Rules can be helpful as a framework, but they are not necessary for play.

I appreciate arguments made that certain rules and precedures help to emulate genre or setting, but my counter is that those methods are redundant, as even with passing communal knowledge of the setting at the table, everyone can reasonably play anything with imagination and conversation. Context, motivation, and the assumptions of the setting guide your actions and approach, not mechanization.

You've met a person, right? How do you talk to them? Now talk to a person inside of a game in the same way. I've said elsewhere that an adventure game needs little more than interesting choices regarding interesting people amidst interesting locales. In general, storygames and mainstream modern RPGs and even a swath of the old school community don't appeal to me because portions of the experience are deliberately gamified when they could just be role-played. I find that I love the free kriegsspiel model not because it is simple (though that is a large plus) but because it all is about intuition and honesty with subject matter. So, to reiterate, here is how I go about it. There are various preferences, emphases, and relationships to consider. Still, though, there has been an instance of. Nonetheless, Worf gives the order: 'prepare for ramming speed' This implies that he was referring to an impulse velocity. With the stated loss of main power and weapons, not to mention visible damage to her warp engines, it is unlikely that the vessel had warp drive available. This is, of course, how any two different people running any two different games will pan out, but it's worth stating here since there is not, in fact, 'one way' to adopt this method. Ramming Speed In First Contact, the Defiant is battered by the Borg. Two referees adopting similar styles may yet produce very different tables. This is not 'how it always works.' It is a (hopefully clarifying) example.

I'm going to make this quick, because that's something I especially appreciate about this method: it's fast, it's intuitive, and it only needs a little nudge to get going.ĭisclaimer: This is how I run my games. For almost a calendar year since this concept has become increasingly vogue across the interwebs, many earnest folks have raised repeat questions not about 'what is this?' but 'how does it actually work?' At the risk of being overly ironic, think of this post as an introductory rulebook to a style of play that assumes a rulebook is patently unnecessary. I take it for granted that I know how I run and have been running my games for a few years now according to the 'free kriegsspiel/FKR' (henceforth 'ultralight') approach.

Prepare for ramming speed