Risus is actually a c6

Last night (at the Emerald City Game Feast), I played in a Risus game, and my PC got knocked unconscious by Miss America. While I was out of commission, I picked up the printout of the Risus rules that someone had brought to the table, and started looking at them.

I noticed several things we were doing "wrong". Not wanting to be a rules lawyer, I said nothing. I may bring it up with the group before the next time we play Risus again, I just wasn't going there at that moment. The notion of arguing over rules in the middle of a scene is excruciatingly vile to me, even if the thing we did "wrong" was part of what caused my character to be knocked out just then.

More importantly, and more to the point, in those 5 minutes of reading I learned a good deal about Risus that I hadn't known before. I've played it several times, but had never read it. When designing my Crunchometer, I had rated Risus as a c4, upgraded to a c6 if this one optional rule was being used. I've never played with said optional rule, I've just heard three different GMs say they had no intention of using such a rule because mucks up an otherwise elegant system.

Having now skimmed the rules, I can say that Risus is not as simple as I believed it to be. It's not really a c4. It's a solid c6 (even without the dreaded optional rule that I still know nothing about). I've played it under 4 GMs, and they've all abstracted / house-ruled the game into something a whole bracket simpler than the rules as written. The more complicated by-the-books rules actually strike me as far more robust than the dumbed down version we've been playing, but it's not as easy to remember across the months between one-shots.

I think I'll have to download Risus and read it more thoroughly sometime.