say) the rules framework in a RPG. The debate is more or less between those who need a light set of rules... someone would love to have a 5-page rulebook (!!!), someone else is looking for a single page only... and on the other faction, those who want an as much as possible detailed set of rules... those kind of massive books where the authors have foreseen nearly every event could occur (and not only: every event has been combined among the many other features sorting out a vectorial product of huge size)... Looking from a mere external point of view, it is clear that a RPG is the outcome of someone's needs: it can be as vary as the number of people playing RPGs... this is not really the point though. What is interesting is trying to sort out the roots of this hobby: it started from a group of wargamers (at the end of the day, the Fantasy supplement in Chainmail is the embr...

I posted some questions on DF boards just to have the opinion of some educated fellows of that community: the questions where not about contents, it was all about form and layout. Useless to say, we have fallen in the trap and I found an interesting view on contents by a fellow who left some brilliant thoughts here:  Post on Dragonsfoot  . The first point is interesting and not too far from reality: experienced players and GMs looks for games where there are several degree of freedom... those "light-rules games". Maybe that it is not always true (I can imagine that a group of engineers would prefer a very complex rules framework, no offense intended at all!), but what this guy writes makes a lot of sense. After all, it ends up to the logic of the VI·VIII·X game: a set of rules to be born by the GM mainly, leaving more room for role-playing and for tasting the situation rather than worrying about the correct modifier to be applied. The second and more interesting point is ...

A troubled question is waving in my mind since a couple of days... firstly it is necessary to explain the background: from a proofread I got a feedback that the acronym KUP is not technically correct. "Keep uneducated players" has a different meaning than "Keep players uneducated": the difference is subtle but there is! The expression "Keep uneducated players" refers to the GM's willingness to retain "uneducated" players and to ensure that others leave the game table by means of the game model. The other expression, "Keep players uneducated", means that the GM, thanks to the game model, is able to keep the players not completely "educated" and makes sure to preserve the "astonishment of ignorance" that I mentioned in an earlier post. Now let's get to the point: on one hand I should stick to the grammar and replace KUP with KPU... at the end of the day that is the correct expression! On the other hand I really...