Its a hard habit to break; I know the feeling. Have you, by chance, played a lot of D&D?
At first, the freedom provided to the GM in Open Legend can be pretty daunting, which is probably my only real complaint about the system. Fortunately, the Core Rules continually reinforce the idea that the rules come second and once you internalize the general flow of the system, it becomes a lovely system.
I’ve only DM’d 3 sessions using Open Legend, but I am finding myself enjoying DM’ing this system more than 5e (played for a year, DM’ing for 6 months) since it feels like the DM gets to “play” in the world in a similar way that the players do. Successes with a twist is really engaging for the DM.
Not a TON of D&D. I dabbled. I had the same problem there, where I would be paging through manuals looking up how to complete lots of tasks rather than carrying the story along. It’s probably more of a video game and/or programmer mindset that @brianfeister mentions than anything.
To be clear, I was stuck in this mindset for many, MANY years and the reason I created Open Legend was to create a system for myself that helped me become a better writer / storyteller as opposed to poring over rules and optimizing mechanics.
I used to be the biggest power-gamer of them all, but in the midst of it all, I found that my favorite moments were the ones that had to do with a kind of feeling that could never be re-created inside of a video game / binary tree type approach. Like when Vera the Frenzied Berserker needed something to do with this useless sack of gold which she had no interest in. So she purchased a tavern and mounted the heads of her enemies above the fireplace / mantle.
So Open Legend just makes it so that you have rough guidelines for thematic, story-driven things to happen. And in combat, you have specific parameters for what’s possible in terms of “buffs” and “debuffs” (boons and banes). Everything outside of that, doesn’t really need much quantification, and even with those things, it comes down to a complex matrix of optimizations and situational modifiers – what boons can the players access? what banes can the players access? what feats do the NPCs have? what feats do the players have?
Open Legend opens the doors so wide, that stories become truly exciting because you really can’t plan for all the possible outcomes. And since your NPCs might have a “favored action” but also have attributes, when things go off the rails and your players surprise you, you know what your “menu of options” is based on attributes when you need to quickly improvise a “counter” to their clever trick that makes the combat too easy.
