About Dead Simple Roleplaying

“Let me explain, no that would take too long, let me sum up…”  – Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

Like an growing number of roleplayers over the last two decades I have found the increasing complexity and length of most commercial roleplaying systems overwhelming. I’m sorry everyone, but I like to play RPG’s for fun, not as a second life. I like to be carried along by the story, not the dice. I like to spend my playing time finding creative solutions to seemingly intractable problems, not rolling handfuls of dice against skill tables to see if I succeed.

I understand that the commercial authors of rules have mortgages to pay and businesses to run and I applaud the fact that they have found away to do so. However, I do not see why I as a games master have to own several multi-hundred page books, all of the supporting novels, the asssociated figures ranges, the maps and floorplans and a bucket of dice, just to give my friends an evening of fun.

All this complexity is driving the roleplaying out of RPGs. The straw that broke this old camel’s back was when Dullards of the Coast decided that D&D had to become a superpowered skirmish game that mimicked World of Wiffwaff.

Already known for my ability to distill a wargame down to a single page (FUBAR) I decided to try and do the same with a classic fantasy RPG. Well folks I failed.. well not entirely. Dead Simple is indeed a single page, but I couldn’t help myself and wrote a dozen supplements on such things as creating dungeons, villages, cities and monsters, each a single page long.

So the rules now span a dozen pages, but you still only need the first page to play a game. You can create and develop a character and play it in a game with that single page.

I published this game on my blog a few years ago now, and it has gone from strength to strength. With only a single page to mess about with I found it easy to convert to other genres and before I knew it I had about twenty variants on the books. A few of them became very popular, such as Carbon City – 1930’s Superhero Roleplaying.

Well all this has now outgrown my original blog and so I have built a new one to chronicle and support it.

Important Note: All of this is free! Please download anything you like here and bend, fold, staple, mutilate and adapt it to your heart’s content. All I ask is that if you publish it on the interweb that you put a link back to where it came from. Also if you have the time let me know how it is going.

Now, wo ist meine kleine goblin-hammer…?