Comment on “Bring Enough for Everyone, Did We?”

Obviously I agree with you on this point or I wouldn't have a website where I'm doing my own accumulation of detailed rules (often by tweaking and borrowing yours.)

But the problem I find myself running into is this: at this time I would not want to run the kind of disease scenario you give as an example here. Not because I think it's not good D&D -- it is, we don't have to go into that -- but precisely because I don't yet have the rules to support meaningful assessment of disease, injury, and so on. So I feel like although I want to run more complex scenarios, I feel like I can't make it meaningful without least a draft of the relevant rules in place.

Obviously one method is just to be writing all the time. I'm trying! I'm ticking away at my skill rules, at my economy, at my this, at my that. But I can't invent everything all at once and so I feel like the stuff I haven't had inklings about yet is, in a way, "off limits" as part of a scenario.

Do you get what I'm saying? Do you think you can help?

Thinking about this "I don't want to use scenarios until I've got their underlying rules decently worked out" makes me think about using monsters. Maybe the reason writing and rewriting monsters is so popular is because a monster is a kind of contained rules unit all on its own. It can have its own special abilities or unique rules without calling out to other parts of the game documentation. And if it's a draft, hey, it's only one type of monster, I never have to use it again if it pans out badly. Or I can tweak it afterward, since (except in cases like your Identify/Predict XYZ Creature skills) monster rules are usually much less transparent to the players than, say, the rules for "how my Authority medic does amputation." The latter is directly player-usable and feels to me like it has to be gotten closer to Right before I can deploy it, where a monster can exist as more of a draft forever.