How much is enough?

 I look a one-page game like "Honey Heist" and have to seriously wonder when I play it. How much of the game is embedded in the rules written on the page, and how much of it is carried into the game as cultural baggage from playing dozens of games over hundreds of sessions in the last three-and-a-half decades.

I guess Grant Howitt's "Honey Heist" shares some similarities with Erin's game "An Adventurer's Tail". Both are about animals doing decidedly un-animalistic things. Both are fairly minimalist in their approach, but Grant's is condensed to a single page and mechanism of play that forces characters into a dichotomy of "bear" or "criminal", instantly driving a single type of story, while Erin's is more open, and therefore needs a more fluid systemto account for the variety of stories that might unfold within its sessions.

Both games leave a lot of gaps in their structure, and while I've run both at the table I had to seriously wonder in both situations if the success of each session was due to the rules, or in spite of them. I've run heaps of minimalist games over the years, and have developed a decent range of techniques to keep a game working nd moving forward. So that leads to my woinder.

If I go back to that idea that every session is a three-way tension between GM/narrator, players, and the rule system, does a minimalist system just mean I need to step up?...regardless of the minimalism, and the game is just more heavily driven by myself and the players?? How do we tell if a minimalist game is actually a successful design? Is it an Emperor's New Clothes thing? Are some games too minimalis, and it's only hype that keeps them popular?


Am I over-analysing things again?

I've had a few discussions with Erin regarding this. I guess that a part of the issue is that different people have different thresholds for minimalism. Some folks need more support structures in place for their sessions of shared imaginary experieces...others not so much.

It's not so much that one style of game design is wrong, it;s just that different games work better for duffrent people. Diferent rule sets do different things.

I like where Erin took the rule set, annd I'll be interested to see what she does with some of the other ideas I haven't had the chance to finish off... and where she goes with her own ideas in the future. 

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