Design Philosophy (Part I)

Like many longtime gamers, as I've gotten older, I've become increasingly lazy as a GM.  Part of it is because I simply have less time to prepare for game sessions.  Part of it is because not only have my improvisational skills as a GM improved, but I now enjoy a bit of improvisation during game sessions.

Consequently, the first design focus for my rules set, Sorcery & Steel, is to make a GM's life easier.  One of the decisions I've made is to do away with all in-game look up tables (i.e., look up tables used after character generation).  Back in grade school, I spent many hours memorizing tables like this:

I know that some old school players swear by look up tables, but today I prefer not even needing to look anything up during a session, which is usually possible since I know my rules set well enough.  While my approach front loads complexity, once a GM gets the hang of Sorcery & Steel, gameplay speeds up noticeably, which also happens to be a second, somewhat overlapping, design focus.

Recently, I briefly made an exception by adding Critical Hit and Critical Miss tables.  However, when playtesting a module I'm writing for these rules, gameplay came to a halt when I had to look up the Critical Hit table, so I reverted to the old rules (double weapon damage for a Critical Hit and dropping your weapon for a Critical Miss) for the next draft of the rules set.