There's a clear approach.

Create a sandpit with a boundry. A nice wide boundry.

Then three rules:

1) IC

2) IC

3) IC

Why, because we have a voting system that can create the necessary IC legislation to limit or expand IC actions and behaviour. We don't want stuff OOC because;

a) it undermines the role playing experience

b) undermines the IC legislation Diet mechanism

c) creates confusion.

d) removes from the Diet excellent topics for debate.

You create the boundries/OOC rules, keeping them nice, simple and vague, and then let role playing and IC politicking resolve the issue(s).

Classic example:

HOUSE Armies from KotR.

We didn't have em, we realised the Houses wanted and needed em, the Dukes needed em, so we voted em, bingo house armies.

Why because the voting system and the weighting mechanism is where the action and IC effort is expended.

If you want the Chancellor with extra power, vote!! You want different ranks, vote!!

It's all kept IC and simple. Any expansion on rule sets or fundamentally IC issues like ranks can be modified IC using our base line political mechanism.

Again, it's too much. Very much like LotR. I personally and sincerely appreciate the efforts that have been made to create additional concepts but there is a real art to creating a rule set that creates a nice simple boundry and then doesn't try to go further.

The aim is to create four railway sleepers (those big solid pieces of wood), 3 tonnes of yellow sand, a small shovel and some water. That's it. Leave it at that and let people create the rest. Don't be tempted to over cook the OOC rules when there are already IC rules about how things are going to be handled IN the sand pit.

Our sheer mass is going to cause mayhem by itself. But, we are creating a rule set that boggles the mind and will.

I found KotR an excellent experience and the basis for a great game. We dodged a train wreck at the last minute with LotR because we over cooked our rule set. Lets not go down the same path again.

Here ends the sermon.