Limited Working Memory - A Mission Statement

Dungeon crawl. Party comes to a door. They search the area.

Mark off a 10 minute Turn. Torches burn down. Wandering monster check - a 2 on 1d6 - no monster this Turn.

The several party members search for traps. The cleric too searches for traps - she rolls 1d6 and gets a 4. Normally that would fail (she needs a 5 or 6) but she's got a +1 due to using a 10' pole to poke around. 

It's a Magic Missile trap, so the thief kneels and gets out his tiny silvered chisel to scrape the special trigger rune off the inscription without setting the trap off in his face.

He rolls a percentage die and gets a 81. Way too high. The trap goes off! He rolls a save versus Spell and gets a 16! Enough to take only half damage, 1 hit point. Lucky.

These are just examples. There are lots of things like this in D&D. Lots of different subsystems handle different situations. This is especially true for OSR games (why this is true is for another time.) This means a lot of the activities that are theoretically important at the table in the OSR, a lot of the activities that go into playing the "old way" fall away in actual play. The Referee's working memory isn't large enough to handle all the details. This Referee's working memory, anyway.

I am blessed with a terrible memory. I'm just not that smart. (Stop pandering, I'm not fishing here.) My brain doesn't work as well as it did when I was 10, 20, 30 years old. Maybe yours does, but mine doesn't. But it is a blessing. It means that I'm always searching for a short cut to the fun I imagine. My RAM, my working memory, is minimal. I can't keep a lot of stuff in my head all at once. I need cheat sheets. But remember - it still has to work right and feel right.  I don't want to just pull it out of thin air. It doesn't seem right to do that when I don't absolutely have to!

This is why I always look for the simplest subsystems possible for simulating critical activities, and work tirelessly to jettison anything that isn't critical. While we talk about "rules-light" a lot, I'm not looking to replace rules with handwavium. Rather I'm looking to simplify the rules without moving the game from tabletop-strategy territory to story-game territory. It still has to keep the wargames roots that make it feel like OSR D&D.

Ideally I would find a set of rules as complicated as Candyland that would still feel like D&D. It's an impossible goal but it's what I strive for every day. I think I did a really good job doing it with Mythical Journeys. Things are never perfect but I'm satisfied with the effort for now.