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Referencing rules at the table

Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 4:01 pm
by quaffeine

So I've been going down the rabbit hole of at-the-table reference material lately, specifically things like home-made cheatsheets.

Given the concise nature of e.g. m20 Purest Essence as well as some of the more expanded rulesets, how does everyone typically look up rules at the table?

  • Page through the rules booklets? If so, what size? Anyone still using things like the PocketMod format m20 originally used?
  • Any supplemental reference materials? Cheatsheets? Index cards (like the D&D/PF Spell Card decks)?
  • How about digital tools? Do you reference PDFs? Curate rules using e.g. Google Docs?

Re: Referencing rules at the table

Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2022 11:31 am
by squirewaldo

Well my first start is to try to build as much of the basic rules into the Character Sheet as possible. This is pretty easy for M20 based games and it is why I do so emphasize to new players to use the character sheets I provide.

And as you know I have no problem looking at the rules to figure out what they say, even when I wrote the damned things. I cannot remember everything I have written or said, so having a reference is always handy. After all that is what rules are for.

As for digital stuff I wish I was better with that, but I have no luck in using them. I need to have paper in my grubby little paws.

however, when I don't feel like doing so I just make shit up on the fly. That works too.


Re: Referencing rules at the table

Posted: Sun Oct 16, 2022 7:18 am
by randalls
quaffeine wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 4:01 pm

Given the concise nature of e.g. m20 Purest Essence as well as some of the more expanded rulesets, how does everyone typically look up rules at the table?

I try to avoid looking up rules during play. if I can't remember the specifics of a rule, I generally just make ruling that seems fair. Keeping the game moving is -- more often than not -- more important than following some rule that doesn't come into play often enough to remember.

That said, I have all the rulebooks as PDFs on my tablet, so if I need to find something important, search is my friend. If I'm using multiple rulebooks, I generally merge them into one PDF so I can search the lot of them with one search.

Important note: For games like Microlite74, I been running some version of them or the game they are intended to recreate for many, many years. There's not much important that I am likely to forget.