Mork Borg & Trust Issues

In an RPG with a technical ruleset that occupies the whole of one small page, the gamemaster has to call a lot of shots. This is the opposite of an RPG with a 300 page ruleset, even if the essence of those rules can be simmered down to a single target number and a die roll (plus modifiers). Mork Borg, being the former, relies heavily on a few essential abstractions of how things happen in the world. That one small page doesn’t restrict what a player character can do, it just minimizes the intrusion of charts and calculations into the flow of play. It shifts a significant portion of rules interpretation from the books to the gamemaster, who decides which of the handful of rules apply to any situation. A player doesn’t face a character sheet crammed with scribbled notes or littered with hyperlinks. There isn’t much there on the Mork Borg character sheet beyond a few stats, a few weapons, maybe a scroll or two, and perhaps the odd block of lard. This is wonderful.

Or it’s awful. Depending on who is running the game, and how the expectations of the players shape the experience. Mork Borg rewards players for having faith in the person making decisions, rather than maintaining fidelity to an elaborate ruleset.

My main RPG group has been playing together for over twenty years. We began by blowing the dust off our AD&D books and played happily for years, ignoring the editions that had come out since. What finally got us into 3.5e was the appearance of balance. It seemed to handle the innumerable edge cases that AD&D either ignored or botched horribly. It felt like a breath of modernity, like the video games D&D had inspired had returned the favor by injecting necessary computational logic into the Player’s Handbook. There appeared to be a rule for almost everything, and the rule systems worked together rather than operating with the broken modularity of AD&D.

We coasted there for another decade. I was mostly a forever DM, in part because I was good at learning the rules. 3.5e has a lot of rules. Over time, my group discovered the myriad ways in which the 3.5e ruleset created as many problems as it solved. Then we moved on to 5e, enjoyed the things they fixed, found other things that they didn’t, and we’ve had fun. But such a complex RPG demands much from its participants. Life is more complicated than it used to be, time is more precious, and we’re all getting a little tired of the cognitive burden of D&D. We still have laughs. I still know how to spool out a cliffhanger session ending. But it feels like work, the balance isn’t right, and the game requires an investment of an increasingly scarce reesource: focus.

When I stumbled upon Mork Borg it hit me like a welcome slap (if not the full spiked-flail-to-the-face). I loved the design, the commitment to theme, the simplicity. A grim, difficult world, light on technicalities, densely atmospheric. No skill systems. Intriguing random charts. Spells that endanger everyone involved, and not the tightly-worded superpowers that we’re accustomed to. Player-facing dice rolling. All of it sprinkled with bits of arbitrary horror. Search a corpse? Fvck you — here’s a pocketful of spiders. I’m charmed.

But some of my group is reluctant, and I understand why. As much as the endless fiddly bits of D&D slow us down, they also provide structure. I see that structure as an enclosure, but my players see it as a framework. Some of them prefer the character sheet packed with details and rules because it describes all of their options but also limits them. They don’t want to imagine the dour, dramatic world of Mork Borg, or the infinite number of brutal, ridiculous actions their character might take — for them that imagining feels like a source of the cognitive burden. Whereas for me, as the DM in our D&D game, the monster stat blocks, PC abilities and spells, the rules about movement and lighting, and all the rest of it are the part that feels less like fun and more like management.

But there is another, more subtle consideration. Players in a D&D 5e game like those rules because they, too, can learn them (at least in theory). We can all agree on the radius of dim light provided by a torch. Spirit Guardians does the same thing when they cast it as when an opponent casts it. The players are good at keeping their characters alive, because the game demands an investment in a character’s progression. They look at Mork Borg — and hear my recommendation that they keep a backup character in the wings — and see a world where the rulebook has nothing to say about the universe of edge-cases that will invariably arise during play. They have to rely on me, the gamemaster, to provide the framework.

They have to trust me.

Which they mostly do. Or at least they’d damned well better. I’ve earned it. I’ve heard them out when we disagreed about something and changed my opinion in the face of a well-built argument. I’ve owned my mistakes, and tried to quietly restore balance when a narrative decision has had unintended consequences. I don’t double-down when I’m wrong. Life is too short. So is game night. If we’re playing Mork Borg and one of them wants to use a bow at point-blank range in a melee fight, so be it. I’ll figure something out.

But if I succeed in directing my crew over to Mork Borg and we can have fun in the Dying Lands, what surprises will be waiting for me? Can I craft adventures that suit this ruleset's sensibility? Will my players be able to develop a sense of who their characters are without a four page document itemizing them? My hope is that we will all be able to get into the spirit of the game and that the streamlined rules will be a gateway to faster, punchier play.

I suppose we’ll find out. And either way, it will at least offer a break from 5e. Maybe that spiked flail to the face is exactly what we need to shake up our expectations.