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Rules to Live By (RTLB) is a generic live-action rules set. They consist of a few rules, a wee bit of GM advice and a big pile of character generation stuff. There’s also an adventure, character templates, a list of animals, some mediocre artwork and three utterly superfluous pages on languages.
The rules aren’t anything special. Worse (considering this is supposed to be a live-action rulebook), they’re not particularly suited to live-action games. First, they require dice. Second, and more importantly, they don’t feel like they’re written for a live-action game. RTLB is just like normal table-top rules system, where you have a GM overseeing everything. To me, a live-action set of rules should be as self-contained as possible so that the GMs can relax and concentrate on plot. They should also involve “doing” stuff rather than just rolling dice. After all, isn’t that why you’re doing the live-action thing in the first place?
The character generation system is equally uninspiring – you get points, and have to spend them on abilities, skills and stats. Yawn. And if it sounds like GURPS, it feels like GURPS. In fact, RTLB is to GURPS as Minds Eye Theatre is to Vampire: the Masquerade. If you like GURPS, fine. If the thought of a live-action version of GURPS fills you with dread – steer clear of RTLB.
In fact, I could probably finish this review right here by saying that if you like GURPS then you’ll probably like RTLB. And if you don’t like GURPS, you won’t like RTLB. But that’s not really fair. There are more detailed reasons why I don’t like it.
Of course, I’m hardly RTLB’s target audience. RTLB is designed so that players can create their own characters for a live-action game. I personally prefer the kind of live-action game where the characters are created for you – detailed characters, with objectives, a past, allies and enemies. Not just a list of numbers – a real character. (We call these games “freeforms” in the UK. I think they’re sort-of known as “theatre-style” games in the US, but I think that covers a multitude of sins and isn’t precise enough.) Letting players design their own characters for these kinds of games is rather defeating the point.
But even given that I’m never going to like RTLB, I still think it does things wrong. The biggest crime that RTLB commits is that it treats live-action games as nothing more than round-the-table games but without the table. You’ve only got to look at the sample adventure for that. You could happily run the sample adventure without having to leave the luxury of your armchair. So what’s the point?
Live-action games do a number of things really well. They are particularly good at character interaction and combat. As far as interaction goes, instead of the GM playing every single NPC (and those NPCs being generally rather trivial), in a live-action game you can have the NPCs played by real people. Or even better, don’t have NPCs at all – all the characters are played by players and they all have backgrounds and objectives. You can fill out a town this way. RTLB, on the other hand treats NPCs pretty much as you would if you were running a normal game - as guards, and monsters and other minor characters (although they are played by real people, so that's an advantage I suppose).
Then there’s combat. For those who are into that sort of thing (and I’m not, but I can see the attraction), one of the great joys of live-action gaming is beating the living daylights out of something with a foam rubber weapon. RTLB, on the other hand, has a completely safe and abstract combat system instead. I’ve nothing against abstract combat systems, but frankly I don’t have any confidence in a system that gives five bunny rabbits a 40% chance of killing an average person in the first round of combat! And as I mentioned above, RTLB uses dice, which I’d rather not see in a live-action game.
One of the other nice things about live-action games is that they generally do away with all that statistic-skill-advantage nonsense that has burdened tabletop games. The games I enjoy certainly tend to concentrate on character rather than numbers. RTLB therefore feels like a distinct retrograde step to me.
And then there are the three mystery pages of languages. I have absolutely no idea what these are doing in the book. They aren’t well explained, there doesn’t seem to be any point, and I don’t know what relevance they have to live-action games. In fact, I’ve never seen this in a roleplaying game before - although I’ve not seen many recent games so perhaps such tables are currently in vogue. I don’t know.
So to summarise: Rules to Live By - I won’t be using it.
