# Why the hate for complexity?



## Derren (Feb 27, 2019)

Maybe I am wrong but I have the impression that for some time now (a decade at least) there has been an ever increasing dislike for complexity and calls for ever simpler "rules light" systems.
D&D 5E is already much simpler than previous editions like 3E and 2E, yet people still look for even lighter systems up to a point that for large parts of the you are freeforming with no mechanics at all.
And even though 3E was once widely played it is now decried as a complex monster no one could have had fun with (hyperbole).

So I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from? Was it always there? Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore? Do they feel rules are constricting or that the granularity complex rules add like characters being differently competent in different skills instead of having one modifier for everything doesn't add anything to the game?


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## Bagpuss (Feb 27, 2019)

Anecdotally in my youth I use to love playing games like Champions, Battletech, and others that had all sorts of complex systems for designing characters or 'mechs. AD&D 2nd Edition wasn't really that complex compared to 3rd Ed until they added the Skills and Powers options, which again I enjoyed playing with making custom classes and the like, but then I also had a lot of free time on my hands, and few of the distractions kids have nowadays.

As an adult I have a lot more commitments on my time and many more distractions for my free time. Even if I had the same free time I had as a kid, there are way more things I can do with it. There aren't just 3 channels on the TV, there is whatever I want to watch when I want to watch it. Even if I was a kid that enjoyed RPGs with my friends, I'm not sure I would want to spend hours working on a character for Champions when I could be playing a real superhero on a PS4.

I still have Champions, Battletech on my shelf, occasionally I think about getting them down, trying them with my kids or running a game with my friends, but the set up time in learning a new system just doesn't seem worth it. I have a hard enough time getting my kids to sit down for a straightforward board game, let alone something that will take hours to explain.

I've also found from playing at conventions you can get some pretty intensive RP experiences when the rules don't get in the way. A game you can sit down, teach and play within four hours is pretty good fun. It might not be suitable for long term campaign play hence I also like games with a bit more meat on their bones.

I don't hate those complex games, it's more I don't have the time or inclination to put the effort in needed to make them work, when a simpler game will fill that same need.


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## Blue (Feb 27, 2019)

There are a few different parts to "complexity".

You bring up AD&D 2nd Ed.  It had a profusion of different ways to resolve issues, separate subsystems for so many different things, all that had to be looked up (or ignored, like weapon against armor types).  Moving to a unified mechanic removes a load of complexity and speeds the game without watering down the system or removing choice at all.

But yes, there is a shift in design paradigms as the industry has matured.  3.x ed tried to be a simulation, where there were rules laid out for everything.  What are the effects on your AC for being waist deep in water, etc.  For a computer system, having all of these well defined to know when to apply them would be good - for most normal players it meant time spent referencing rules instead of actually playing them.

Another part of the complexity of 3.x was around character creation and advancement.  With more players than DMs, books with player crunch sold well, and the business model wanted one a month.  Combine this with the heavy use of prerequisites and the fact that multiclassing into Prestige Classes gave a lot more than staying in the core classes (except for some pure casters) it ended up that the level of complexity really favored building characters all the way up to 20th before starting play, referencing over a dozen books so they you wouldn't miss the requirements for feat X and have to wait 3 more levels, because that would push back getting into prestige class Y, which in part gave you a particular class skill so your max skill ranks would be enough to get into prestige class Z.

Combine that while players focus on only a single character and welcome complexity, since foes were build on the same system it put a very heavy prep load on the DM.  And less DMs means less games.

4e moved from attempting to simulating realism to an approach where the mechanics focused first on proving a balanced game.  Some would say too far, and combined with other design choices ended up causing a schism in the player base.

Having a system that is both friendly toward growing the hobby, plus one that _gets out of the way_ to let us play instead of constantly trying to find and reference specific corner case rules, is where they went with 5e.  It's a balanced compromise, and looking at the published numbers about what games are being played out there it has a lot more active games then the older systems so that seems the right business decision.  

There are definitely people who miss the abundant meat for character creation that the one-book-per-month brought, but from a business plan perspective in earlier editions they have shared that only the core books were evergreen, keeping up regular sales.  The other books, which cost as much to design, produce, get art, layout, edit, print and distribute, had an initial spike but then settled down at a much lower level.  On the other hand the 5e model of fewer books coming out has kept them perennially selling well, as well as allowing more time for quality.

So, with an aging original player base who have less time, with greater growth of new players than earlier editions, and with a more stately publishing plan, lighter rules and streamlined play is where we are.  There are plenty of other systems out there for those that enjoy other niches.


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## Morrus (Feb 27, 2019)

Technically complex games are very hard to write -- I can't imagine how to approach writing something like Pathfinder (or 3.x). Jason Bulmahn has superpowers, as far as I'm concerned. And something like HERO... yikes!

So naturally you'll see a lot more of them published. Also, lighter games like 5E are more suited for streaming and convention games, and streaming a big part of game marketing these days.

I'm not personally a fan of very light games, except as one-shots. For a campaign I find I like having the complexity to dive into with my character if I'm playing him for months. But different people like different things, and have more or less time and inclination.


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## Flexor the Mighty! (Feb 27, 2019)

Derren said:


> Maybe I am wrong but I have the impression that for some time now (a decade at least) there has been an ever increasing dislike for complexity and calls for ever simpler "rules light" systems.
> D&D 5E is already much simpler than previous editions like 3E and 2E, yet people still look for even lighter systems up to a point that for large parts of the you are freeforming with no mechanics at all.
> And even though 3E was once widely played it is now decried as a complex monster no one could have had fun with (hyperbole).
> 
> So I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from? Was it always there? Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore? Do they feel rules are constricting or that the granularity complex rules add like characters being differently competent in different skills instead of having one modifier for everything doesn't add anything to the game?




I've learned that complex rule system rarely add to the fun at the table.  Oh they often add to the fun away from the table for those who love build tweaking and such, but tons of options and the resulting mods they create and require tracking add little to the quality of the game.  Quite the opposite, it usually makes the flow of the game more choppy as we spend more time engaging the rules themselves rather than the scenario. IMO, YMMV.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Feb 27, 2019)

Pretty much that. After work, making dinner, walking the dog, and whatnot, I only have so much time left at night. When I was a kid, I had the time to learn and play systems like Battletech, Shadowrun, Palladium, Megatraveller and the like. The trend back then, too, was definitely towards more complicated game systems. Now, I much prefer simpler games. 


It’s not that I hate complicated games, but that I just don’t have the time or brainspace. And I like to think that the time that would’ve been spent learning all those disparate systems is better spent learning how to be a better DM/GM.


Another barrier is that, if I were to run a more complicated game, I would have to bear the heavy lifting of knowing the rules and the book for months before everyone is up and running at the table. It’s hard to argue with everyone already knowing D&D 5e (mostly – there will always be players that just don’t seem to take the effort to learn how their abilities work, but I digress), or with a system that can be explained in about 15 minutes.




Derren said:


> Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore?


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 27, 2019)

In my experience, on this and other RPG forums, it seems that many people confuse "complex rules" with "difficult system". Reading some online reviews of games I like, I get the impression that some people think "because complex rules are included you must use them all the time", though I do think in one review's case the reviewer's reading comprehension of the rules could use work. Again in my experience, "simple rules" doesn't always mean "easy system", some Lite systems make it quite hard to figure out how to do some things.

Boiled down to the bullets:
* Complex doesn't necessarily mean hard
* Simple doesn't necessarily mean easy

D&D 3.x and the d20 system in general did a lot of damage to learning new games over the years with their attitude of "d20 games are easy, all other games are necessarily harder" attitude. That said, I liked some d20 games, D&D included, but not every genre works well in d20, and when you've been a gamer for decades that kind of attitude puts some people off. This isn't meant as an attack, it's just my experience.


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## cmad1977 (Feb 27, 2019)

I find that the added complexity doesn’t come with a commensurate addition of fun.


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## Celebrim (Feb 27, 2019)

Derren said:


> Maybe I am wrong but I have the impression that for some time now (a decade at least) there has been an ever increasing dislike for complexity and calls for ever simpler "rules light" systems.




Well, that little bit of pretense and calling what other designers and players do 'badwrongfun' in technical language goes back nearly two decades, but the movement away from complexity has been going on for nearly thirty years now.

So, a bit of background.  In the 80's, design in RPGs was wide open and we barely had language to talk about the issues of design.  There was a lot of good design and a lot of bad design, but one very common complaint about D&D is that the design was bad because it wasn't 'realistic', and there was a general sense in much of the community that many if not all of the problems tables encountered in a game was do to a lack of 'realism'.   Various systems of Traveller and GURPS might also be worth looking at, and a trip into the world of GULLIVER (a modification of GURPS) would also be worthwhile.  This led to a fetishization of realism as a goal of game design, which can be seen in extremely complex games of the period - HERO, and Rolemaster might be a very good examples, though the pain points in that complexity come up at different points.  Since the goal of RPGs started out as basically 'Simulation of the World', the attributes of a system which were considered very admirable in a system were that it would be universal (able to simulate everything) and realistic (able to produce a simulation that produced intuitive or 'correct' results).

In the early '90's, the difficulties of play with super-realistic systems and the fact that realism hadn't in fact solved all table issues, and indeed created some, combined with a second thrust of design that could be seen in games like Pendragon and Ars Magica, led to backing away from realism as the primary goal of design, and with that a backing away from the super-complex designs.

In the late 90's and early 00's, a forum called 'The Forge' began some very formal and highly influential discussions on the design of RPGs.   I personally feel almost all of their conclusions were wrong and the community ultimately became very unhealthy, but it was very helpful in some ways because it began attacking the problem of RPG design in a rigorous way using a lot of technical language and often from perspectives that had never really been clearly voiced before.   This was the so called 'Indy' RPG movement, and almost any buzzword that you'll hear in RPG design like 'rules light' or 'story first' or 'fail forward' comes out of those discussions.  Most of it is, as I said, just a load of horse hockey pucks, but it's worth studying in the same way bad philosophy is worth studying to make you think.   A few very good designs came out of that, probably the best of which is 'Dogs in the Vineyard', which is sort of a 'Rules Light' game and a good example of what you can do with one.

Ultimately, I think this 'hate' for complexity is similar to the hate of classes and hit points that you saw from certain sectors in the 80's, where champions of 'realism' would sneer at the design of D&D because it lacked 'realism' and classes and hit points were considered proof if D&D's inferior design.  This sneering was in fact mostly honored only in the breech, in that most of the games out there people were actually playing still featured classes and hit points in some form or the other, if often disguised by different terminology.  And certainly out in the world of computer games where complexity could be dealt with without the bookkeeping overhead that plagued it in table top games, designers were still most frequently reaching for hit points and classes to solve design problems.  The realism movement had some influences on the larger design of games, but it never was the cure all solution some trumpeted it as.

The same is true of the ideas that were championed by the 'Indy' movement.  Almost no one plays those games compared to very complex traditional games like 3.X and Pathfinder.   The 'Indy' games have influenced design of popular games in various ways, and there has been a lot of buzzwords thrown around in a marketing sort of way but 'Rules Light' has some major issues.

One big problem a 'Rules Light' game has is simply financial.  It's pretty much impossible to have a major 'Rules Light' success because most rules light games are supposed to have all the rules contained in a single usually short supplement.  It's hard to make money off of that, and if your game is a success, then how do you capitalize on it?  It's easy to capitalize on the success of a 'Rules Heavy' game simply by issuing more supplements and more subsystems but if you try to do that for a 'Rules Light' game then it very quickly becomes something other than 'Rules Light' (usually 'rules medium').   This is why I say somewhat tongue in cheek that, "There is no such thing as a successful Rules Light RPG".   This evolution can I think be seen in various games run off the FUDGE engine, then later the FATE engine, then later various FATE + stuff extensions.   The more successful the game the more complex it tends to be.

There are also a lot of 'Rules Light' games that are anything but.  For example, the game Mouse Guard which you might nominally think of as a rules light game has something like 11 different factors that can modify an individual die roll, and that modification to the roll can happen in 3 different ways.  The results are every bit as fiddly as D&D at its worst.

I have similar issues with a lot of Indy inspired ideas like 'story first', which I think if you examine its implementation, has to be the most misleading claim in RPG history in the sense that if you examine the process of play, most of the mechanics designed to implement that tend to put the rules first and the story second to an even greater extent than old school D&D play.  They are implementing some interesting ideas, but maybe not the ones they think they are implementing.  (I should probably write a long post on that since its been knocking around in my head ever since I made attempts to play Mouseguard.)



> I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from? Was it always there? Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore? Do they feel rules are constricting or that the granularity complex rules add like characters being differently competent in different skills instead of having one modifier for everything doesn't add anything to the game?




So, there is one area where complexity is I think pretty much dead, but its not RPGs.  Back in the day, there were simulation games like Star Fleet Battles and Car Wars which I played, that if you go back and read now are very much revealed to be pieces of computer software that run on a human brain.  I think there is probably very little interest in games like that any more simply because you can achieve the same and even more engaging results by playing them out actually on a computer.   The Hex tile war game at least at the level of complexity of some of the older monstrosities isn't completely dead, because grognards, but it doesn't hold nearly the place in nerddom that it once had.  But RPGs are still somewhat immune to this because even something like Skyrim or Witcher III can't begin to hope to simulate a GM, and we are probably decades away (at least) from having computer RPGs that can generate content and simulate free and open interaction in the way a good GM can.

Complexity in RPGs is far from dead.  5e is somewhat more streamlined than 3e and requires somewhat less bloat than the 4e design, but it's hardly by any stretch a 'Rules Light' game.  It's more organized in its layout than 1e, but its probably at least as complicated as 1e and more complicated than 2e D&D and it takes a lot of inspiration from the 3e and 4e designs.   If you look at what people are actually playing, almost all of it is at minimum 'rules medium' and most of it is 'rules heavy'.

And I agree with Morrus's comment from earlier, that the thing a 'rules light' RPG does very well is a quick one shot.  I don't believe that they well support long sustained play that is the hallmark of most tabletop RPGs very well if at all.   The 'pretension' that I mentioned about the notion of 'rules light' is that the designers of rules light frequently think that they are offering up artisanal haute cuisine rules that obsolete all other offerings, when in fact what they are actually selling is 'fast food' rules.  There is nothing at all wrong with 'fast food', and there are times when well made fast food is exactly what the situation calls for.  It's just by no means is 'fast food' proof you are a better designer than someone writing heavier systems, and by no means do 'rules light' systems obsolete crunchier ones.


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## Ratskinner (Feb 27, 2019)

I'd agree with both [MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] and  [MENTION=1013]Flexor the Mighty![/MENTION]. I mean, when I was young, I got into game complexity a lot. But I think it was barking up the wrong tree from the goals of play for which I come to an rpg. I'm perfectly happy to play a complicated war or battle game like SFB, even. I think there's definitely a place for complicated rules for competitive environments. However, that's the long way around for a game that's trying to create an interesting story. (And not all gamers come to rpgs for that purpose, either.) And honestly, that's why I come to play an rpg. 

I think, in a historical sense, a more fundamental problem is that traditional rules are not geared towards "story" at all, so much as they are geared toward a very loosely-drawn idea of "simulation" of a fantasy world.* So, this leads to "fudging" rolls and rules. I mean, you can't have the people who were prophesied to save the world in episode 1 get eaten by a randomly encountered Troll in episode 3....so, if I'm going to be fudging rolls, why have all these details in the first place? 

That being said. A simple ruleset does not immediately engender a good story game. Most of the "rules light" games out there are just a stripped-down traditional rpg system with a bit of handwavium thrown in to make up for all the rules and lists of gear that they got rid of. Which, to be fair, IME is perfectly adequate to play a traditional rpg in the style I like. But it doesn't inherently position you for creating a good story. The PCs could still wander around aimlessly never closing plot loops, etc.  I'm much more intriqued nowadays by games like Fiasco and Blades in the Dark, which cleanly focus on a particular type of story. And I wouldn't call Blades rules-light.

*and a very odd one at that, given some of the gamist premises of dungeon-crawling.


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## Flexor the Mighty! (Feb 27, 2019)

I would love a game that more accurately modeled medieval combat and weapons, and made combat full of mechanical options and choices...but every system like that I've tried was a chore to run and bogged down at the table. So I went back to an OD&D philosophy and system and things are fine.


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## Morrus (Feb 27, 2019)

I do agree that there is a strain of "complex = badwrongfun" which has been pervasive over the last few years. I wish it were easier for folks to accept that different people like different things, but I guess that's the nature of things.


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## innerdude (Feb 27, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> In the 80's, design in RPGs was wide open and we barely had language to talk about the issues of design.  There was a lot of good design and a lot of bad design, but one very common complaint about D&D is that the design was bad because it wasn't 'realistic', and there was a general sense in much of the community that many if not all of the problems tables encountered in a game was do to a lack of 'realism'.   Various systems of Traveller and GURPS might also be worth looking at, and a trip into the world of GULLIVER (a modification of GURPS) would also be worthwhile.  This led to a fetishization of realism as a goal of game design, which can be seen in extremely complex games of the period - HERO, and Rolemaster might be a very good examples, though the pain points in that complexity come up at different points.  Since the goal of RPGs started out as basically 'Simulation of the World', the attributes of a system which were considered very admirable in a system were that it would be universal (able to simulate everything) and realistic (able to produce a simulation that produced intuitive or 'correct' results).




 @_*Celebrim*_ sums it up pretty well here, with the key idea being, _why_ the need for complexity? What does the complexity actually positively accomplish either at or away from the game table?

Ostensibly the goal early on for creating more complex games was realism. The thought was that in order to more accurately "simulate" real-world processes and phenomena, you had to create rules systems that operated at a highly granular level.

The problem with doing this is that implementing that complexity _at the table_---making skill checks, running details combat scenarios---became so cumbersome that many players ended up rejecting the resulting play experience. 

If "realism" really was the end-all, be-all to a quality RPG experience, then Rolemaster, GURPS, HERO, Runequest, etc., would have long ago gotten a much larger footprint into the TRPG "cultural identity," but they haven't. 

What little experience I have with these types of systems is with GURPS, but I was always struck by the irony of the attitude many of the players had when I was in that particular group. They had this attitude that GURPS was the "One True Way," that anyone who didn't immediately recognize and embrace the awesomeness that was GURPS was essentially a moron. "It's so much more realistic," "You can literally do anything with it," "I don't get why ANYONE would still play D&D when GURPS is around; D&D is inferior in every way." 

But after a few brief turns of popularity, 33 years after its release in 1986, GURPS is barely a niche player at this point. D&D, Pathfinder, Fate, Savage Worlds, Fantasy Flight Star Wars / Genesys are all objectively more popular and widely played based on sales numbers and play statistics on things like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. I'd even argue that the combined OSR and Powered by the Apocalypse games are vastly more popular.

And why is that? Because for other than a microscopic fraction of the TRPG player base, the complexity of GURPS does not ultimately serve the purposes of play for participants. 

So the question again is, why are you adding complexity? It's already been shown through decades of real-world experience that "complexity for the sake of realism" is a dead-end goal. So why else would you add complexity?

Are you wanting to just give players more options to muck about with away from the table? Because it's no denying that this was a huge draw for D&D 3.x / Pathfinder. But that again only plays into the needs of a small subset of gamers.

Are you, as @_*Celebrim*_ noted, adding complexity because it makes a good marketing strategy? Because this was clearly the case with GURPS as well, where they literally have a supplement for every conceivable genre and historical period. And that's fine, but again, SOMEONE has to balance all that complexity against the costs for putting it to use in play.


(*Edit* As [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] mentions too, historically there was a strident section of RPG players at the time who firmly believed that adherence to realism as the ultimate goal would create dramatically better play experiences across the board. The reasoning being, most disagreements at the game table between players and GMs were around "how realistic" stuff should be, and that if GMs could just grasp "realism" better, that games would automatically improve in play. And we continue to see this impulse manifest itself, even now.)


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 27, 2019)

I think at the core, the need for complexity is "Some players are nuts and bolts type people, others aren't". One True Wayism isn't limited to complexity as goal games, as evidenced by presenting an open game and immediately being asked "Is it d20 system?". 20 years ago, I was a One True Wayer for D&D.


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## Morrus (Feb 27, 2019)

innerdude said:


> So the question again is, why are you adding complexity? It's already been shown through decades of real-world experience that "complexity for the sake of realism" is a dead-end goal. So why else would you add complexity?




Because I enjoy it.



> Are you wanting to just give players more options to muck about with away from the table?




Absolutely! System mastery is its own fun for some. Tinkering is an enjoyable activity for many.



> Because it's no denying that this was a huge draw for D&D 3.x / Pathfinder. But that again only plays into the needs of a small subset of gamers.




Well, I only need to worry about a small subset of gamers. Me and my friends!

(Or if I'm designing, as a small press publisher I don't need to sell millions of copies to make a living).


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## Flexor the Mighty! (Feb 27, 2019)

I think a big reason why my group didn't grouse when I moved the system from more complex games  ultimately Swords and Wizardry is that they don't mess with the game stuff outside game night for the most part, so the build tweaking loss wasn't a huge deal.   Since 2k we went from 3.0>3.5>CC>1e+CC mashup>5e>S&W.   And with 5e, well I was having to rework too much of it to make it even remotely challenging for my table that I said, screw this.   Otherwise I'd probably still run it.  I would just house rule the heck out of it, but why bother when S&W is doing what I want?


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## Gradine (Feb 27, 2019)

I have maybe two-and-a-half hours in which to play, every other week, with a group of up to seven players at a time.

We can get a heck of a lot more done in that time with a rules-light system than we can with something more complex.

The proliferation of rules-light games are a godsend for tables like mine. We wouldn't be able to play RPGs otherwise. They might not always have the longevity that a more complex RPG can bring to the table, but not every table needs that style of play anymore. 8-12 sessions can be a good length for a campaign.


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## Celebrim (Feb 27, 2019)

innerdude said:


> [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] sums it up pretty well here, with the key idea being, _why_ the need for complexity? What does the complexity actually positively accomplish either at or away from the game table?




That's an extraordinarily deep and useful question, and my way of answering it depends on me discussing what I think an RPG is, and what I think makes a good and successful RPG.  My answers are radically different than the conventional ones The Forge offers, so bear with me.

So to begin with, I believe an RPG is a game of structured make believe story-telling that is composed of a collection of mini-games which simulate aspects of the genera of the story that is being told.  An RPG is successful, if the different mini-games satisfy one or more of the potential aesthetics of play of the participants in a compelling way.

That may require some breakdown to fully get at what I'm saying, but from that definition we can I think immediately espy the utility of complexity.   First, complexity is useful because more minigames means more different aesthetics of play that can be potentially satisfied by a game over the course of play, and the more different genera elements or conflicts we can resolve in a compelling way.  Secondly, complexity is useful because it can add depth to those minigames, making them more compelling in terms of the opportunities the player will have for decision making, the emersion that the player will experience in the minigame, and the way that the minigame will act to both prompt and aid the imaginations of the participants.   That is to say, by providing more structure and more details within a particular minigame, the more likely it is that the minigame can satisfy multiple aesthetics of play simultaneously.

Now I want to contrast this with two specific claims made by 'The Forge'.  The first is that all correctly designed games only can satisfy at most one aesthetic of play (of which The Forge identified only three).  And the second is that a system should be tightly designed as a single coherent game to satisfy that one aesthetic of play.  These two claims lead one to think that the best possible RPG is one that is very simple and has a single unified system running through out it.   But by contrast I'm suggesting that the best possible RPG is one that has disparate, non-unified but interacting subsystems that each work to accomplish different goals of play by the different participants in the game.

My idea here is that by catering to diverse experiences, not only are you attracting more different participants to the game, but you are preventing the participants from easily tiring of the ones perspective on play that a more tightly designed system would provide for.   To go back to my earlier food analogy, a good rules light game might be something like 'Cane's Chicken Fingers', which offers a very limited menu selection of simply prepared convenient food.  The problem with this approach is that while it satisfies your urge for fried chicken, when you assemble a crowd of people not only are you likely to have people that are tired of fried chicken or who are glutten intolerant, but you probably will not find a group that will want to go out for chicken fingers every week.  Whereas a diner with a more diverse menu, might reasonably offer something for everyone and sufficient menu diversity that you do not easily tire of the food.  There might be that one guy that likes cheeseburgers and always orders the cheeseburgers, but as long as the other participants in the party can order something else, everyone is happy.


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## Umbran (Feb 27, 2019)

Derren said:


> So I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from?




"Hate" is a strong word.  It suggests an emotional commitment that probably doesn't (or at least shouldn't) apply to a game mechanic.  



> Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore? Do they feel rules are constricting or that the granularity complex rules add like characters being differently competent in different skills instead of having one modifier for everything doesn't add anything to the game?




It isn't about *learning* the rules.  It is about *using* the rules.   When I was a kid, my free time was bountiful, and my life experience limited.  I would spend tons of time on just about anything.  Weekends and summers were long stretches of freedom to do whatever I pleased, a lot of which was gaming sessions, 8 hour stretches, twice a weekend, and multiple days a week in the summer...

Today, that just can't happen.  Free time is limited, and to have the most full life, one must prioritize for the greatest joys.  So, I have to ask myself, is *USING* the rules at least in the running to be the most fun part of the game?  Do I (and more importantly my players) get a kick and have fun in the act of working the mechanics?  The act of counting up the fiddly bits, looking up details, is that a thing we smile when we do?  

If not, then the rules need to get out of the way for the things that are in the running.  With my main group, I have a three hour session every other week.  I *do not have time* for things in there that are a drag.


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## Jer (Feb 27, 2019)

Derren said:


> So I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from? Was it always there? Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore? Do they feel rules are constricting or that the granularity complex rules add like characters being differently competent in different skills instead of having one modifier for everything doesn't add anything to the game?




Speaking for myself - I teach a lot of novices how to play.  And I play with a lot of casual gamers.  So in my role as an RPG evangelist to complete noobs and people who won't remember the rules from week to week, having rules systems that are "just complex enough" is important.  Too much complexity they get overwhelmed and it becomes "not fun".  Too rules-lite and there isn't enough of a game for them to hang onto.  As more companies are kind of thinking about bringing new players into the market - rather than just cannibalizing existing players to come play their game - I think they're keeping issues like that more at the fore than they might have a decade or so ago.

Another angle is that a lot of folks are coming into the game via actual play pod/vid casts.  And in general the shows that have more narrative and less rules talk are more engaging for the audience.  So there's been more exposure for games that play well for audiences, and that's driving the conversation in ways that it never would have been driven previously when the idea of people actually tuning in to watch a bunch of nerds sit around a table and play D&D would have been the punchline to a joke and not something that happens on a daily basis.  (I still can't quite believe that it happens, tbh.)

And also - I think that it's hard to sell people on a new complex game these days.  Because there are existing games out there that they're already playing, and learning a new complex rules set is more of a time cost than learning to play a lighter game.  It's a big ask.


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## Blue (Feb 27, 2019)

Flexor the Mighty! said:


> I would love a game that more accurately modeled medieval combat and weapons, and made combat full of mechanical options and choices...but every system like that I've tried was a chore to run and bogged down at the table. So I went back to an OD&D philosophy and system and things are fine.




Respectfully, I'm not sure I would.  Riddle of Steel (a Conan-expy RPG) was lauded about the realism of the combat - and was upfront that three okay combatants vs. a mighty hero would end on the side of numbers.  Getting ganged up was very realistic - and therefore deadly.

I like slaying dragons and wading through hordes of goblins.  My hobby is an escape, it needs only be to realistic enough to feel right and give me a sense of tension and risk - and needs to be unrealistic enough that we can be heroes and fight those dragons.

(On the other hand, I'd definitely play that as a pocket game against friends.)


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## Flexor the Mighty! (Feb 27, 2019)

Blue said:


> Respectfully, I'm not sure I would.  Riddle of Steel (a Conan-expy RPG) was lauded about the realism of the combat - and was upfront that three okay combatants vs. a mighty hero would end on the side of numbers.  Getting ganged up was very realistic - and therefore deadly.
> 
> I like slaying dragons and wading through hordes of goblins.  My hobby is an escape, it needs only be to realistic enough to feel right and give me a sense of tension and risk - and needs to be unrealistic enough that we can be heroes and fight those dragons.
> 
> (On the other hand, I'd definitely play that as a pocket game against friends.)




Oh I don't mind the hero getting larger than life to a degree but I'm more referring to accurately modeling weapons and armor really.  But swords are sexy and pole axes aint. 

Though one thing I like about S&W is you really peak around level 9-10, like old D&D.  So you never get the crazy HP and/or attack bonuses of high level 3e/4e/5e PC, which makes them less godly.  D&D often turns into a superhero game at higher levels, later editions more so, and I don't like that as much.


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## Celebrim (Feb 27, 2019)

Flexor the Mighty! said:


> Oh I don't mind the hero getting larger than life to a degree but I'm more referring to accurately modeling weapons and armor really.  But swords are sexy and pole axes aint.




One thing that I find if you start attempting to model the various factors involved somewhat reasonably is that what works on a battlefield doesn't always work for someone whose job is to explore steaming jungles, trap filled tombs, lightless caves, and reeking mires.  One advantage that swords have over pole axes, however much all other things being equal on a tournament floor the pole axe wielder has the advantage of the sword wielder, is that swords are ever so much wieldier than pole arms.  A soldier can put an axe over his shoulder and march, and fight on a battlefield, but I dare you to be doing what my players have to do wearing plate armor and carrying a pole axe.  You just don't have enough hands, and you have no good way to store the thing when its not needed because it's longer than you are.  You'll find that if you are realistic about pole axes, they are always clattering on the floor as necessity forces you to drop one to do something else - like draw your dagger to cut this stirge off you before it sucks you as dry as a raisin, catch hold of your colleague before they slip off this ledge 60' above the cruel hard ground, bar a door against some monstrousity on the other side, or what not.

Beware super powers like 'Invisible Third Arm' (Fourth? Fifth?) or 'Infinitely Large Back Pocket'.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 27, 2019)

Derren said:


> So I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from? Was it always there?



Complexity is a bad thing. It always has been, and it always will be. Complexity is the cost of playing. It is the amount of work you have to put in, before you get any results from the system. In an ideal system, you wouldn't have to do any work, and you'd get exactly the results that you want the system to give you. No system is ideal, which is why every game has some degree of complexity.

Whenever you accept a certain amount of complexity from a game, the trade-off is that you can achieve more of your other goals for the game. Maybe it increases the detail of resolution; a more-complex system can tell you that you hit someone in the left shoulder, where a less-complex system may only tell you that you hit them. Maybe it increases your character customization; instead of playing a Fighter, you can play a two-weapon samurai with a particular faction affiliation that synergizes particularly well. There is good to be had from complexity, because it gives you a bigger budget to afford details in your game.

In the beginning, game were fairly complex, because they were poorly-optimized. I'm not going to fault Gygax or anyone else for that. They were doing something new, and they were mostly playing it by ear. Throughout the eighties, games became even more complex. Everyone had an idea for how to do things better, but that meant modeling more detailed realities, rather than optimizing the system design. It wasn't until the late nineties (or so) that people really started questioning the inherent complexity, and figuring out how much of it was truly necessary in order to give them the resolution they wanted.

When I was young, I played Shadowrun (2E and 3E), because the setting was cool. I had no idea how complex it was, because it was the first game I really played (aside from Palladium Robotech), so I just figured that's how games were. I wanted to play in that setting, so I agreed to pay the complexity cost. I didn't know there were any alternatives.

I recently read through the Shadowrun 5E rulebook, and for the first time, I realized how poorly-optimized it is. I don't think the complexity or resolution have changed much over the decades, but the sheer amount of work involved in getting anything done is staggering. I can't play Shadowrun anymore, because unlike when I was a kid, I know that I have alternatives. I can see how inefficient the rules are, and I don't want to put in that much work to get so little done.

I think a lot of other people are in a similar position. They accepted complexity in the past, because they didn't know that there were any alternatives, but now they know better and they've moved on to games that deliver better on what they want. Either they don't need the detail of resolution, and they've moved on to rules-lite games, or they like that level of resolution and have simply found games that are more efficient about delivering it. Nowadays, the only ones who stick with high-complexity games are the ones who absolutely want a high level of detail, or who care more about the IP and are willing to endure the complexity in order to have it.


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## Tony Vargas (Feb 27, 2019)

Derren said:


> Maybe I am wrong but I have the impression that for some time now (a decade at least) there has been an ever increasing dislike for complexity and calls for ever simpler "rules light" systems.



 Gee... what started about 10 years ago...?  Oh, yeah, the edition war.  When everyone was looking for language they could twist to make eachother's favorite games sound bad, and their own sound good.

"Complexity," "Rules Heavy" and, conversely, for your favored system, "Simplicity" and "Rules Lite" fit the bill.  They were far from alone.


There's no question, though, that complexity can be very un-fun - mainly, though, when it's /needless/ complexity.  When complexity accomplishes something desirable, it's worth it, and can even be part of the fun.

Now, if you don't enjoy a game to begin with, all the complexity embodied in it is needless (for you), so every time you're dragooned into playing it, you're overwhelmed with how onerous all that complexity is - and you go on line and let the world know! 

Conversely, if you love a game _a priori_, it's complexity vanishes from your perceptions, you can praise it to the moon for it's simplicity.  




> D&D 5E is already much simpler than previous editions like 3E and 2E, yet people still look for even lighter systems up to a point that for large parts of the you are freeforming with no mechanics at all.



 5e has fewer books published than those other editions (or PF, even short-lived 4e - or a lot of even more obscure/less-successful games, for that matter). The system, itself, if you compare PH to PH across editions?  D&D hasn't varied all that much in complexity.  AD&D was wildly, needlessly complex, because it had this odd design foible of dreaming up completely different mechanical systems for each task:   Attacking someone with a weapon? Roll a d20!  Attacking them with a spell? /They/ roll a d20.  Attacking them with psionics?  Look up your attack vs their defense mode on a matrix.  Wrestling with them?  Roll d%!  Then there were the classes, each class had it's own sub-systems, it's own exp chart, etc.  Being 8th level in one class was barely even roughly equivalent to being 8th level in another.  There was tremendous inconsistency, I suppose you could say.

Yet, when criticizing 3.x/PF & 4e/E, grognards would harp on how much less complex AD&D was!  Really?  They used /one/ system, roll a d20 + modifiers vs a DC, to resolve everything AD&D used entirely different systems for, above.  Heck, 4e didn't even screw around with /who/ rolled that d20.

Now, 5e is doing the exact same thing (almost - sometimes you'll roll TWO d20s - gah! the complexities!), but does get credit for being simpler?

It's a bunch of nonsense. 

RPGs are complex, because they model - one way or another - really complex stuff, like human (and imaginary non-human-sentient) behavior, and physics, and the imaginary physics of magic.  Some RPGs model more of that stuff with rules, some even take the bizarre step of making those rules clear & consistent to reduce needless complexity, and some just punt it to the GM.  







And even though 3E was once widely played it is now decried as a complex monster no one could have had fun with (hyperbole).

So I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from? Was it always there? Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore? Do they feel rules are constricting or that the granularity complex rules add like characters being differently competent in different skills instead of having one modifier for everything doesn't add anything to the game?[/QUOTE]


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## Umbran (Feb 27, 2019)

Tony Vargas said:


> Yet, when criticizing 3.x/PF & 4e/E, grognards would harp on how much less complex AD&D was!  Really?  They used /one/ system, roll a d20 + modifiers vs a DC, to resolve everything AD&D used entirely different systems for, above.  Heck, 4e didn't even screw around with /who/ rolled that d20.
> 
> Now, 5e is doing the exact same thing (almost - sometimes you'll roll TWO d20s - gah! the complexities!), but does get credit for being simpler?
> 
> It's a bunch of nonsense.




Um, there's more to overall system complexity than the task resolution mechanic. 

For example:
Questions - how much text does it take to describe the OD&D Fighter class?  How many choices does one have to make in character creation, leveling up, and play?  How many decisions do you make or elements do you have to line up and know before you can engage whatever resolution mechanic is used?

Then, same questions, but for 3e, 4e, and 5e.


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## Celebrim (Feb 27, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> Complexity is a bad thing. It always has been, and it always will be.




Now, I think we are going to need a definition of 'complexity', because I don't feel that that is sustainable at all.

Complexity is a good thing.  Indeed, it's one of the best things, maybe the best things there is.  If we tweaked the fundamental constants of the universe such that the universe was made of nothing but hydrogen atoms, it would contain the same amount of information but none of it would be complex.

When you say 'complexity is the cost of playing' and equate it to work, maybe you should just say 'Work is a bad thing.', because complexity is not work.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 27, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> When you say 'complexity is the cost of playing' and equate it to work, maybe you should just say 'Work is a bad thing.', because complexity is not work.



Complexity inevitably begets work, so complexity is bad because work is bad. 

What good can you say is _inherent_ to complexity? What positive trait can a game not possibly have, without also increasing the number of rules involved?


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## Morrus (Feb 27, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> Complexity is a bad thing. It always has been, and it always will be. Complexity is the cost of playing. It is the amount of work you have to put in, before you get any results from the system.




What you're missing is that for some people, that *is* part of the playing. They enjoy the process. Let's not go all "badwrongfun", eh? We survived edition wars, we don't need game style wars.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 27, 2019)

Morrus said:


> What you're missing is that for some people, that *is* part of the playing. They enjoy the process. Let's not go all "badwrongfun", eh? We survived edition wars, we don't need game style wars.



I'm not saying that complex games are necessarily bad. I'm just saying that complexity, itself, is bad. You need to weigh the trade-off, for all of the awesome things you get in exchange for it.

Are you suggesting that some people might enjoy complexity, for its own sake? That someone might prefer to roll seventeen dice, and cross-reference the result on three different charts, because rolling dice and referencing charts is inherently fun for some people? Because I honestly hadn't considered that before. If there are people like that, then my blanket statement might be a bit over-reaching, and the whole topic just comes down to a matter of preferences.


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## Celebrim (Feb 27, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> What good can you say is _inherent_ to complexity? What positive trait can a game not possibly have, without also increasing the number of rules involved?




All of them.

I feel I have to break out "The World's Simplest RPG" again.   It has one rule:

Rule #1: Whenever any proposition is made, flip a coin.  On heads, the proposition succeeds.  On tails, the proposition fails.

By your argument this game now contains all the positive traits that a game can have.

Reading you statement just above this one, I again insist we need a definition of complexity because when you use the word you are tacking on the idea of "needless complexity".

Before trying to define complexity, let me define a related term: "Elegance".   Elegance is the property of being the simplest system necessary to achieve a certain desired result.   Games should strive to be elegant.   They cannot avoid complexity and still be good games.  Complexity is good.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 27, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> All of them.
> 
> I feel I have to break out "The World's Simplest RPG" again.   It has one rule:
> 
> ...



No, by my argument, this game lacks sufficient detail in its resolution (for most people). I would prefer a game which did (much) more to differentiate between character abilities. The game is lacking almost all of the positive traits that you would normally gain as a trade-off from adding complexity. 

The game could stand to add complexity, not because complexity is inherently beneficial, but because doing so will allow the system to do more of those things that we typically ask an RPG system to do. In modifying this game to increase its depth of resolution, we should mind to increase the complexity by the smallest amount necessary to achieve those goals; no more, but also no less. For example, we shouldn't use multiple dice and charts unless we actually need them to achieve the probability distribution that we want (unless our goal is specifically to increase player engagement with the dice and charts, because that's fun for you).


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## Morrus (Feb 27, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> I'm not saying that complex games are necessarily bad. I'm just saying that complexity, itself, is bad. You need to weigh the trade-off, for all of the awesome things you get in exchange for it.
> 
> Are you suggesting that some people might enjoy complexity, for its own sake? That someone might prefer to roll seventeen dice, and cross-reference the result on three different charts, because rolling dice and referencing charts is inherently fun for some people? Because I honestly hadn't considered that before. If there are people like that, then my blanket statement might be a bit over-reaching, and the whole topic just comes down to a matter of preferences.




Of course there are.

And there are people who like fine-tuning the engines of their cars, and who like arguing the minutiae of TV continuity, and who memorise stats of sports players, and who painstakingly build model railways, and who like the arduous process of computer coding. I can't imagine doing any of those things. 

The things people have fun doing are many and varied. I enjoy spending time designing starships using fairly complex game systems, but I wouldn't enjoy it if it were a simple task which took me 20 seconds. I enjoy the *process*. 

(I mean, your example is deliberately bad to make the POV look ridiculous, but the point stands).


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## Celebrim (Feb 27, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> No, by my argument, this game lacks sufficient detail in its resolution (for most people).




Detail in resolution is, unsurprisingly, a definition of complexity or not a bad pass at one.



> I would prefer a game which did (much) more to differentiate between character abilities. The game is lacking almost all of the positive traits that you would normally gain as a trade-off from adding complexity.




The positive traits are the complexity.  You can't separate the two things.  Complexity has to do with emergent properties of a system.  You don't attain complexity without having at least some properties that occur across different scales.



> The game could stand to add complexity, not because complexity is inherently beneficial, but because doing so will allow the system to do more of those things that we typically ask an RPG system to do. In modifying this game to increase its depth of resolution, we should mind to increase the complexity by the smallest amount necessary to achieve those goals; no more, but also no less.




Absolutely.  We should strive to make this game elegant.  We should not strive to make this game uncomplicated.



> For example, we shouldn't use multiple dice and charts unless we actually need them to achieve the probability distribution that we want (unless our goal is specifically to increase player engagement with the dice and charts, because that's fun for you).




Yeah, so chess is a good example of a complex game.  It has a simple set of rules, but the interactions of these simple sets of rules create a game that has very surprising emergent properties and tons of agency in the person playing it, in that they have meaningful choices to make that have difficult to determine outcomes that therefore require a lot of analysis.   

You probably won't be surprised to find that some people might enjoy analysis of complex outcomes as a thing in and of itself.


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## Tony Vargas (Feb 27, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Before trying to define complexity, let me define a related term: "Elegance".   Elegance is the property of being the simplest system necessary to achieve a certain desired result.   Games should strive to be elegant.   They cannot avoid complexity and still be good games.  Complexity is good.




Necessary Complexity is good, I suppose, Needless Complexity, bad.  What's necessary vs needless largely depends on the purpose of the system.  I don't think the purposes of TSR & WotC era D&D, for instance, were tremendously different...



Umbran said:


> Um, there's more to overall system complexity than the task resolution mechanic.



Nod, it was just one example of needless complexity in the classic TSR era vs the comparatively clean/elegant and consistent complexity of the WotC era. 



> For example:
> Questions - how much text does it take to describe the OD&D Fighter class?



 Heh.  Do you include the sections of the DMG describing the fighter's potential followers & that Keep he gets to build at 9th level?  What about all the fighter-only magic items, those are essentially fighter class features?

But, another way of thinking of it:  could you, from memory, easily re-create the 1e fighter?  It's exp chart, combat matrix, saving throws, attacks/round, etc?

What about the 3e fighter?  Exp/level, same as everyone else.  d10 HD, 2 skill points.  A bonus feat at first, one at every even numbered level. Full BAB, Good FORT, Bad REF/Will.   Hardest thing'd be remembering which are his class skills (Climb, Craft, Jump, Ride, Swim?). 




> How many choices does one have to make in character creation, leveling up, and play?  How many decisions do you make or elements do you have to line up and know before you can engage whatever resolution mechanic is used?
> 
> Then, same questions, but for 3e, 4e, and 5e.



 The numbers can be HUGE.  Years ago I did calculate the theoretical number of unique single-class 3.x fighter builds, for instance, and it was just ridiculous...
...yet the class description, itself, is stunningly simple.  You don't experience the complexity implied by the whole universe of choices because you automatically narrow them down quite a bit based on concept.

I did take a stab at a more complete answer, it got really long:

Chargen:

1e: Choose chargen method, the most common, Method IV, IIRC, 4d6-and arrange, so make 5 choices of stat placement.  Choose Race, Gender (because it matters, mechanically), sub-race, Class, depending on race, choose a multi-class combination. Depending on class Randomly roll your gp and buy a bunch of equipment, any bit of which may be critically important. Depending on class randomly determine spells known and prepare 1 to as many as 4 spells for the day, or pick an all-important 'optional' weapon specialization, etc..
3e: Assuming point buy, make a /lot/ of choices about your stats. Choose Race, Class, distribute anything from 6 to 44(?) skill points, equipment.
4e: Assuming elite array, make 5 choices about stat placement. Choose Race, class, & PH 'build' - everything else is chosen for you, right down to gear. ;P (No, really, you could cut to the chase like that in the PH.)
Essentials: Choose Race, Class, Background, Theme, Alternate Class features or Sub-Class, Powers, a feat, and skills.
5e: 5 choices about stat placement.  Choose Race, sub-Race, Class, Background, skills from background, & skills from class, and spells known and/or prepared.  Depending on class, you might also choose sub-class (like wizard tradition) at 1st. You can let background & class choose most of your equipment for you.

So, yeah, in all eds there's a lot of complexity in chargen.  In 1e, there was less choice and more randomness.

Level up?  In 1e, add up your exp, at the end of each session, possibly add a 10% bonus, divide it by your number of classes, check your next level goal for each of those classes to see if you leveled up, then go looking for training and flush a bunch of gold to actually level up, then look to see what your class gives you at the new level, because every class & level is different. Depending on class, gain new spell levels, special abilities, etc, possibly gain followers, maybe even fight a duel to keep the new level.
3e: No bonus, no dividing among classes though you might have an MCing penalty (rarely), just check one level chart. Pick a class (or PrC! or next level of a class you already have) to take for your next level, determine if you can actually take it without penalty, and look up what that class/level gets you because they're all different. Distribute your new skill ranks to skills, minding the cost/limits of in-class vs cross-class. Pick a feat every 3rd level, or if a class-level gives you one.
4e: Add up your exp, check it against one chart, unless you miss sessions you all level up at the same time, and pick a power from your class or feat and/or stat bump based only on your level, because there's just one progression for everyone.
5e: Add up your exp, check it against one chart, unless you miss sessions you all level up at the same time, check to see what the next level of your class gives you, because they're all different, pick a feat or spells or other feature if you get one; optionally pick a new class or next level of an existing class if you're using the optional multi-class rules in the PH.



While the WotC era has brought in a lot more customizability the net price in complexity hasn't been that high, because needless complexity, like different exp charts and different THAC0 progressions and the like have been done away with.




In play... OMFingG…



1e:  Depending on class, memorize some spells from either a short list of known spells or your full list of spells for your level, or just wait, bored, while everyone else does the same, maybe break camp while they're studying books and praying for 10 min/spell level/spell.  Tick off rations, light sources, &c used.  Declare weapon-in-hand and marching order - if you want any chance of sneaking up on anything, get your halfling or thief well in advance of the party.  Wander around in the wilderness or dungeon, carefully asking the DM for every conceivable detail of the environment that might drop a hint about treasure or danger.  Either roll % dice (Thief) or d6 (surprise) to determine if you sneak up on anything (or vice versa). Each side (or player, depending on your DM, the rules aren't crystal clear and some make more sense one way, some the other) rolls a d6 to determine surprise, what determines surprise depends on the character and the enemy and can result in either, both, or neither side being surprised, or some of one side or the other being surprised or not.  Each segment you're surprised, the enemy beats on you like it was a whole round, 'cept for spell casting.  Probably.  Again, the rules were neither consistent nor consistently applied by DMs. Once you're in combat, either attack, or move and attack, or charge, or set a weapon to receive an opponents charge, or cast a spell, or draw and maybe use a different weapon, and roll initiative, again, maybe on a d6 for the whole party, or maybe a d10 for each (it was a super-common variant), and apply casting times and weapon speed and factor in attacks per round to try to figure out what order things happen in, and, maybe even, in some cases, get a bonus attack for tying but not winning initiative... if you attacked, roll a d20 to hit, apply various modifiers based on the weapon you're using, the circumstance, the armor they're wearing, and tell the DM, who will add any secret modifiers and consult a matrix to see if you hit, if you did and the monster could be harmed by your weapon, roll damage based on the weapon and the size of the enemy you hit, and add more modifiers... if you're casting a spell, and you didn't happen to get hit in the middle of casting, look up what the obtuse Gygaxian prose of your spell says, while the DM looks up the extra notes about how it works in the DMG and everyone else settles in for a long argument about what happens...  If your next challenge isn't a combat, describe everything you do in excruciating detail, including every argument you can think of about why it should work (and why your character should know it should work), unless you happen to have a 'special' ability that lets you just solve it with a pass/fail % check, or a spell or magic item that you can make an argument (usually involving middle-school/PBS-special/comic-book science) will obviate the challenge in some way.

...oh, and I almost forgot, do the same for your henchmen and hirelings!  (but be careful with them, because the DM is constantly adjusting their Loyalty and Morale...)



3e:  Depending on class, memorize _prepare_ some spells from either a list of known spells (wizard) or your full list of spells for your level (Cleric/Druid), or just wait, bored, while everyone else does the same.  Tick off rations, light sources, &c used, unless you've found/made/bought some infinite-resource magic item.  If you want any chance of sneaking up on anything, get your highest-stealth character well in advance of the party and have him make a lot of stealth checks.  Wander around in the wilderness or dungeon, declaring every skill check that you think might reveal a hint about treasure or danger.  If any challenges come up, everyone roll every relevant skill until someone succeeds (or just take 20).  Or just cast a spell, probably from a scroll, that obviates the combat.  If the challenge was an unexpected combat, roll contested stealth & perception to determine surprise.  Then roll initiative. The highest initiative caster picks the right spell from the list of every spell he knows (spontaneous) or every spell he has prepared (which might be dozens at higher level) /and hasn't cast yet/ or magic item (from everything you've collected or made) for the fight to bring it to a swift conclusion.  If you know about a combat in advance, layer pre-cast spells until the challenge is obviated before initiative is even rolled.  If anyone gets hurt, pull out the Wand of Cure Light Wounds and heal them back 1d8+1 hps & six second at a time.



4e: Decide on something you'd like to do, or just board the railroad of a linear published adventure.  If there are difficulties on the way, the DM may make it a skill challenge that you each take a turn and try to apply something you're good at too until you succeed or fail ("forward"), if it involves a fight, and you want to sneak up on 'em make a group stealth check (DC of their passive perception), if half of you succeed, you gain surprise (one standard action each), then you roll initiative, and, in initiative order, decide where to move, maybe take a minor action, and (mainly) which of your several attack powers to use - if you attack or cast an attack spell, roll to hit (with your predetermined attack bonus) vs the targets defense, and roll the power's damage dice, maybe with resistance deducted.  After, everyone takes 5 (minutes) and spends healing surges @ 1/4 max hps each, to get back to full.


5e: Depending on class, _prepare_ some spells from either a list of known spells (wizard) or your full list of spells for your level (Cleric/Druid), or just wait, bored, while everyone else does the same.  Wander around in the wilderness or dungeon, declaring every action you think of that might reveal (possibly with a successful check) a hint about treasure or danger.  If the DM does call for a check from a character and he fails (with no particular consequences), everyone else piles on and tries the same thing until they succeed, if it involves a fight, and you want to sneak up on 'em make a group stealth check, if half of you succeed, you gain surprise,  then you roll initiative, and, in initiative order, decide whether (there's often not much point) & where to move, and declare an action, which may or may not also entitle you to a bonus action, and, if you attack, roll a d20 + bonuses vs AC, or if you cast a cantrip or spell either do the same or call for a save from the target(s) which is also d20 + bonuses but vs your save DC, or do whatever else the spell says.  If you hit, roll weapon damage, or if your targets fail their saves, do whatever the spell says.  After, if you have an hour to rest, you can spend (roll) some HD to get some/all of your hps back.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 27, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Reading you statement just above this one, I again insist we need a definition of complexity because when you use the word you are tacking on the idea of "needless complexity".
> 
> Before trying to define complexity, let me define a related term: "Elegance".   Elegance is the property of being the simplest system necessary to achieve a certain desired result.   Games should strive to be elegant.   They cannot avoid complexity and still be good games.  Complexity is good.



It seems to me that you're conflating cause and effect, when they are really two different variables. You're saying that the cause is good, just because the effect is good. I'm saying that the effect is good if the effect is good, and the cause is something we have to deal with; if we could get the same effect, without investing as much into the cause, then that would be preferable.

Doing work is good, because it gets stuff done. If you could get stuff done without doing work, then that would be preferable. Work, by itself, does not justify its own existence (unless you're into that sort of thing). The real value is in the results.

In order to maximize the elegance of a system, you should minimize the amount of complexity that's required to achieve your desired result. Complexity is bad, in the same way that cost is bad when you're designing a computer. If you could build your super deluxe computer without spending any money, then that would be ideal, although reality will probably fall short of that ideal by a considerable ways.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Detail in resolution is, unsurprisingly, a definition of complexity or not a bad pass at one.



I would find that definition to be fairly surprising. I wouldn't expect anyone to conflate the number of steps in the resolution process with the variety and distribution of possible outcomes, unless they were very new to these sorts of discussions.

Nevertheless, for the purpose of this thread, I'm using the term to refer only to the former. By using the same term to describe both parts of that equation, it makes it hard to discuss the elegance factor. The reason why some people have moved away from complex games is because they no longer need that level of complexity in order to realize a given level of resolution, and the resolution is all they're really after.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> It seems to me that you're conflating cause and effect, when they are really two different variables.




No, you are persisting in using a poor definition.  I've offered up better definitions, but you've neither quibbled with them, nor offered your own, nor accepted them.  Instead, you are continuing to talk in a circle without even so much as acknowledging the argument I'm making.  So in short, this conversation is probably coming to an end.



> You're saying that...




I'm not going to get into refuting that because what I've said is available to see above and it has nothing to do with what I'm saying.



> Doing work is good, because it gets stuff done. If you could get stuff done without doing work, then that would be preferable. Work, by itself, does not justify its own existence (unless you're into that sort of thing).




You  are back to conflating work with complexity, and they really don't necessarily have a lot to do with each other.  For example, the game of chess is complicated, and it requires deep analysis to play well, but there is no "work" in playing it in the sense you mean it.  There is no direct relationship between complexity and work, and apparently you've been burned by poorly designed games that require a bunch of work (bookkeeping, math, memorization, table lookups, etc.) to achieve a result and now you think all that work is inherent to complexity but it just isn't.   I suppose that there is some inherent increase in the difficulty of learning to play a game with more complexity than a game with less (although, I can think of counter-examples even to that, but no in the sphere of RPGs), but the actual act of playing a complex game does not inherently mean more work in the sense you keep using it.

Not that I even think 'work' is a really great term for what you seem to be talking about, but a better one doesn't immediately occur to me.



> In order to maximize the elegance of a system, you should minimize the amount of complexity that's required to achieve your desired result.




Yes, but that's a truism.  You are just restating my definition back to me using different words.  That's like saying to maximize momentum you should increase mass without reducing velocity.  It's something I agree with, but it's also something that is obvious.



> Complexity is bad, in the same way that cost is bad when you're designing a computer. If you could build your super deluxe computer without spending any money, then that would be ideal, although reality will probably fall short of that ideal by a considerable ways.




Again, you are stuck on ideas of "needless complexity" or some such.  You're continually defining complexity as bad as a tautology.  Complexity isn't work.  It isn't cost.  You can go look up discussions of the (very complex) idea of complexity, and you'll not find them discussing work and cost and such.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> I would find that definition to be fairly surprising.




Well, start with a Wikipedia article on 'complexity'.



> I wouldn't expect anyone to conflate the number of steps in the resolution process with the variety and distribution of possible outcomes, unless they were very new to these sorts of discussions.
> 
> Nevertheless, for the purpose of this thread, I'm using the term to refer only to the former.




*Beats head against wall*



> By using the same term to describe both parts of that equation, it makes it hard to discuss the elegance factor. The reason why some people have moved away from complex games is because they no longer need that level of complexity in order to realize a given level of resolution, and the resolution is all they're really after.




Ok, I'll take a different tack.  Rules Light inherently supports less granularity in the resolution.   The proponents of Rules Light tended to mock the idea that you needed to have fine grained resolutions, and as a result tended to create games that do not as an element of the resolution process give you any degree of granularity or specificity.  They are not merely looking for a simpler or more elegant way to achieve what used to be called realism, they are eschewing the need for complexity at all.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> No, you are persisting in using a poor definition.  I've offered up better definitions, but you've neither quibbled with them, nor offered your own, nor accepted them.



Fine, then. What is your word that refers to the number of rule interactions and the amount of effort required to resolve something under a particular game system? Is it just 'work'? Do you want me to say that complex systems aren't bad, but work is bad, and people don't like complex games because they're too much work?



Celebrim said:


> Not that I even think 'work' is a really great term for what you seem to be talking about, but a better one doesn't immediately occur to me.



What's wrong with saying 'complexity' then? The amount of effort required to resolve something is an incredibly important factor in discussing game design. It's hard to believe that we don't have some common jargon for it, yet. I was under the belief that the correct jargon was 'complexity' but I guess that's not widely-accepted.

I mean, if you're discussing a machine that has a lot of moving parts which don't necessarily interact in obvious ways, then I wouldn't hesitate to call it a complex machine. How is an RPG any different?


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Tony Vargas said:


> Necessary Complexity is good, I suppose, Needless Complexity, bad.




Yes, but that is just a truism.   You might as well say good complexity is good and bad complexity is bad.  You've just used fancy words to connotate 'good' and 'bad' in this context. 

The question you should be asking is, "How much complexity do I want, and why?"  

Back to the World's Simplest RPG.  It's a complete system.  However, some problems with the system are immediately forth coming, such as that the propositions, "I jump over a puddle.", "I jump over the Atlantic Ocean.", and I get up from my chair are equally likely to succeed.  The results that we achieve using this system might be funny in their incongruity, but unless that is what we are going for we are likely to become dissatisfied with this system over time, and the longer we play it the more dissatisfied we might become.   So, while the World's Simplest RPG is complete and universal and as rules light as it comes, there are still things missing from it that make it a good game.


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## dragoner (Feb 28, 2019)

Like many old RPG players, I also played war games, some could get terribly complex like Squad Leader, Anvil of Victory. That was cool, except around 10-15 years ago I noticed that a lot of the older war game crowd were signing off, and newer people just didn't care for the war game-y style of play. Rules light comes to rule if I have to be fairly encyclopedic about rules as GM, then the less the better, to reduce my burden as I devote time to prep.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Ok, I'll take a different tack.  Rules Light inherently supports less granularity in the resolution.   The proponents of Rules Light tended to mock the idea that you needed to have fine grained resolutions, and as a result tended to create games that do not as an element of the resolution process give you any degree of granularity or specificity.  They are not merely looking for a simpler or more elegant way to achieve what used to be called realism, they are eschewing the need for complexity at all.



Is that what this thread is about? Is it not about those who criticize old games for their inelegant designs, but about those who criticize the need for granular results at all?

I guess I missed that.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> Fine, then. What is your word that refers to the number of rule interactions and the *amount of effort* required to resolve something under a particular game system?



 - emphasis added

Garbage in.



> Is it just *'work'*?



 - emphasis added

Garbage out. 

You continue to define things circularly.

The number of system interactions is not the same as the amount of effort required to resolve something.  Cryptography is for example dependent on the speed of resolution of encoding and decoding a message once you know the rule is vastly smaller than the effort required to find the rule by analyzing the message.   There is not a one to one relationship between complexity and work.   Finding a large prime number is difficult.  Proving it is a prime number once you find it is easy.  Life is filled with asymmetries like that because reality is... complex.



> Do you want me to say that complex systems aren't bad, but work is bad, and people don't like complex games because they're too much work?




No.  What I want you to see is that complexity is not work, and that people can have reasons for not liking complex games that don't have anything to do with work.  



> What's wrong with saying 'complexity' then?




Because words have definitions and definitions are important.



> The amount of effort required to resolve something is an incredibly important factor in discussing game design.




Agreed.



> I mean, if you're discussing a machine that has a lot of moving parts which don't necessarily interact in obvious ways, then I wouldn't hesitate to call it a complex machine. How is an RPG any different?




Yes, it is a complex machine!  But the work required to operate that machine doesn't necessarily correspond to complexity of it.   For example, a Slot Machine.


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## MGibster (Feb 28, 2019)

Morrus said:


> And there are people who like fine-tuning the engines of their cars, and who like arguing the minutiae of TV continuity, and who memorise stats of sports players, and who painstakingly build model railways, and who like the arduous process of computer coding. I can't imagine doing any of those things.




Or those strange people who like to discuss the minutia of details as they relate to games where they pretend to be elves with magical powers.  ::looks nervously left and right::

GURPS is an example of a complex game that some people absolutely love precisely because of its complexity.  The rules allow someone to create almost any type of game world they want and some people love being able to tinker with things at the macro and micro levels.  

I used to love GURPS and I'd still use it but most of my players refuse to play it.  To be fair they did give it a shot at least.  For the most part I don't enjoy a lot of complexity in my games.  I loved Battletech and Car Wars when I was younger but I'd never play them today.  Of course I don't want something too simple because it won't work for me.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> Is that what this thread is about? Is it not about those who criticize old games for their inelegant designs, but about those who criticize the need for granular results at all?
> 
> I guess I missed that.




Eureka!  I mean, that's not all that this thread is about, but it is a necessary insight to fully understand the conversation.

So, suppose you had an RPG that came with a little box something like Alexa, and during combat if you declared an attack, the box would magically spit back a detailed summary of the results of your attack that paid attention to all the factors involved in the attack and produced a granular and cinematic result like:

"You slash the orc's sword hand, severing it at the wrist.  The wrist lands in an adjacent square and the orcs scimitar clatters to the ground beside him.  The orc howls in pain as blood splatters out of the wound.", and meanwhile during this narration, the orcs stats on the GM's worksheet were magically updated.

There was a time when this would have been considered unquestionably the greatest thing ever.

But some people started asking, "Why do you need to know whether the orc's sword hand got severed?  Don't you really just want to know whether you one the fight with the orc or not?  Why not just generate that as a result, and then leave it up to the game's participants to narrate that result in the way that they thought would make the best story?  Having it specified what happened during the fight is actually getting in the way of the goal of RPing."


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## Immortal Sun (Feb 28, 2019)

Complexity leads to characters builds.
Character builds leads to powergaming.
Powergaming is the path to the dark side.

At least that's usually the vibe I get from people.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> You continue to define things circularly.



You're the one who brought 'work' into this conversation. I was perfectly happy with 'complexity'.



Celebrim said:


> The number of system interactions is not the same as the amount of effort required to resolve something.



Not exactly, but they do both tend to scale with the number of steps involved with the resolution process. If swinging a sword means that I roll a die to hit, and then you roll a die to parry, and then the GM rolls a die for happenstance, and then you roll a die for divine intervention, and then I roll for damage, and then you roll for damage resistance; then that's a lot of system interactions, which require a lot of effort to resolve. Even if you don't want to call it complex, I would still call it complicated and convoluted.



Celebrim said:


> What I want you to see is that complexity is not work, and that people can have reasons for not liking complex games that don't have anything to do with work.



Sure, anyone can dislike anything for any reason. There are plenty of reasons why someone might not like a game that takes twelve steps to resolve an attack. However, the amount of time and effort required is a big and obvious reason, and it's worth consideration.  



Celebrim said:


> Because words have definitions and definitions are important.



Agreed, but in the context of RPGs, I still don't see how the word in question fails to meet the definition being used. If it takes twelve steps to resolve an attack, then there are a lot of moving parts and interactions between the relevant variables, which should qualify it as complex under the agreed-upon definition.

I'm really getting tired of the semantics here, so let's just say that we agree on the basic points of this thread, even if we can't agree on the words to describe those points. I'm pretty sure that's accurate.


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## Morrus (Feb 28, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> You're the one who brought 'work' into this conversation. I was perfectly happy with 'complexity'.
> 
> Not exactly, but they do both tend to scale with the number of steps involved with the resolution process. If swinging a sword means that I roll a die to hit, and then you roll a die to parry, and then the GM rolls a die for happenstance, and then you roll a die for divine intervention, and then I roll for damage, and then you roll for damage resistance; then that's a lot of system interactions, which require a lot of effort to resolve. Even if you don't want to call it complex, I would still call it complicated and convoluted.
> 
> ...




There’s no game that takes twelve steps to resolve an attack. That’s as much an extremism as describing light games as just improv theatre. Sure, both ends at their absurd extremes cease to be useable roleplaying games. Pathfinder, the go-to example of a medium complex game, has two steps - roll to hit, roll for damage. For this conversation to even work, we have to use realistic examples of both.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 28, 2019)

Immortal Sun said:


> Complexity leads to characters builds.
> Character builds leads to powergaming.
> Powergaming is the path to the dark side.
> 
> At least that's usually the vibe I get from people.



Particularly in the wake of 3E, and the reveal that they'd always known Toughness was a garbage feat which only existed so experienced players would feel smart by avoiding it, there's been a certain backlash against games that require significant degrees of system mastery in order to create an effective character. I don't know that anybody is really on-board with rule sets designed to trick new players into accidentally making ineffective characters, or which allow some players to completely dominate every aspect of gameplay just because they're good at math.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> You're the one who brought 'work' into this conversation. I was perfectly happy with 'complexity'.






			
				Also Saelorn said:
			
		

> Complexity is a bad thing. It always has been, and it always will be. Complexity is the cost of playing. It is the amount of *work* you have to put in, before you get any results from the system.




At this point, it's clear that this isn't going anywhere.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> At this point, it's clear that this isn't going anywhere.



I wish there was a 'sigh' option for interacting with posts. We're definitely talking past each other.


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## Umbran (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Complexity is a good thing.  Indeed, it's one of the best things, maybe the best things there is.  If we tweaked the fundamental constants of the universe such that the universe was made of nothing but hydrogen atoms, it would contain the same amount of information but none of it would be complex.




Sorry, but you are incorrect here.  It takes significantly *less* information to describe a universe that is all Hydrogen than our universe.  I our universe, to describe things within it, we have to describe where it is, how it is moving, and what it is.  In the all-hydrogen universe, we don't need to know what, as that is the same for all things, vastly reducing the amount of information within the universe.  

And, here's an interesting thing to chew on - one of my possible thesis projects was in what we call origin of life calculations, which includes study of self-organizing systems.  We considered the probability of a system going from just a disorganized collection of molecules (a condition of high entropy) to an organized collection of cells/organisms (a condition of much lower entropy). 

If your system has too few different puzzle pieces to work with, you don't have enough variety, and there's nothing to organize around.  If your system has too many puzzle pieces to work with, it never settles into organized patterns, as there are too many options.  Life requires some complexity, but not too much.  There need to be some limits on complexity for the system to be organized enough to be useful.

Make of that what you will.

I think I mentioned this in another thread recently, but it might be useful here, as well.  Most folks use "complicated" and "complex" mostly interchangeably.  There are times when narrowing the connotations can be useful.

We say a system is complicated, when it has a lot of different parts in action.  We say a system is complex when the results of the action are difficult to describe or predict.

So, a mechanical wristwatch is complicated, but not complex.  There are many parts, but their resultant overall action is easy to describe, and works very predictably.

But, we can take a much simpler system - three planetary bodies moving under their mutual gravitation (a "three body problem") is super-simple to describe the parts, but their resulting action is, in general, chaotic, difficult to describe or predict in the long run.  It is not complicated, but it is complex.  Or, the game of Go - the rules are not complicated, but the resulting play is very complex.

In this sense, we probably all want our games to be complex - the results are not easy to predict, there is unforeseen emergent details or behavior.  But some people want this to come from complicated rules, and others probably want rules that are not as complicated.


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## GMMichael (Feb 28, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> I don't know that anybody is really on-board with rule sets designed to trick new players into accidentally making ineffective characters, or which allow some players to completely dominate every aspect of gameplay just because they're good at math.



Damn.  Back to the drawing board...



Derren said:


> So I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from? Was it always there? Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore?



This.  Except people often have more than one job.  And the competition, VRPGs, are usually rules-light by comparison, so a rules-medium TRPG seems to have a high barrier to entry.


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## Umbran (Feb 28, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> Are you suggesting that some people might enjoy complexity, for its own sake?




Of course!  

Some people like the game of Go - the rules of this game are not at all complicated.  

Other people like Eurogames with 17 different resources to develop and track over the course of play...


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## MechaPilot (Feb 28, 2019)

Complexity is fine, as long as the complexity serves the purpose of enhancing the enjoyment of those playing the game (including the DM).  When complexity is frustrating to implement or track, or when the effort it takes to implement the complexity provides little to no benefit to the gaming experience, then complexity becomes undesirable.


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## Immortal Sun (Feb 28, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> Particularly in the wake of 3E, and the reveal that they'd always known Toughness was a garbage feat which only existed so experienced players would feel smart by avoiding it, there's been a certain backlash against games that require significant degrees of system mastery in order to create an effective character. I don't know that anybody is really on-board with rule sets designed to trick new players into accidentally making ineffective characters, or which allow some players to completely dominate every aspect of gameplay just because they're good at math.




As a card-gamer, I think D&D has generally done a _terrible_ job at creating good complexity.  It is more often than not complex for the sake of being complex, not for presenting interesting options (even if some are superior to others) or creating interesting interactions.  It's just, bloaty and complicated.  

I doubt I could build a good character from scratch in D&D.  But I know I could build a good MTG deck.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Sorry, but you are incorrect here.  It takes significantly *less* information to describe a universe that is all Hydrogen than our universe.  I our universe, to describe things within it, we have to describe where it is, how it is moving, and what it is.  In the all-hydrogen universe, we don't need to know what, as that is the same for all things, vastly reducing the amount of information within the universe.




You sound like the expert in this, but it seems to me that I can describe all the what it is by simply identifying where all the constituents are.  That is to say, in both universes I could simply say: proton, electron, proton, electron, etc.  And as long as I labeled where all the parts where and where they were going (ignoring some known problems with that), I would still have a complete description.  Indeed, does it take more or less information to describe 'bunch of protons and electrons' compared to 'U238'?  Does the fact that things are frequently organized in a regular manner increase or decrease the information?  (Seriously asking here, I don't know.)   



> I think I mentioned this in another thread recently, but it might be useful here, as well.  Most folks use "complicated" and "complex" mostly interchangeably.  There are times when narrowing the connotations can be useful.




I would say most times.  I'll be happy to take correction over when my word choice is sloppy and ill-considered.  I certainly wasn't thinking of this distinction until you brought it up clearly.



> So, a mechanical wristwatch is complicated, but not complex.  There are many parts, but their resultant overall action is easy to describe, and works very predictably.
> 
> But, we can take a much simpler system - three planetary bodies moving under their mutual gravitation (a "three body problem") is super-simple to describe the parts, but their resulting action is, in general, chaotic, difficult to describe or predict in the long run.  It is not complicated, but it is complex.




I get where you are going with that, but I suspect that in reality the wrist watch is similar to a three body problem where the pieces are in a stable, regularized orbit - such as a solar system which has been orbiting a star for millions of years and so is likely to do so for millions of years to come.  The constraints on the system make it seems as if both will necessarily run forever like, well like a clockwork, but in fact it is not true in either case.  There are small deviations and changes happening that in the long run will make a very big difference.  The watch is only easily described in the sense that it is meant to model something and we can easily describe the thing that it models.



> In this sense, we probably all want our games to be complex - the results are not easy to predict, there is unforeseen emergent details or behavior.  But some people want this to come from complicated rules, and others probably want rules that are not as complicated.




I'm not sure that he complicated nature of the rules is for most humans the real problem.  Humans are pretty well adapted to complications.  What seems to draw complaints is the computational burden of the rules.  After all, we could in theory describe a simulation of the whole world in terms of a few 'simple' equations, but the computational burden of figuring out what happens by applying those simple rules in that simulation would be daunting.  Gamers, as with engineers, make a model that reduces the computational burden down to something approachable, where the realism of the model is 'good enough'.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Immortal Sun said:


> As a card-gamer, I think D&D has generally done a _terrible_ job at creating good complexity.  It is more often than not complex for the sake of being complex, not for presenting interesting options (even if some are superior to others) or creating interesting interactions.  It's just, bloaty and complicated.
> 
> I doubt I could build a good character from scratch in D&D.  But I know I could build a good MTG deck.




I think one of the things that the 4e designers were trying to do was make the complexity do a better job of making interesting choices at all times, at least within what they considered the core gameplay of D&D, which was the skirmish combat.  Some people really enjoyed it.  Some people didn't.

I agree though that D&D rules sets tend to be bloaty and complicated.  For example, over time editions of D&D tend to accumulate far more spells than they really need, simply because on one level it is easy to write spells and then you have some content to put into the next splatbook you are selling.  

PS: I really hate what MtG has become.


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## Immortal Sun (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> I think one of the things that the 4e designers were trying to do was make the complexity do a better job of making interesting choices at all times, at least within what they considered the core gameplay of D&D, which was the skirmish combat.  Some people really enjoyed it.  Some people didn't.



I felt like it did a good job of remaining complex, but also having fewer false choices.  Particularly among "casters".  As you reference spells below, there are a lot of them in vancian systems that are just...pointless.  Noone takes them, and even people with no system mastery know they're bad.



> I agree though that D&D rules sets tend to be bloaty and complicated.  For example, over time editions of D&D tend to accumulate far more spells than they really need, simply because on one level it is easy to write spells and then you have some content to put into the next splatbook you are selling.



Without more regular smaller editions or the ability to update existing material like a digital game would, this is unfortunately bound to happen.  The only other alternative is to create a very strict spell-creation algorithim and force all spells to be made according to it.  It would probably result in a lot of "samey" feeling spells though.



> PS: I really hate what MtG has become.



In what way?


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## Guest 6801328 (Feb 28, 2019)

I eventually figured out that I really enjoyed creating characters in games with complex rules, but I really enjoyed playing (and DMing) simpler games.


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## The Crimson Binome (Feb 28, 2019)

Morrus said:


> There’s no game that takes twelve steps to resolve an attack.



_The World of Synnibarr_ (second edition) has a seven step process for resolving an attack, but the damage step actually has five sub-steps to it, and a lot of the other steps have other checks that need to be made within them. 

For example, if you shoot and miss, there's a roll to see where the shot actually went, and then the attack process starts over against the accidental victim. If the enemy chooses to disarm you rather than dodge your attack, then they need to resolve their entire maneuver (including your own dodge roll, fate roll, heroic attempts, and divine intervention roll) before you can continue your attack.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Immortal Sun said:


> As you reference spells below, there are a lot of them in vancian systems that are just...pointless.  Noone takes them, and even people with no system mastery know they're bad.




This is a CharOp view of what spells are for, and indeed very much a 'card players' view of what an RPG is about.  It has some relevance, but I don't think a list of optimized puzzle solvers is the only thing that a system like D&D needs to be doing with spells.  Still, what I object to is redundant spells.   For example, over the long run any edition of D&D tends to end up with an over abundance of direct damage spells that only differ slightly in flavor and mechanics.  Generously someone puts the spell in because they think some particularly horrific way to die is evocative, but all to often I think that such spells get put in because they really don't require a lot of imagination or creativity.   

However, I'm personally OK with what I call 'NPC content', which is options no PC would take, but you can easily imagine an NPC whose job is more mundane and less focused on killing things might consider a superior option to 'magic missile' or 'fireball', provided that content is well done and well thought out.  I consider that part of a games world building, in that it tells you things about what the world is like outside of the battle map (and that such a world exists).  

Too often though, going all the way back to the 1st edition of the game, spells are considered only from the perspective of their balance on the battle map, and not on their implications for the setting.  That's why you find spells like 'Create Water' priced as if they are a trivial feat, and not one of the most extraordinary acts of magic, or spells like Fabricate or Circle of Teleportation with their world shaking implications.  

Spells needed to be added to a game like ingredients to a dish - carefully and with purpose.  It's not just to increase the breadth of the meta, as it would be in MtG (at least MtG when MtG was good), but its also to basically let your system help build your story by being deep and evocative about the setting.  I don't want to really go into details, but as a good guide to how I think about this, whenever I see a story where a character preforms some bit of magic that isn't just a mumbo jumbo plot device, I think to myself, "Could you do that in D&D?"  There is a lot of magic that I think is missing from D&D that might be needed, and a lot of junk people have come up with over the years that should have never made it in the first place.  It's not just so much "would you ever use this spell to win a game" but "would you ever use this spell to tell a story"?   I think most of the added spells to the game fail both of our tests.



> In what way?




Going back to a very early point in the game, WotC have repeatedly made the decision that the best way to make money off the game was to narrow the size of their audience and focus on getting more and more money out of their most devoted fans.  The result is a game that is increasingly inaccessible for new or casual players, with increasingly smaller amounts of pushed cards surrounded by increasingly large amounts of bloat.  The game has also started to hit its creative limits, and since creatures are the most complicated playing piece in the game, the game has increasingly revolved around faster and faster creature clocks, simply because there are more creatures than can be printed for the game than other sorts of cards.  Everything is on a bear now.  Every thing that can happen during play, has to be triggered when something enters play.  Decks can now go big with aggro that formerly would have required weenies, just because the curve of everything is so fast.  And there is increasingly nothing new, just an ever shifting meta that depends on a few deliberately undercosted cards in a sea of overcosted jank.  It's a strategy that has kept the game going for longer than I thought possible, but at the cost of making for a very unattractive game.


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## Tony Vargas (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> The question you should be asking is, "How much complexity do I want, and why?"



 I thought I did, very concisely:

"What's necessary vs needless largely depends on the purpose of the system.  I don't think the purposes of TSR & WotC era D&D, for instance, were tremendously different..."



Celebrim said:


> Too often though, going all the way back to the 1st edition of the game, spells are considered only from the perspective of their balance on the battle map, and not on their implications for the setting.  That's why you find spells like 'Create Water' priced as if they are a trivial feat, and not one of the most extraordinary acts of magic, or spells like Fabricate or Circle of Teleportation with their world shaking implications.



 I got the impression, back in the classic game (1e AD&D, rather than 0D&D, from my perspective, having started in 1980), that spells and magic items were very often added to the game because they were inspired by something in a Vance story or Harryhausen movie or Ditko comic or crib notes mythology or whatever. Science fiction as much as fantasy sources, for that matter. 

(It seems another source of higher level spells was as challenges for players to face rather than spells for them to cast, themselves.  Guards & Wards, for instance, or Prismatic Sphere with it's cast-spells-in-specific-order puzzle solution.)


Gygaxian D&D didn't seem like it was designed for balance or elegance or anything like that, but more like an accretion of cool ideas collected session by session, typed up and bound between covers.  

So some savings in needless complexity seems, in retrospect, inevitable, once you got designers working on it as a system.


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## Jacob Lewis (Feb 28, 2019)

Complexity for the sake of complexity is not the preferred option when the same thing can be accomplished more simply.


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## Umbran (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> You sound like the expert in this, but it seems to me that I can describe all the what it is by simply identifying where all the constituents are.  That is to say, in both universes I could simply say: proton, electron, proton, electron, etc.  And as long as I labeled where all the parts where and where they were going (ignoring some known problems with that), I would still have a complete description.




Except the real universe also has... neutrons (and thus *all* arrangements in atoms other than hydrogen), other baryons with charm and strange and other quarks, mesons, the muon and the tau leptons, a bunch of neutrinos, a bunch of bosons other than the photon...

So, yeah, "everything is hydrogen" leaves lots of things out.




> Indeed, does it take more or less information to describe 'bunch of protons and electrons' compared to 'U238'?




Yep.  Hydrogen has one single particle in its nucleus.   U238 has 238 protons and neutrons, and each atom may have a different internal layout of how those particles are arranged.  



> I would say most times.  I'll be happy to take correction over when my word choice is sloppy and ill-considered.  I certainly wasn't thinking of this distinction until you brought it up clearly.




Oh, there was nothing sloppy about your word choice.  The use I raised is a bit idiosyncratic, and the distinction not necessarily obvious on first pass.  I rasied it not in correction, but in case someone found the distinction useful for consideration.  It can lead us, for example to consideration of "elegant" vs "inelegant" rules.




> I get where you are going with that, but I suspect that in reality the wrist watch is similar to a three body problem where the pieces are in a stable, regularized orbit




No, it isn't. In order to specify the three body problem, I need to specify the mass, location, and velocity of each body, and that's all I need.  Three scalars, six vectors, and that's it - in a normal flat space, I can specify it with at most 21 numbers.

To specify the watch, I need to specify the physical details of each individual gear, spring, pin, the casing, the diameter of every hole, and so on.  Unless someone has been exceedingly clever in their construction, each internal component appears only once, and there are almost assuredly more than 21 parts, each of which needs several numbers to characterize.



> The watch is only easily described in the sense that it is meant to model something and we can easily describe the thing that it models.




Agreed - describing what it models is describing the result, not the internal workings - so this is noting how the watch is not complex, but it is still complicated.




> I'm not sure that he complicated nature of the rules is for most humans the real problem.  Humans are pretty well adapted to complications.  What seems to draw complaints is the computational burden of the rules.




In a practical sense, the two are not easily separated.  But, no, I don't think it is the computational burden.  In virtually all cases, the computations are addition and subtraction of small numbers, and that's not terribly burdensome.  

I think the issue lies in the *number of steps and considerations*, which extends the time required to resolve actions, and to some degree the cognitive distance from the narrative this takes the player (essentially, breaking of immersion).



> Gamers, as with engineers, make a model that reduces the computational burden down to something approachable, where the realism of the model is 'good enough'.




Um, math/engineer-geek-bias showing.  A great number of gamers these days don't come from the STEM background, and don't primarily work/think in terms of mathematical models at all.  I've seen at least one interesting RPG that came not out of the math-and-model paradigm of the engineer/wargamer, but instead came out of theater and improv and its exercises.  IIRC, this game has little or no computational burden at all - there are no numbers (again, IIRC).  I'll see if I can find the reference.


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## Morrus (Feb 28, 2019)

Elfcrusher said:


> I eventually figured out that I really enjoyed creating characters in games with complex rules, but I really enjoyed playing (and DMing) simpler games.




That's the design goal for many complex games. You get to play both games -- the optional solo background tinkering of characters or spaceships or whatever, and the fast front-end group gameplay. I very much enjoy both aspects of the game, and a game which has them both is the perfect game for me.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Except the real universe also has... neutrons (and thus *all* arrangements in atoms other than hydrogen), other baryons with charm and strange and other quarks, mesons, the muon and the tau leptons, a bunch of neutrinos, a bunch of bosons other than the photon...
> 
> So, yeah, "everything is hydrogen" leaves lots of things out.




Sure, but if the strong nuclear force in our hypothetical universe is too weak to support the creation of helium (because the protons fly apart), we still might have a sea of hydrogen awash in neutrinos, free neutrons and a bunch of other detritus left over from the big blow up.  



> Yep.  Hydrogen has one single particle in its nucleus.




Deuterium, Tritium?  



> U238 has 238 protons and neutrons, and each atom may have a different internal layout of how those particles are arranged.




Agreed, but that goes back to my point.  Since to describe the U238 atom we also have to describe the layout of the constituent parts, does U238 have more or less information in it than 92 free floating protons and 146 free floating neutrons?  I would have thought they are the same, but I admit that I'm not a physics major and my informational theory normally only thinks about bits and bytes.  I agree that the U238 has more complexity (vaguely definable as that is) because the aggregation has properties that are novel and would not be easily predictable from just looking at the components, but I'm not sure where it stands on information.   (Not that information is a physical property or conserved quantity... unless we really are living in someone higher dimensional beings laptop.)



> I think the issue lies in the *number of steps and considerations*, which extends the time required to resolve actions, and to some degree the cognitive distance from the narrative this takes the player (essentially, breaking of immersion).




Agreed to a large extent, though I think number of steps still falls into my idea of computation.   There are ways to add complexity to a rules set that don't extend the number of steps, and if you back up to my definition of an RPG, where I define an RPG as a collection of minigames, it becomes obvious where I'm going with that.



> Um, math/engineer-geek-bias showing.  A great number of gamers these days don't come from the STEM background, and don't primarily work/think in terms of mathematical models at all.  I've seen at least one interesting RPG that came not out of the math-and-model paradigm of the engineer/wargamer, but instead came out of theater and improv and its exercises.  IIRC, this game has little or no computational burden at all - there are no numbers (again, IIRC).  I'll see if I can find the reference.




True, which gets us back on topic.  Because while the process of play of an RPG has always owed something to theater games, that wasn't really explicit or intentional until relatively recently.  The 'story first' crowd eschewed modeling not just because of the computational burden, but because they eschewed modeling - however computationally efficient - at all.   They were essentially saying, "Let's dump all this legacy of wargaming out of the game and get to (what we consider to be) the good stuff."   

I don't know what example you are looking for, but a pure story-telling game example might be 'Montsegur 1244'.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Morrus said:


> That's the design goal for many complex games. You get to play both games -- the optional solo background tinkering of characters or spaceships or whatever, and the fast front-end group gameplay. I very much enjoy both aspects of the game, and a game which has them both is the perfect game for me.




Back in the late 70's, early 80's, when I was a wee munchkin, I had an older cousin that played Traveller and to a large extent it was obvious his enjoyment of Traveller was much as a solo game of world building as it was the collective RPG experience.  Though I think Traveller might be the definitive example of that, there are similar examples from other games, CharOp and monster modifications in 3.X D&D and spaceship construction in N.E.W., or character creation in HERO or really most 'supers' games especially, can be considered robust solo mini-games, and the process of world-building even if it isn't crunchy in any game can be considered from the GM's perspective a sort of solo minigame to be enjoyed in its own right.

Heck, I'm a rules tinkerer and smithing out homebrew rules for RPGs could be considered from a bird's eye view of my life in terms of the hours spent on it, my most passionate hobby.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 28, 2019)

I may have missed it, but one thing I don't think we've discussed here is that what is seen as complex to one person may not be by another.


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## Zardnaar (Feb 28, 2019)

Time I don't want to spend 4 hours prepping a session like I did with 3E. Try sticking a template on an NPC rogue you rolled up.


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## Celebrim (Feb 28, 2019)

Zardnaar said:


> Time I don't want to spend 4 hours prepping a session like I did with 3E. Try sticking a template on an NPC rogue you rolled up.




Regardless of the game system I use, it always seems to take me 3-5 hours of prep per hour of play time that I want to have.  And for me at least, it seems to require nearly that much even if I'm running a prepared published module.

To only spend four hours prepping a session is astonishing to me.  Normally I'd spend 10-20, and I'd only get below that if I had a sandbox which I'd invested in that was returning on the investment.  And most of that would not be working out mechanics.  Most of that would be working out the fiction and the setting, figuring out how to animate the NPC, making maps, or doing research.   It took me just as long to prep for 1e AD&D with its super simple stat blocks as it does for 3e D&D, because what I lose in lost time churning out 5 line stat blocks compared to 1 line stat blocks, I make up for knowing that I have a tool set that can handle interaction with the environment instead of needing to smith out location by location rules.  Read a 1e AD&D module some time and take note how much of the text is spent creating on the spot rules for the specific environment of the room.  

That and word processors are a God send. 

My advice to you regardless of the edition would be don't roll up an NPC rogue or stick a template on them.  Give the character the attributes you want.  If you are 1 or 2 'plusses' off of what a rigorous check of the math would yield you, so what?  There is only a small chance such a small difference will matter to the die roll anyway, and most the work you're putting into getting the skill points to come out right is wasted anyway because you won't make all or most of those skill checks in game anyway.  

Reuse stat blocks.  Once you've created one buccaneer stat block, you don't need to create another one.  Flesh out important NPCs only as you need to.   By the time the campaign has gone 50 weeks, you'll rarely need a stat block for an NPC that isn't just cut and paste from another one and can't be tweaked on the fly if you need to.

In my experience most DMs don't prep enough (including me).  But also in my experience most DMs are prepping the wrong stuff.

Over the winter break I ran a game of Mouse Guard - six hours of prep per hour of play and I don't think I've ever been as frustrated with the inflexibility and bad math of a system since I played RIFTS that one time in college.


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## Umbran (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Sure, but if the strong nuclear force in our hypothetical universe is too weak to support the creation of helium (because the protons fly apart), we still might have a sea of hydrogen awash in neutrinos, free neutrons and a bunch of other detritus left over from the big blow up.




Um, you said "the universe was made of nothing but hydrogen atoms".  You didn't say "all the normal subatomic particles, but the only atoms we get are hydrogen".  



> Deuterium, Tritium?




See above.  I was excluding them, based on how exclusively you spoke, and the fact that in particle and atomic physics, we don't generally use "hydrogen" to be "hydrogen and all its isotopes".  We we usually speak of hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium separately.

And, in general, if you can get deuterium and tritium to form in a mostly-stable way, it becomes harder to exclude atoms with higher numbers of protons.  If the electroweak force is such that the two protons can't sit that closely together, then likely the electron can't be kept from falling in to make a neutron, and you have no hydrogen atoms.  

But that's pretty far aside the point.  How about we go back to rules, not atomic physics?


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## Guest 6801328 (Feb 28, 2019)

Morrus said:


> That's the design goal for many complex games. You get to play both games -- the optional solo background tinkering of characters or spaceships or whatever, and the fast front-end group gameplay. I very much enjoy both aspects of the game, and a game which has them both is the perfect game for me.




I get that.  But I think I also prefer playing games with simple character creation.  When there are too many character options, and in particular too many options which depend on each other, I find:
a) My focus shifts from the character's story to his/her mechanical power.
b) I keep wanting to start over with a new character.


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## Zardnaar (Feb 28, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Regardless of the game system I use, it always seems to take me 3-5 hours of prep per hour of play time that I want to have.  And for me at least, it seems to require nearly that much even if I'm running a prepared published module.
> 
> To only spend four hours prepping a session is astonishing to me.  Normally I'd spend 10-20, and I'd only get below that if I had a sandbox which I'd invested in that was returning on the investment.  And most of that would not be working out mechanics.  Most of that would be working out the fiction and the setting, figuring out how to animate the NPC, making maps, or doing research.   It took me just as long to prep for 1e AD&D with its super simple stat blocks as it does for 3e D&D, because what I lose in lost time churning out 5 line stat blocks compared to 1 line stat blocks, I make up for knowing that I have a tool set that can handle interaction with the environment instead of needing to smith out location by location rules.  Read a 1e AD&D module some time and take note how much of the text is spent creating on the spot rules for the specific environment of the room.
> 
> ...




Try doing that with a 12 hour work day. My prep time will be 30 mins. Running SWSE Sunday I'll think up a svemario it's pilot based through in some ships and wing it.

 I ran a clone once, 20 min pre time published adventure no rulebook on my side of the table.


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## TreChriron (Mar 1, 2019)

At face value, in casual conversation, I believe people see "complexity" in a negative light for the very real-world reasons you (the OP) pointed out. People are busy. Systems with more "things" to stat out, or interact with, or calculate can add more time to making adventures, or creating a new recently lost character, etc. It takes more time to wrap your head around an RPG with distinct sub-systems that handle various activities differently. Where it suggests how much time it takes a person to dig a ditch based on their characteristics; or the different procedures a character must embark to gather energy, control it, shape it, successfully cast a spell and THEN make successful targeting roll. For a busy group with a busy GM, this is all going to sound less fun than just playing.

From the Troll with a Bone to Pick files; it's obviously a curse word. Like go Complexity Yourself you horrible simpleton. In either case I would take the term with a grain of salt. With a tequila chaser. Just to be sure.

*Digging deep into the weeds of RPG theory regarding complexity;*

I was a regular lurker on The Forge and studied the essays like a hungry young scholar freshly ordained in a monastery might devour "the sacred works". I jumped into the punch bowl and drank deeply whilst swimming in it. The conversations were intriguing. It was easy to get sucked in. It was all so academic, making you feel like "finally, this hobby my peers are so quick to dismiss has come into its own! soon we will have degrees and orders!".

It was glorious! It was also mentally damaging.

We could probably dig through the internet archives, create a beautiful glossary of Forge terms, and then try to hash out a real RPG definition of complexity. We would also likely have to save vs. The Forge or lose 1d20 sanity. DC50.

As the several pages of this thread have aptly proven, complexity is a weighted term. We are prone in Western culture to pick sides and play a spiritual game of Hungry Hungry Hippos where everyone at the edges reaches out with arms widely-stretched trying to pull anything from the middle to the chosen side. Greedily. We don't like scale, or granularity or subtlety. It forces us to ponder too many possibilities and worse, those possibilities are often far too reasonable. It is after all difficult to prosecute a war against people who are trying to see things from your perspective. This is no fun.

The reality of complexity is no fun either. To one GM having to even THINK about the AC of an enemy is too much work while another finds brainstorming 12 different stats with associated derived calculations a simple 5 minute math exercise necessary to get on with the greater fun. One player may shriek with excitement at choosing just the right weapon with just that right stats from a list of 1000 possibilities to defeat the lovingly detailed ogre's armor while another picks up their phone to get lost in twitter because #boringThisTakesTooLong. Some games have 17 (apparently...) points of handling in every combat interaction while others have just one. Like just one roll for the whole thing.

It's a scale. It has hundreds of granular points on it from no-complexity to "OMG is this really a game?" and everything in between. What's worse - we don't use "complexity" as a description of any reliable consistent term about what a game is. Instead, we use it as a pejorative. Like, WOW that was the worse restaurant I've ever been too, the food was so COMPLEX!

The REAL answer to the OP's question came up several times on the thread, from "what do you mean by complexity?" to "why do you even care?" which (unfortunately) are more apropos than debating complexity as a curse word.

Here's my suggestion - don't judge a game by complexity or simplicity. Don't buy into labels like light and medium. Just judge the game by how it makes you feel. Do all those dials and switches turn you on? Does the thought of making a character excite you? Do you smile when you imagine GM/Playing it? Do you WANT it?

These criteria will always be more meaningful than the terrible new pejoratives we invent to piss on other people's fun.

Love,

Trentin C Bergeron. He/Him. Gamer.


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## dragoner (Mar 1, 2019)

Complexity is often boring, and if it gets it wrong, then it has a cascade effect or being wrong plus boring.


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## Morrus (Mar 1, 2019)

dragoner said:


> Complexity is often boring, and if it gets it wrong, then it has a cascade effect or being wrong plus boring.




 But then simplicity is often boring, and if it gets it wrong, then it has a cascade effect or being wrong plus boring.


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## dragoner (Mar 1, 2019)

Morrus said:


> But then simplicity is often boring, and if it gets it wrong, then it has a cascade effect or being wrong plus boring.




True, nevertheless the investment in time and energy is less to discover that. There are complexity ratings that can be helpful.


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## Morrus (Mar 1, 2019)

dragoner said:


> True, nevertheless the investment in time and energy is less to discover that. There are complexity ratings that can be helpful.




Eh, gaming is my hobby. I do it for fun. I’m not looking for ways to spend less time doing it. I’m happy to take time to find out which games I like. And I consider the tinkering and backend building part of that fun, just like a wargamer might enjoy painting minis.


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## dragoner (Mar 1, 2019)

Morrus said:


> Eh, gaming is my hobby. I do it for fun. I’m not looking for ways to spend less time doing it. I’m happy to take time to find out which games I like. And I consider the tinkering and backend building part of that fun, just like a wargamer might enjoy painting minis.




That's cool, you should do what makes you happy. My opinion isn't meant as a criticism of anyone else's joy; it is that as I have been getting older, I no longer have the boundless energy for system mastery of complex games. I love war games also, I played "Battle of the Five Armies" by TSR before D&D even, and war games definitely have a complexity scale, which I think works well. I used to enjoy a certain complexity in RPG's also, though in the last few years, I have found that less is more in a lot of ways.


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## pogre (Mar 2, 2019)

Morrus said:


> Eh, gaming is my hobby. I do it for fun. I’m not looking for ways to spend less time doing it. I’m happy to take time to find out which games I like. And I consider the tinkering and backend building part of that fun, *just like a wargamer might enjoy painting minis.*




It's interesting you would say that. I like what a lot of folks would call an upper to mid level of complexity in my games (I would put 5e in that realm). Where I love to invest time is preparing for play. 

A lot of my enjoyment comes from painting miniatures, preparing scenery, creating props, designing maps, and making other play aids. I'm old and have run enough games to wing it with very little prep time and my players typically enjoy those games, but it is less enjoyable for me.

For others the very thought of going through all of this prep for an adventure would be a major drag.

I love indy games for one shots, but for longer campaigns there has to be a certain level of complexity for me to continue to enjoy it.


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## Morrus (Mar 2, 2019)

pogre said:


> A lot of my enjoyment comes from painting miniatures, preparing scenery, creating props, designing maps, and making other play aids.




To me, that's just a different type of "back-end" play. I wouldn't enjoy painting miniatures (I've tried it - not my thing) but I would enjoy crafting an awesome NPC.

I enjoy game design - the mechanical part of it - more than writing the prose. I imagine that's linked to it.


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## Zhaleskra (Mar 2, 2019)

I think at this point it's pretty clear that the word "complexity" is more subjective than objective. As I mentioned before without using myself as an example, what another might consider really complex I might consider trivially simple, and vice versa.

One thing I've noticed is that "crunch heavy" games tend to only be as complicated as the GM and players make them.


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## Celebrim (Mar 2, 2019)

Zhaleskra said:


> I think at this point it's pretty clear that the word "complexity" is more subjective than objective.




I think it is vague, poorly defined, and we don't agree on what the definition is... but I don't think that it is subjective.  I just think the idea represented in 'complexity' is complex enough that it is hard to offer up an accurate description.  Competing definitions don't necessarily mean that there isn't something real underneath the confusion.  It just means no sees clearly (yet).

(A related problem is that 'complexity' might actually be a superset word, and that there are many types of complexity which themselves need to be defined.  Certainly, this is how the problem is being attacked for now.)

This problem isn't limited to RPGs.  Defining complexity is an important topic in several fields.  We tend to "know it when we see it" but we can't yet offer rigorous definitions of it.



> One thing I've noticed is that "crunch heavy" games tend to only be as complicated as the GM and players make them.




It's certainly true that tables tend to ignore any rules that they feel are too complicated.  1e AD&D might be one of the definitive examples of this, but I'm sure it happens with many rules sets.   Some systems are deliberately modular, where they offer up different levels of complexity you might want to play with.

I'm a rules tinkerer myself.  There is hardly ever a game I play that I don't end up extensively house ruling to try to make the rules clearer, more flexible, easier to apply, more balanced, or whatever.   My 3.0e house rules tend to make the game slightly more complex than RAW 3.0, while at the same time reduce a ton of the rules bloat in spells, prestige classes, feats, options and so forth.   3.X in my opinion suffered from the problem of there being more than one way to do things, which is almost always bad design.  Some things got more complicated (my flanking rules for example), while the overall system has vastly less 'rules'.   I've recently played and been thinking a lot about Mouse Guard, a rules set I very much have a love/hate relationship with, and I'm almost certainly going to rewrite those rules into a rules light set of rules in the long run as there is a ton of needless complexity in the rules, bad math, and poor rules flexibility.   So, in a very literal sense, when I play a set of rules I end up making them as complicated as I want them to be.


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## Yaztromo (Mar 2, 2019)

Of course I can give you just my point of view: I don't have the time for playing as much as I had when I was younger, so I want to make the most of each opportunity. This means that having to pass a whole session just to roll a character is now something unacceptable: I want to start the game within 5-10 minutes!
The other factor is that my old friends have similar problems with time and we can meet only occasionally and every time with a different line up, so we find that one-off adventures are perfect to deal with it.
In general, my impression is that current culture prefers having "fast fun" (when this involves interacting with other people) and avoiding long committments.
This doesn't mean that there is a _hate_ for complexity, but there is a lot of competition to get a piece of your time and if you don't have fun "all the time" you just switch to some other thing that comes up.


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## 5atbu (Mar 2, 2019)

I like the complexity of a rich deep campaign built from simplicity. Same as my approach to ICT


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## Umbran (Mar 3, 2019)

Zhaleskra said:


> I think at this point it's pretty clear that the word "complexity" is more subjective than objective.




I'm with Celebrim here - How complex a game is may be poorly defined, but it isn't all that subjective.  "Complexity" is a thing that could be mathematically defined, if we really bothered to do so. For example, resolving things in rules is really just running through one algorithm or another - we could measure rules complexity just as computer code complexity is measured.

What is subjective is our experience of that complexity - whether we mind that a thing is complex is subjective.  And, when we are not bothered by complexity, way may not realize that it is complex.  But that doesn't change the reality, just as some person may care that it is over 80F, and another not.


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## GMMichael (Mar 3, 2019)

Zardnaar said:


> Time I don't want to spend 4 hours prepping a session like I did with 3E. Try sticking a template on an NPC rogue you rolled up.



This, I think, is the exact reason I stopped playing 3e.  To be fair, the game's not as hard to manage as I was making it (one doesn't need to dot every I and cross every T), but when you're presented with a wall of rules, it's hard to see through them.  When NPCs don't just have stats, they have "blocks" of them, it points toward building walls instead of tearing them down.

For its part, Numenera boasts that it frees the GM up to do the storytelling, partly by streamlining some rules and partly by making dice-rolling only for the players.  Which makes me wonder - can a game be complex on one side of the GM screen, and simple on the other?  If the players are character-optimizers, can the game still be simple for the GM - or if the GM loves minutiae, can the players still get by with four-line character sheets and one or two dice?  A game like that could cut complexity-hate in half.


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## Zardnaar (Mar 3, 2019)

DMMike said:


> This, I think, is the exact reason I stopped playing 3e.  To be fair, the game's not as hard to manage as I was making it (one doesn't need to dot every I and cross every T), but when you're presented with a wall of rules, it's hard to see through them.  When NPCs don't just have stats, they have "blocks" of them, it points toward building walls instead of tearing them down.
> 
> For its part, Numenera boasts that it frees the GM up to do the storytelling, partly by streamlining some rules and partly by making dice-rolling only for the players.  Which makes me wonder - can a game be complex on one side of the GM screen, and simple on the other?  If the players are character-optimizers, can the game still be simple for the GM - or if the GM loves minutiae, can the players still get by with four-line character sheets and one or two dice?  A game like that could cut complexity-hate in half.




Something like 5E with micro feats and tighter focus on those feats designs.


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## billd91 (Mar 4, 2019)

So why is complexity currently in the doghouse? It’s the swing of the pendulum. Things get more complex, the market saturates, the reaction grows against it. Things get simpler, the market saturates, the reaction grows against it.


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## Umbran (Mar 4, 2019)

billd91 said:


> So why is complexity currently in the doghouse? It’s the swing of the pendulum. Things get more complex, the market saturates, the reaction grows against it. Things get simpler, the market saturates, the reaction grows against it.




I think that's questionable.  Do not confuse "we are currently talking about games/game-types X,Y, and Z" with "the market is saturated with X, Y, and Z".  What we talk about is not strongly linked with what is present in (or even what is popular in) the market.

For decades, now, the market has always been saturated with all kinds of games.  Complex and simple, fantasy and sci-fi and superhero and cyberpunk, and what have you.  The market always has more than anyone can play, saturated to the point that most game designers make a marginal job, at best, of supporting themselves with their work.

In another sense, the market is basically saturated by it's top couple of games, that have the lion's share of gamers - Pathfinder (pretty complicated game, there) and 5e D&D (somewhat less complicated).  These two have dominated the rankings... for several years now.  I'm not sure there's a real pendulum swinging at all.


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## Celebrim (Mar 4, 2019)

DMMike said:


> Which makes me wonder - can a game be complex on one side of the GM screen, and simple on the other?  If the players are character-optimizers, can the game still be simple for the GM - or if the GM loves minutiae, can the players still get by with four-line character sheets and one or two dice?  A game like that could cut complexity-hate in half.




The answer is "Yes."

A game can concentrate it's complexity in preparation while having a simple mechanical resolution mechanic.  If a game does that, the player's have a one time investment in complexity, but after that their experience of play tends to be fairly smooth.  Some proponents of the HERO system will make this claim, that all the complexity is front-loaded in the options and set up for the game, and once play begins (if it ever begins) then the complexity largely goes away.  While I'm not an expert in HERO system, I think from my experiences with GURPS this is mostly the case for GURPS as well.

The problem is that if you concentrate your complexity investment in preparation, you can create a huge burden for GMs to prepare the game.  As you note, GMs can avoid this by refusing to dot every 'i' and cross every 't', and game systems like GURPS explicitly call this out but then this can feel wrong for a GM that doesn't like to wing it and associates fiat rulings with lack of neutrality as a referee.  Alternately, in a game like 3e, you could avoid most of the potential complexity of preparation by only using stock content - old school flipping to page of the monster manual when a monster was called for.   But, if you do this, then as a GM you feel like you aren't getting the most out of the system and utilizing the creativity that the system allows or which you want to engage in.  

The worst thing in 3e D&D is when you need to stat up a high level NPC, complete with spell selections and some sort of gear, and you are intending to hit some CR/EL/wealth by level standard to pace the game according to its default assumptions.   At that point, all the complexity that exists to provide a rich experience to the players is working against the DM.


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## Morrus (Mar 4, 2019)

DMMike said:


> Which makes me wonder - can a game be complex on one side of the GM screen, and simple on the other?  If the players are character-optimizers, can the game still be simple for the GM




I like to think that's what I accomplished with my game.


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## pemerton (Mar 4, 2019)

Derren said:


> people still look for even lighter systems up to a point that for large parts of the you are freeforming with no mechanics at all.



This remark seems to rest on a mistaken presupposition, that light mechanics mean non-comprehensive mechanics.

It's possible to have a light system that is also comprehensive, in the sense that there is no effective limit on what action declarations can be resolved by application of the game's mechanics. Prince Valiant is one example. Ctuhluh Dark is another, much lighter, example.


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## Morrus (Mar 4, 2019)

pemerton said:


> This remark seems to rest on a mistaken presupposition, that light mechanics mean non-comprehensive mechanics.
> 
> It's possible to have a light system that is also comprehensive, in the sense that there is no effective limit on what action declarations can be resolved by application of the game's mechanics. Prince Valiant is one example. Ctuhluh Dark is another, much lighter, example.




Sure. The coin toss game.


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## pemerton (Mar 4, 2019)

Morrus said:


> Sure. The coin toss game.



Have you played Prince Valiant or Cthulhu Dark? Neither is a "coin toss" game. Prince Valiant is a standard dice pool game that can be played with coins because each die is 50/50 success/failure. Cthulhu Dark is different sort of dice pool game, in that only the highest die counts, and you can have between 1 and 3 dice in your pool depending on character and context.

Action resolution in Prince Valiant is more subtle than in 5e's non-combat framework; Cthulhu Dark is probably comparable to 5e's non-combat in terms of subtlety of resolution, but has more going on in determining how many dice to roll.


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## Morrus (Mar 4, 2019)

pemerton said:


> Have you played Prince Valiant or Cthulhu Dark? Neither is a "coin toss" game.




I wasn't saying they were coin toss games. I was saying a coin toss game is an example of a light, yet comprehensive game.


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## pemerton (Mar 5, 2019)

Morrus said:


> I wasn't saying they were coin toss games. I was saying a coin toss game is an example of a light, yet comprehensive game.



My apologies, then, for misreading.

I think a literal toin-coss game may be a bit weak for serious RPGing, because the outcomes of action resolution would seem not to be connected enough to the character. (Even allowing for the fact that the character will have some degree of expression in the player's choice of actions to declare.)

Of games I know, Cthulhu Dark is the closest to that "weak" edge while maintaining character differentation in mechanics as well as "concept". (Each PC has an occupation - not chosen from a list, but specified by the player based on his/her knowledge of real world occupations - so when I played we had an investigative reporter, a longshoreman and a legal secretary. If the action that is declared falls within occupational expertise then a die is added to the pool, thus increasing the odds of a good roll.)

Trying to relate this back to the OP: given that _complexity_ isn't necessary for _comprehensiveness_, nor even for the effective expression of character, _what is it for in RPG design_. One answer could be: to bring the fiction to life via _the experience of rolling dice and engaging with mechanics_ rather than via sheer narration.

I'm playing a fair bit of Traveller at the moment, and I think some of its subsystems probably fit this description.

I personally find it a weakness in 3E/PF design (based on reading as much as play, especially for PF) that its complexity doesn't seem to have any clear purpose other than serving as mechanical input into further mechanical processes. Its connection to the fiction - which is pretty crucial in a RPG - can often seem rather tenuous.


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## Staffan (Mar 5, 2019)

Morrus said:


> There’s no game that takes twelve steps to resolve an attack. That’s as much an extremism as describing light games as just improv theatre.



I count 11 steps in Shadowrun, though you could argue that some of those steps are actually the same step (much like you can mush together different calculations on the same line in physics). I don't count the attacker's choice to attack and how, but I *do* count the defender's choice of defense.

1. Defender chooses how to defend.
2. Attacker rolls relevant combat skill + modifiers.
3. Defender rolls relevant defense.
4. Net successes = Attacker's successes - Defender's successes.
5. If Net successes <0, the attack misses. If >0, the attack hits. If =0, the attack is a grazing hit that does do direct damage but does connect, in case that's relevant for things like touch attacks.
6. Modified damage value = base damage + net successes.
7. Modified armor value = base armor - Armor Penetration (minimum 0).
8. If modified damage < Modified armor, the final damage will be Stun damage, otherwise it's Physical.
9. Defender rolls Body + modified armor value and reduce the damage taken by the number of successes.
10. Apply the reduced damage to the Condition Monitor.
11. If the damage taken > defender's Physical Limit, defender is knocked down.

There's also the previous version of the Swedish game Eon:
1. Attacker chooses whether to make a forceful attack (more damage but easier for the defender to gain initiative and thus become attacker the next round), quick attack (the opposite), or a regular attack.
2. Attacker secretly chooses whether they want to attack in a high, medium, or low position. This affects hit locations and possibly the defenders difficulty.
3. Defender chooses whether to ignore the attack (usually a bad move), counterattack (also usually a bad move unless you can rely on your armor), parry (with a weapon), block (with a shield, easier), or evade. There are also a number of other options, but those are usually not done in response to an attack.
4a. If the defender parries or blocks, they may secretly choose whether to defend in a high, medium, or low position. If they do, and choose the same one the attacker did, the defense becomes easier. If they choose wrong, the defense becomes harder.
4b. If the defender evades, they may choose to sidestep, back up, duck, or jump. If they do, the defense may become easier or harder depending on what sort of attack the attacker does (slash, pierce, crush) and/or what position they attack in (sidestep is good against piercing attacks, ducking is good against high attacks).
5. Both attacker and defender roll their relevant skills.
5a. If the attacker succeeds and the defender fails, the attack hits.
5b. If the attacker succeeds and the defender successfully parries or blocks, the attacker may damage the defender's weapon. Roll damage and compare it to the weapon's/shield's durability. If the durability is higher than or equal to the damage, nothing happens. Otherwise, reduce durability by 1 and roll a durability check (difficulty depending on how much higher the damage was) to see if the weapon breaks.
5c. If the attacker fails, or the attacker succeeds and the defender successfully evades, the attack misses.
6. Roll damage.
7. Check for knockback (even if the attack was blocked or parried).
8. Roll hit location (of which there are 26).
9. Reduce damage by the armor on that hit location.
10a. If remaining damage is less than 10, apply a small number of points of Pain, Trauma (=actual things that break), and Bleeding, depending on hit location and damage type.
10b. If remaining damage is 10 or more, roll a d10 to see what kind of critical injury you inflict. Check the critical injury table to see how many points of Pain, Trauma, and Bleeding you inflict (usually by multiplying/dividing the base damage by some number). Also see if there are any special effects from the critical injury (e.g. amputation, scarring, falling, etc.).
11. Apply any special effects from the critical injury, and potentially roll for them (e.g. an "Amputate" results means the defender needs to roll to see if the body part in question is chopped off, which then either adds more pain/trauma/bleeding or in some cases kills you outright). This can be multiple steps in some cases (e.g. if you both need to roll to see if you lose your limb, and then if you can remain standing).
12. If Trauma was inflicted, the defender rolls a Death check.
13. If Pain or Trauma was inflicted, the defender rolls a Consciousness check.


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## pemerton (Mar 6, 2019)

[MENTION=907]Staffan[/MENTION]'s post made me think about Rolemaster:

1. Declare attack/defence split.
2. Declare target.
3. Roll d100.
4. Add attack portion of the split declared at 1.
5. Subtract target defence.
6. Cross reference on chart to determine hits taken and crit delivered.
7. Roll crit.
8. Cross reference on chart to determine consequence of crit.
9. Determine total hits delivered (from 6 and 8).
10. Apply hits taken and other crit effects to target.

This can get to twelve steps if more than one crit table has to be consulted (which can happen with some RM attack forms).


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## Morrus (Mar 6, 2019)

pemerton said:


> [MENTION=907]Staffan[/MENTION]'s post made me think about Rolemaster:
> 
> 1. Declare attack/defence split.
> 2. Declare target.
> ...




You're kinda creating micro steps out of single steps though. For D&D I could say:

1. Declare target.
2. Pick up a d20.
3. Look up the monster's armor class.
4. Roll the d20.
5. Add your attack bonus.
6. Compare the total to the monster's armor class.
7. Determine whether it was a critical hit.
8. Look up your damage roll.
9. Roll damage.
10. Double the dice rolls if it was a critical.
11. Compare damage to monster's resistances.
12. Halve damage if the monster is resistant.
13. Deduct damage from the monster's hit points.

I mean, yeah, I agree that Rolemaster is much more complex than D&D 5E, but you can also stretch out any process into as many steps as you want to.


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## pemerton (Mar 6, 2019)

Morrus said:


> You're kinda creating micro steps out of single steps though.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> I mean, yeah, I agree that Rolemaster is much more complex than D&D 5E, but you can also stretch out any process into as many steps as you want to.



I've played a _lot_ of Rolemaster - regular (weekly or fortnightly) sessions from 1990 to 2008. I think my identification of the steps is pretty reasonable.

For 4e D&D - which I've also played quite a bit of - I would say:

1. Choose attack
2. Declare target
3. Roll d20
4. Add attack bonus
5. Comare result to target's defence
6. Roll damage
7. Apply damage and any other effect

That makes 4e less complex than RM, and to me that seems right. Choosing a power to use in 4e is comparable to declaring the RM OB/DB split - it sets your tactical orientation for the round; comparing to defence is comparable to subtracting deffence in RM (though mathematically easier); and rolling damage is comparable to rolling a crit.

But in 4e there are no table look-ups, which are a significant part of RM attack resolution; and there is no need to combine the first lot of hits with the hits from the crit, which is a real thing.


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## Sword of Spirit (Mar 6, 2019)

One thing that doesn’t come up much is that simulationism isn’t always complex.


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## 3catcircus (Mar 6, 2019)

Sword of Spirit said:


> One thing that doesn’t come up much is that simulationism isn’t always complex.




I would argue that part of what drives perceived complexity is how well the editing was done. Twilight:2013 is a great set of rules with not-good editing. Mythus was a set of rules hampered by purposely adding complexity in the language used and artificially upping the complexity (such as adding unnecessary granularity to each of the attributes) - Mythus Prime is actually an ok rules set.


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## GrahamWills (Mar 6, 2019)

pemerton said:


> For 4e D&D - which I've also played quite a bit of - I would say:
> 
> 1. Choose attack
> 2. Declare target
> ...




Hmm. I've run 100s of sessions of both RM and 4E, and my impression is the reverse; For both examples I'll assume a "good" sport of hit -- one that causes a critical or triggers an effect


*Rolemaster*
0. Declare action (who you attack and how/what attack)
1. Declare attack/defence split.
2. Roll d100.
3. Apply modifiers (attack split, defense, situational)
4. Cross reference on chart to determine hits taken and crit delivered.
5. Roll crit.
6. Cross reference on chart to determine consequence of crit.
7. Apply total hits taken and other crit effects to target.

*D&D 4E*
0. Declare action (who you attack and how/what power)
1. Roll d20.
2. Apply modifiers (attack bonus, situational) and compare to defense
3. Work out how many damage dice to roll based on d20 roll and other situational modifiers
4. Roll damage dice
5. Work out modifications to the damage based usually on situational modifiers
6. Apply hit/miss/effects for the power
7. Resolve reactions
8. Apply total hits taken and other effects to target


Not only are there more steps, but the details for the 4E ones are trickier (dare I say "more complex"?)
Looking at my current 4E character, here is a completely standard attack sequence:

0. "I attack the stone giant with OPENING MOVE"
1. Roll 19
2. +22 attack, +2 for combat advantage, +2 because the warlord gave me a bonus -- I hit
3a. Since I am using my longsword I will roll a base of 2d8 (referring to both power and weapon information)
3b. I have combat advantage, so I will add 3d8 sneak attack dice
3c. Critical? I did not roll a critical (refer to weapon, which only crits on a 20, unlike my jagged longsword) so no modifications there
4. Roll 5d8 for a total of 26 hits
5a. Standard modifier is +12 (different for each combination of power and weapon -- some attacks are dex based, others charisma)
5b. My goblin totem weapon applies, adding +3 to the damage
5c. As a multi classed fighter, choose whether I want to apply my once per encounter damage bonus
6. Apply the OPENING MOVE effect of a power bonus to my AC and reflex for one turn
7. Anything could happen now, if I'd used a ranged attack, typically the ranger might take an attack right now
8. Target only takes hits damage from this power.

My experience is that RM is significantly easier -- conditional stuff usually applies just to the the attack roll, not to damage calculations, not to extra effects, and so on. The lack of reactions is also huge.

This is not a knock on 4E -- I love playing it, but it is because I _enjoy_ the complexity! It's a feature!


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## pemerton (Mar 6, 2019)

[MENTION=75787]GrahamWills[/MENTION], that's interesting - you're right that I left out reactions, although those can come up in RM too (Bladeturn being a popular one in our games). But I do find 4e quicker/less complex than RM.


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## Argyle King (Mar 6, 2019)

I don't believe that being "rules light" necessarily translates into being less complex.

Sometimes loosely vague and ambiguous rules can complicate things in actual play.  

On addition, I believe that some games have a reputation for being complex/easy which isn't entirely accurate.  For example, it's an unpopular opinion, but I personally find certain editions of D&D to be far more complicated than GURPS.  While the latter (arguably) has more rules, the application of those rules is relatively coherent and intuitive.  For D&D, that's not always the case; in some editions, understanding how one part of the game works doesn't at all correlate into even having a rough idea of how something else works.  The plethora of feats, different abilities, spells, and various other things is (imo) sometimes far more complicated than keeping track of active defenses.


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## pemerton (Mar 7, 2019)

Johnny3D3D said:


> I don't believe that being "rules light" necessarily translates into being less complex.
> 
> Sometimes loosely vague and ambiguous rules can complicate things in actual play.



I would say it depends very much on the details of the rules in question.

If rules light means _a sub-system type game but with subsystems for only a few sorts of actions_, yet the game contemplates activity encompassing other actions, then the issue you raise will arise. Likewise if the sub-systems and/or their scope are poorly defined.

Trying to use Moldvay Basic to play a game with the fictional scope of Dragonlance, for instance, won't be free of mechanical/adjudicative complexity. Using Prince Valiant to play that game, however, will be.


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## Derren (Mar 7, 2019)

GrahamWills said:


> My experience is that RM is significantly easier -- conditional stuff usually applies just to the the attack roll, not to damage calculations, not to extra effects, and so on. The lack of reactions is also huge.




Which hits up a good point. There are several types of complexity which should not be simply mixed and compared with each other.

Some systems have a lot of one-time frontloaded complexity. Complex rules spread over several sub systems for example. But once you learn them, navigating them is easy and the game moves surprisingly fast for the amount of rules there are.
On the other side you have dynamic complexity. This kind of complexity might not look like much when reading or learning the rules, but for example once you are playing you are bombarded with so many temporary and situational modifiers so that even if you know all the rules you have to still stop and calculate all the stuff that applies in the current situation (or wing it when the outcome is obvious).


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## Majoru Oakheart (Mar 13, 2019)

Morrus said:


> There’s no game that takes twelve steps to resolve an attack. That’s as much an extremism as describing light games as just improv theatre. Sure, both ends at their absurd extremes cease to be useable roleplaying games. Pathfinder, the go-to example of a medium complex game, has two steps - roll to hit, roll for damage. For this conversation to even work, we have to use realistic examples of both.




I think if you factor in a lot of the optional steps then there are plenty. The problem is that complexity doesn't always translate to complication. It always has that potential, however.

For instance, my experience playing 3.5e was that the complexity(or the sheer number of options, if you'd prefer) always slowed down the game because it had the potential to exist at the table even when no one took those options.

You could reduce an attack roll in the game down to 1) Roll to hit and 2) Roll for damage. But within those steps there are many substeps. Those substeps all take time so they really need to be factored in. Even when the substeps don't apply during this particular attack, they still need to be checked to see if they resolve.

For instance:

Pre 1) Declare who you are attacking
Pre 1a) Can you see them?
Pre 1a1) If you can't see them, do you have a magical effect that allows you to see them?
Pre 1a2) If you have a magical effect that allows you to see them do they have a magical effect that counters that?
...
1) You attack them
1a) Do you have any bonuses or penalties on your attack roll from yourself?
1b) Do you have any bonuses or penalties from allies?
1c) Do you have any bonuses or penalties from enemies?
1d) Do you have any bonuses or penalties from the environment?
...

This goes on and on. If a particular substep happens rarely enough, you can mostly ignore it. But when it happens a reasonable number of times, you have to think about it each time.

Practically, this manifests itself as players constantly double checking rules because they can never be sure if the particular step was accidentally missed or it was missed on purpose. One of the most common ones used to be Attacks of Opportunity in 3.5e. Every time someone would do something that provoked one there was a constant barrage of players reminding the DM of all the things that could or might happen: 

P1: "He left that square, doesn't he provoke?"
P2: "He might not provoke if he has X ability, that would let him move without provoking."
P1: "Unless I happen to have Y ability which would mean I still get an AOO"
P3: "Right, but then he could do Z to bypass that ability."
DM: "DO you have Y ability?"
P1: "No. But I might have and you never checked."
DM: "It didn't really matter, because as P3 said, he has Z ability which lets him bypass Y. That's why I didn't ask."

That situation could have been resolved very quickly: Monster just moves. However, in practice it took ages because of the number of options in the game.


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## Flexor the Mighty! (Mar 13, 2019)

3.x was pretty concise in theory but in play as levels rose it became a mess of shifting mods to track.  The game rapidly became a chore to run as it was really built with the idea that players were buffed to the max and loaded with gear so they usually were.


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## the Jester (Mar 13, 2019)

This is an interesting topic for me. I like a certain amount of complexity on a personal level, but I have a good head for math and can keep a bunch of complex parts in my head. Not lal players are like that. I have several people in my group who are really bad at math, several who tend to forget their character's abilities, etc. So even if _I_ might enjoy some fiddly bits in the game- for instance, I _really_ miss the old "+1 to hit for higher ground" modifier- not everyone else can keep all that fiddly stuff in mind.  For a lot of players, the added complexity is added not-fun mental load. 

I think a lot of games, in the 3e era, tried for a simulationist approach, with rules describing every case that the pcs might be expected to face in the game. The low-complexity movement arose (I think) largely in response to this. I wouldn't be surprised to see a new wave of high-complexity games arising in the future; this back and forth might be one of those things that is periodic, like the swing of a pendulum. 

As with many elements of playstyle preference, I think that 'complex vs. simple ruleset' is a continuum that players move through. Nobody always wants to play the same type of game, and the choice isn't between a simple game and a complex game; some games are far simpler than others, even if both might be considered to be on the simple or complex end of the spectrum. For instance, GURPS is more complex than 3e, which is more complex than 5e, which is more complex than Top Secret, which is more complex than Amber Diceless. Two players who like complex games might still have different preferences as to just how complex they want it. 

But I think the basic answer to the OP is, "Right now the pendulum is swung toward simple games". 

I'm pretty sure it will swing back.


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## Flexor the Mighty! (Mar 13, 2019)

Part of me would love to run a Hackmaster 5e game. But I know my group would collapse under its complexity.  We will see how Mutant Crawl Classics goes when I get a chance.


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## Sword of Spirit (Mar 14, 2019)

Once a renewed interest in RPG theory arises, maybe rules systems that are highly complex but highly elegant will become more of a thing. Some people think RPG design is mature. I completely disagree. It is probably a bit out of its infancy, but still in early childhood.


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## 5ekyu (Mar 14, 2019)

First, to me, it's kinda key to separate the "feel" from forums, sales and play. To me those three often are very different things.

Played lotsa high complex and medium and light etc.

Complexity at chargen *can* serve to make more problematic bringing in new players. A steep start-up effort is a hurdle. 

Complexity in play can make keeping those new players more difficult.

None of those will really impact "the gang" who has been running ABC since "the old days when it used Roman numerals".

But, in this modern age of online gaming and FLGS Adventure League tables being much more common than the old days where that was more "convention things", I think being able to quickly get up and running with new players or unfamiliar players has grown in value as far as "appeal" to the market goes.

Also, in my experience, complexity is decided at the table level more than at system level. Ye olde "binder of house rules" has added complexity to many light systems and ye olde "rule, roll and move on" has streamlined many rules complex systems as well.


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## Zhaleskra (Mar 14, 2019)

I'm not a fan of the idea of RPG theory at all. From what the Forge did, I am of the opinion that it did way more harm to RPGs than help.


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## dragoner (Mar 14, 2019)

There are still complex games, and people love them, I saw people taking multiple milk crates of Pathfinder books into a local gaming cafe not too long ago. I usually take my messenger bag w/ rules book, portfolio, fire, and some dice; and it's not full.


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## Li Shenron (Mar 15, 2019)

Derren said:


> So I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from? Was it always there? Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore? Do they feel rules are constricting or that the granularity complex rules add like characters being differently competent in different skills instead of having one modifier for everything doesn't add anything to the game?




Quick thought...

A lot of people who like complexity actually like _their own_ complexity. Almost everyone I know who is a fan of high-complexity games uses house rules in RPG because they are unsatisfied by how things are designed by the authors. I might be wrong, but I have developed the feeling that their true motive is simply wanting to be _in charge_, and perhaps even wanting to believe they are better than professional designers. It might be just a casual correlation of two different things, but at least it's something I've noticed first-hand in gamers I know. And I am also partially guilty of this myself!

The opposite trend of wanting low-complexity games exists for a variety of reasons, but I cannot exclude that in part is also a reaction to those in the hobby who have the profile above. I'd say however that the _main_ motivation for wanting low-complexity games is simply because higher complexity requires a bigger effort (especially for DMs) but doesn't necessarily improve the game for everyone. Maybe it's the simple fact that the relative amount of gamers who aren't willing to invest too much time to learn the rules or "master" character design, and those who can only afford casual gaming once in a while (and therefore want to quickly get into the game with little preparation) has grown a lot.

However, in theory a low-complexity game can be better for everyone. Those who want low-complexity already have it, and those who want high-complexity are free to add their own rules and designs. If you start with a high-complexity game, it is more difficult to both, for the first to tone it down and for the second to accept what is already provided by the designers, or change it without causing unwanted consequences.


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 18, 2019)

Li Shenron said:


> A lot of people who like complexity actually like _their own_ complexity. Almost everyone I know who is a fan of high-complexity games uses house rules in RPG because they are unsatisfied by how things are designed by the authors. I might be wrong, but I have developed the feeling that their true motive is simply wanting to be _in charge_, and perhaps even wanting to believe they are better than professional designers. It might be just a casual correlation of two different things, but at least it's something I've noticed first-hand in gamers I know. And I am also partially guilty of this myself!



I think it's less about wanting to be in charge, and more about having a strong vision for what they want from a game. One of the benefits of a complex game is that they can give you a lot more detail about the outcome of an action, but unless you have the exact same vision as the game designer, you probably don't want those specific details.

I can say with absolute certainty that any halfway-competent amateur _is_ better than a professional designer, at delivering the specific content that the amateur is looking for. The amateur knows exactly what they want, and all of the complexity in the game can be used to further that goal. The professional isn't even necessarily looking at the amateur as their target audience.


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## Zhaleskra (Mar 19, 2019)

My basic beef with people dismissing games they deem complex goes something like this. Rando sees some amount of complex rules, then rando assumes that because complex rules are included the entire game is complex, and dismisses the entire game on a false assumption.


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## GMMichael (Mar 19, 2019)

Sword of Spirit said:


> Once a renewed interest in RPG theory arises, maybe rules systems that are highly complex but highly elegant will become more of a thing. Some people think RPG design is mature. I completely disagree. It is probably a bit out of its infancy, but still in early childhood.



All hail the great AI, for the One True RPG shall be its first creation.



Majoru Oakheart said:


> I think if you factor in a lot of the optional steps then there are plenty. The problem is that complexity doesn't always translate to complication. It always has that potential, however.



That was complex.



Majoru Oakheart said:


> You could reduce an attack roll in the game down to 1) Roll to hit and 2) Roll for damage. But within those steps there are many substeps. Those substeps all take time so they really need to be factored in. Even when the substeps don't apply during this particular attack, they still need to be checked to see if they resolve.
> 
> For instance:
> 
> ...



How about this one: simple, complex, or complicated?



> PC: I chop at the ogre's knees from behind while Uriel is poking him with his foil.
> 
> GM: Roll.  The ogre is too busy taking swings at Uriel to defend against you.
> 
> ...


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 19, 2019)

Zhaleskra said:


> My basic beef with people dismissing games they deem complex goes something like this. Rando sees some amount of complex rules, then rando assumes that because complex rules are included the entire game is complex, and dismisses the entire game on a false assumption.



How can a game be _less_ complex than the sum of its parts?


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## generic (Mar 19, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> How can a game be _less_ complex than the sum of its parts?




It can't, but the average complexity of a rules system can be lower than the complexity of a section.

At least, that's what I think [MENTION=20544]Zhaleskra[/MENTION] is trying to say.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 19, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> How can a game be _less_ complex than the sum of its parts?




The owner's manual to my car is about an inch thick with specs, diagrams, and tables.  Every once in a while I have to stop driving and use the manual to check the optimal tire pressure, recommended oil type, or figure out what that unknown light on the dashboard is.  Servicing my car is even harder and requires special tools and skills that I simply don't have.  My car is very complex.  But to drive it, all I have to do is push a button, pull a lever, and press a foot pedal.

Driving my car is much less complex than the sum of its parts.  Most RPGs are the same way.  Look at a stack of game manuals, try to read a stat block you don't understand, or look at a GM's screen, and it looks very complex.  But rolling a die and adding some modifiers is generally quite easy.


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 19, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> The owner's manual to my car is about an inch thick with specs, diagrams, and tables.  Every once in a while I have to stop driving and use the manual to check the optimal tire pressure, recommended oil type, or figure out what that unknown light on the dashboard is.  Servicing my car is even harder and requires special tools and skills that I simply don't have.  My car is very complex.  But to drive it, all I have to do is push a button, pull a lever, and press a foot pedal.
> 
> Driving my car is much less complex than the sum of its parts.  Most RPGs are the same way.  Look at a stack of game manuals, try to read a stat block you don't understand, or look at a GM's screen, and it looks very complex.  But rolling a die and adding some modifiers is generally quite easy.



That's not a very good analogy. The vast majority of the processes in your car work automatically, but nothing happens in an RPG unless you manually make it happen. You aren't actually expected to service your car by yourself, but you are expected to understand and apply the rules of an RPG whenever they come up.

If you look at third edition D&D, for example, the rules for grappling are widely considered to be more complex than we'd like them to be. The fact that you aren't grappling on most turns does not change the complexity of the grappling mechanics. That's still part of the game. You're expected to apply those rules whenever you want to take that action. At best, you could say that the game as a whole is not as complex as the grappling rules would make it seem, but the total complexity of the game is still equal to the complexity of the grappling rules + the complexity of all other rules + emergent complexity.


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## sd_jasper (Mar 19, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> How can a game be _less_ complex than the sum of its parts?




Many universal systems present rule options that are mutually exclusive and not meant to all be "toggled on" together. Others present games of scale, that CAN BE complex... if you want every bit of detail, but are usually built on top of simpler systems that work fine without the more complex detail. The problem is that some folks think that if a rule exists, you have to use it.


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 19, 2019)

sd_jasper said:


> Many universal systems present rule options that are mutually exclusive and not meant to all be "toggled on" together. Others present games of scale, that CAN BE complex... if you want every bit of detail, but are usually built on top of simpler systems that work fine without the more complex detail. The problem is that some folks think that if a rule exists, you have to use it.



That's a good point. I would argue that something like GURPS is really more of a "game creation kit" than it is an actual game. Playing your elf at the table is not nearly as complex as what the GM has to do in deciding how to build an elf template out of the advantages and disadvantages available to them.


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## sd_jasper (Mar 20, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> That's a good point. I would argue that something like GURPS is really more of a "game creation kit" than it is an actual game. Playing your elf at the table is not nearly as complex as what the GM has to do in deciding how to build an elf template out of the advantages and disadvantages available to them.




True, and even though most of what a player needs to know boils down to "roll 3d6 vs skill", GURPS still has a rep of being one of the (if not THE) most complex games out there.


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## steenan (Mar 20, 2019)

Complexity is always a cost. It requires mental effort and time spent handling it during play.

This, in itself, does not make complexity bad. It makes it a budget. The question is, how well it is spent. How much value does the game offer in exchange for the complexity? Or, in other words, how well do the complex rules support and direct the process of play, compared to what simpler ones would do?

Unfortunately, RPGs tend to waste their complexity budget. We still have to learn what creators of board and card games already did - how to get the most return in exchange for the least amount of complexity. 

In a lot of cases, rules are made complex in the name of "realism" or "simulation" that really isn't. They replace common sense with processes that produce absurd results and need to be moderated by the GM to work, thus turning their supposed gain into a loss. In a similar way, offering a lot of options that are wildly unbalanced wastes complexity, as many of them will never be used (or, when used, will result in frustration), while others can easily break the game, requiring additional effort to avoid that.
Another example of wasted complexity is making rules (often complicated ones) for things that are not a part of the core experience. The frequently given explanation is that, as such rules are rarely used, they do not add much complexity. The truth is that because they are rarely used, nobody remembers them, so when they would be useful either the group ignores them or wastes time looking them up.

So it's not that I don't like complex rules. It's that I like well-written rules, ones that pull their weight. And they are currently much easier to find in rules-light games.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 20, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> but nothing happens in an RPG unless you manually make it happen. You aren't actually expected to service your car by yourself, but you are expected to understand and apply the rules of an RPG whenever they come up.
> 
> If you look at third edition D&D, for example, the rules for grappling are widely considered to be more complex than we'd like them to be. The fact that you aren't grappling on most turns does not change the complexity of the grappling mechanics. That's still part of the game. ...  but the total complexity of the game is still equal to the complexity of the grappling rules + the complexity of all other rules + emergent complexity.




Sure, 3.5e grappling is complicated.  But, as you say, nothing happens in an RPG unless you make it happen.  I have played entire 3.5e campaigns where the grappling rules never came up.  The players in that campaign had no expectation to understand and apply the rules of the RPG that they never used.  Having the potential to make something complicated does not mean the game has to be complicated.  You can add modules on to any game to make it infinitely complicated, but the base system remains simpler.

Maybe I'll agree that the total complexity of a game is equal to the complexity of all rules.  But the complexity of a game to one individual player is only equal to the complexity of the rules that individual actually uses.  The 3.5 wizard doesn't care about grappling rules, because if they're attacked by a grappling monster the DM is the one who has to adjudicate.  The 3.5 barbarian doesn't care about the complexity of the shape change rules, because it's up to the druid to keep track of their animal shapes.  The rogue doesn't compare about the complexity of the turning rules, because the cleric is the one who will fight the undead.

Now, there is something be said about how modular a system is, which will help keep these complexities separate and allow new features to be added without affecting others.  And there's a major point to made for the poor DM, who has to manage all the complexities of the individual players (and monsters).  But to a vast majority of the players, there's simply to reason to call a game "complex" if they'll never experience the complexity.


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## Umbran (Mar 20, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> Maybe I'll agree that the total complexity of a game is equal to the complexity of all rules.  But the complexity of a game to one individual player is only equal to the complexity of the rules that individual actually uses.




You seem to forget that a major issue with complexity is the time it takes to resolve actions.  

Even if I am not the one initiating a grapple, any time anything in the game grapples, I have to sit around waiting for the grapple to be resolved. In this way, a player's game experience is linked to the complexity of all rules used at the table, not just the ones they personally use.


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 20, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> Maybe I'll agree that the total complexity of a game is equal to the complexity of all rules.  But the complexity of a game to one individual player is only equal to the complexity of the rules that individual actually uses.



That's pretty much what I was getting at, but with the caveat that the player still has to know any rule that might affect them. A wizard can't choose to ignore the grappling rules entirely, just because they don't plan on initiating a grapple, since someone may choose to grapple them against their will.

That being said, I know plenty of groups had a social contract to ignore the possibility of grappling, so nobody would have to deal with it. On a similar note, most of the groups I played in ignored the possibility of crafting, so we wouldn't have to worry about it. In essence, we house ruled ourselves into playing a less complex game.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 20, 2019)

Umbran said:


> You seem to forget that a major issue with complexity is the time it takes to resolve actions.
> 
> Even if I am not the one initiating a grapple, any time anything in the game grapples, I have to sit around waiting for the grapple to be resolved. In this way, a player's game experience is linked to the complexity of all rules used at the table, not just the ones they personally use.




I'm not forgetting it, I'm just minimizing it.  Time to resolve actions is only one measure of the complexity of a system (and is also dependent on things other than complexity)

My claim here is that we don't measure complexity of an entire game by the most complex rules; the overall complexity of a game can be less than the sum of all the parts.  Even in your example, the game would be slowest if all characters grappled all the time.  If it's one character only grappling occasionally, then the overall game is still faster (and simpler) than if the entire game were judged by just the time spent grappling.  Also, players who know the grappling rules better will still be faster than those who need to look up a table of modifiers every time.

You are correct, though, that I also can't claim a game is only as complex as it's simplest or core mechanic.  Adding in complex modules like grappling (or difficult spells, etc) does affect the overall gameplay.  In that regard, there's also a "modularity" factor that needs to be considered.  If grappling is only possible by specialized fighters or monsters, then it's easy to exclude it from the game when you don't want to slow it down.  If any character can randomly do it in the middle of a battle, it's more likely to cause problems at inopportune (i.e. dramatic) times.


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## Sword of Spirit (Mar 20, 2019)

steenan said:


> Complexity is always a cost. It requires mental effort and time spent handling it during play.
> 
> This, in itself, does not make complexity bad. It makes it a budget. The question is, how well it is spent. How much value does the game offer in exchange for the complexity? Or, in other words, how well do the complex rules support and direct the process of play, compared to what simpler ones would do?
> 
> ...




This is a perfect example of an RPG Design Theory post, and it's great. It brings up some things I'd already considered, adds some new concepts that hadn't yet fully clicked for me, and presents them together with a structure that relates them to one another and expands my understanding.

I don't see why anyone would think this sort of thing is anything but a good thing.

(And really, this entire thread _is_ an RPG theory discussion, unless a post is simply stating preference without addressing the first word in the title "Why".)



Saelorn said:


> At best, you could say that the game as a whole is not as complex as the grappling rules would make it seem, but the total complexity of the game is still equal to the complexity of the grappling rules + the complexity of all other rules + emergent complexity.




I had a thought. Can there be such a thing as emergent simplicity? My immediate thought is "no, of course not", but perhaps there in fact can be. What would that look like? Has anyone experienced it?


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 20, 2019)

Sword of Spirit said:


> I had a thought. Can there be such a thing as emergent simplicity? My immediate thought is "no, of course not", but perhaps there in fact can be. What would that look like? Has anyone experienced it?



I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but I know I've seen a few combinations of mechanics where each individual mechanic is fairly convoluted, but the interaction with other sub-systems reveals that the optimum solution is a degenerate one.

As an example, imagine a point-buy game where you could either roll 6d10 to determine your budget, or just choose to start with a budget of 70. The more complex path is strictly inferior, so there's no reason for anyone to ever engage with it, and the effective rule is that you just start with 70.

A more realistic example would be a game where you spend character creation budget on both attributes and skills, but the price of each is skewed such that you can just max out all of your attributes and take zero skills, and you're more effective than if you tried to balance taking both attributes and skills. A complex equation reduces down to a simpler one in practice.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 20, 2019)

Sword of Spirit said:


> I had a thought. Can there be such a thing as emergent simplicity? My immediate thought is "no, of course not", but perhaps there in fact can be. What would that look like? Has anyone experienced it?




This sounds a lot like the "feat tax" that people complained about if 4e.  There's lots of feat options, but one is clearly the best and ends up becoming a "tax" that all players must take.  It was viewed as a problem of 4e.

Another possible example I can think of is the death rules from 3.x.  "When your hit point total reaches 0, you’re disabled. When it reaches -1, you’re dying. When it gets to -10, you’re dead."  At level 1, with low hit points and low damage, you could end up in any of these conditions and need to be familiar with all of them.  Dying is a slow and complex process.  At level 20, you have hundreds of hit points and are getting hit for hundreds of damage.  The odds of being hit and left in the small window of 0 to -9 is very low.  Thus, dying (due to HP loss) is binary and simpler at higher levels.


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 20, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> Another possible example I can think of is the death rules from 3.x.  "When your hit point total reaches 0, you’re disabled. When it reaches -1, you’re dying. When it gets to -10, you’re dead."  At level 1, with low hit points and low damage, you could end up in any of these conditions and need to be familiar with all of them.  Dying is a slow and complex process.  At level 20, you have hundreds of hit points and are getting hit for hundreds of damage.  The odds of being hit and left in the small window of 0 to -9 is very low.  Thus, dying (due to HP loss) is binary and simpler at higher levels.



That reminds me a lot of the damage system in Palladium games. Nominally, every character has two health pools: SDC, and HP. SDC (Structural Damage Capacity) covers soft damage, like how HP work in D&D, and SDC damage is fairly easy to recover. HP is for serious damage, like Vitality represents in certain D&D variants, and is a huge pain to heal with slow recovery times and lingering injuries that give fiddly penalties to different actions for the life of the character. Every Palladium game has a couple of pages devoted to describing how slow and painful it is to heal HP damage.

When they published Rifts, they still included those pages about healing, but they also introduced the concept of Mega Damage. Mega Damage is the kind of damage dealt by giant robots, most giant monsters, and futuristic laser guns. If you're just a normal dude, and you get hit by a Mega Damage attack, then you instantly explode. The only way to protect yourself against Mega Damage is to put on futuristic super armor, or get into a giant robot, or play as some giant monster; in that case, you have a different health pool, called MDC (Mega Damage Capacity). Every enemy that anyone cares about is a Mega Damage creature, which deals Mega Damage with its attacks. You will never be in a situation where you take damage to your SDC, let alone your HP; it either goes to your MDC armor, or you're dead. But you still gain 1d6 SDC per level, and they still have those pages explaining what happens if your HP hits certain negative thresholds.


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## Ratskinner (Mar 20, 2019)

Sword of Spirit said:


> I had a thought. Can there be such a thing as emergent simplicity? My immediate thought is "no, of course not", but perhaps there in fact can be. What would that look like? Has anyone experienced it?




Seems contradictory to me...I mean "emergence" is usually defined as something like "complex behavior exhibiting from multiple actors following simple rules". Going the other direction doesn't make much sense to me.


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## Umbran (Mar 21, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> My claim here is that we don't measure complexity of an entire game by the most complex rules; the overall complexity of a game can be less than the sum of all the parts.




Well, if you take it that way, we fundamentally cannot measure the complexity of a game except for a particular table, and then only after the entire campaign is completed, and we know what rules did get used, both official and house-rules.  At that point, there's not much more to say, because this isn't practical or constructive.

Moreoever, I don't buy it.  It seems perfectly fair to me to take the rules as written, and use them as a guideline.  If the game, as written and intended is complex, and we have to start eliminating parts for convenience so that individuals don't experience them... well, that pretty much tells us those parts were not useful complexity, and when we consider the game, we should consider that as a bit of a flaw, no?  It really isn't a great critique of the design to say, "Well, it isn't that complicated in practice, because we throw out large chunks of it!"


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## Umbran (Mar 21, 2019)

Ratskinner said:


> Seems contradictory to me...I mean "emergence" is usually defined as something like "complex behavior exhibiting from multiple actors following simple rules". Going the other direction doesn't make much sense to me.




Emergent behavior emerges.  It is the the whole having behavior not found in any of the particular parts.  The thing that emerges is not necessarily complicated or simple - so long as it is unexpected from just looking at the individual parts.


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## Ratskinner (Mar 21, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Emergent behavior emerges.  It is the the whole having behavior not found in any of the particular parts.  The thing that emerges is not necessarily complicated or simple - so long as it is unexpected from just looking at the individual parts.




Depends on who you ask (see long discussion in Wikipedia article on emergent phenomenon). I tend to fall into the camp of thinking along the lines of "a thousand things doing something is inherently more complex than one of them doing something." Although, thinking about it too much rapidly devolves into the "What does _complex_ mean?" discussion, IME.

Either way. I don't see how any sort of "simple" gameplay experience in a TTRPG could emerge or derive from "complex" rules. Although certainly computer rpgs can pull it off for their human players, TTRPG rules are being "run" within the minds of the human participants, who can't avoid any complexity.


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## Umbran (Mar 21, 2019)

Ratskinner said:


> I tend to fall into the camp of thinking along the lines of "a thousand things doing something is inherently more complex than one of them doing something." Although, thinking about it too much rapidly devolves into the "What does _complex_ mean?" discussion, IME.




I think uphread I did get into the difference between complicated and complex.  A mechanical watch has dozens of very specifically formed moving parts - it is complicated.  What it does is tell the time, which is not complex.  Three bodies moving under their mutual gravitational attraction is super-easy to specify.  It is not a complicated system.  Their resulting orbits, however area complex and unpredictable.    In this way, we can talk separately about how the thing is constructed, and how it behaves in the end.

Note: a single thing doing something *cannot* be emergent behavior.  Emergent behavior is what you get when *multiple* things interact, and the result is behavior not found in any individual part.  

As an example:  you can build a little robot that has two behaviors - it walks in a little loop, and it tries to stay near other robots.  Put a hundred of them together, and the group starts moving in a straight line (composed of a hundred little loops).  This emergent behavior is very simple - it is just movement in a straight line.



> Either way. I don't see how any sort of "simple" gameplay experience in a TTRPG could emerge or derive from "complex" rules.




Grappling is complicated.  So, none of us initiate grapples.  Complicated rules.  Simple resulting behavior.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 21, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Well, if you take it that way, we fundamentally cannot measure the complexity of a game except for a particular table, and then only after the entire campaign is completed, and we know what rules did get used, both official and house-rules.  At that point, there's not much more to say, because this isn't practical or constructive.
> 
> Moreoever, I don't buy it.  It seems perfectly fair to me to take the rules as written, and use them as a guideline.  If the game, as written and intended is complex, and we have to start eliminating parts for convenience so that individuals don't experience them... well, that pretty much tells us those parts were not useful complexity, and when we consider the game, we should consider that as a bit of a flaw, no?  It really isn't a great critique of the design to say, "Well, it isn't that complicated in practice, because we throw out large chunks of it!"




We are taking the experience of gaming many times and many tables.  After we know what rules got used, both official and house rules, we are attempting the measure the complexity of the games.  Is this not practical and constructive?  

Anyone who has played D+D, or Pathfinder, or SW, has always made a decision to exclude material due to complexity.  Every mass published RPG has thousands of pages of material beyond the core mechanics.  It's simply not possible to use every book for every game.  "Throwing out large chunks of it" is literally the only way to play any professionally made RPG.

It sounds like you want a very academic discussion of complexity using a specific set of game texts.  I don't think that's possible, simply because that's not how RPGs are played.  Discussion of complexity is only valid if we include real life experience.


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## GMMichael (Mar 21, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> It's simply not possible to use every book for every game.  "Throwing out large chunks of it" is literally the only way to play any professionally made RPG. . .  Discussion of complexity is only valid if we include real life experience.




The real life experience is too subjective to be worth discussing.  That is, unless you have a Hasbro-backed marketing machine that can take 10,000 data sets and crunch them into some usable numbers.  (Side note: ENWorld does have a lot of members...)

Due to Rule Zero, any game can be a simple one.  So if you start throwing out large chunks, you're reducing oranges to apples, and apples to apple-cores.  Then the question of the thread becomes "Why the hate for Granny Smith apples?" when all we're looking at is a bunch of chewed-up apples.

BUT...if you're right, and all we're looking at is the real life experience, not the book contents, then the answer to the question is:

Complex games generally weigh more and cost more, making simple games look more appealing by comparison.


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## dragoner (Mar 21, 2019)

DMMike said:


> BUT...if you're right, and all we're looking at is the real life experience, not the book contents, then the answer to the question is:
> 
> Complex games generally weigh more and cost more, making simple games look more appealing by comparison.




Time is probably the reason, more time for rules mastery, more time in play if the complexity is on the playing side (combat, tasks, etc.) vs setting building rules.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 21, 2019)

DMMike said:


> BUT...if you're right, and all we're looking at is the real life experience, not the book contents




Why is it a binary thing?  Can't we consider both the mechanics of the game and user experience?  Can't we consider even more options, like modularity?  And tabletop tools?  And customer support?  And writing quality?  Aren't those all factors in complexity?


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## gepetto (Mar 21, 2019)

I definitely prefer rules lighter the older I get. Part of it is not wanting to learn or teach a huge book full of complex rules. And part of is that I just want to play through an adventure with my friends. I dont want to look up rules, talk about rules at the table or even really think about rules. 

So to me its not just rules light, its also rules intuitive. So that a player can tell me what they want their character to do in narrative rather game terms and I can quickly figure out exactly what they should roll. And we can all agree on it, because the rules are simple and intuitive. For example I like NWoD regular mortals as a rules engine. Its very simple, attribute+skill+equipment+possible enviromental mods=dice pool. I never have any trouble quickly figuring exactly what those modifiers are without cracking a book and we almost never disagree, if a player does all they have to do is give me a good reason why and if its logical thats fine too I'll usually go with it. 

Speed and ease of play with the rules are what matter to me.


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## GMMichael (Mar 21, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> Why is it a binary thing?  Can't we consider both the mechanics of the game and user experience?  Can't we consider even more options, like modularity?  And tabletop tools?  And customer support?  And writing quality?  Aren't those all factors in complexity?



Well, no.  Because the OP asked:


Derren said:


> Maybe I am wrong but I have the impression that for some time now (a decade at least) there has been an ever increasing dislike for complexity and calls for ever simpler "rules light" systems.



I don't think that there have been calls for fewer tabletop tools, less customer support, or lower writing quality.

While I'm at the mic, maybe the perceived decade-or-more calls for simplicity are tied to the advent of humorless TV comedies, three-word-limit advertising slogans, over-produced and under-artistic music, and substandard public teacher salaries?


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 21, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> Why is it a binary thing?  Can't we consider both the mechanics of the game and user experience?  Can't we consider even more options, like modularity?  And tabletop tools?  And customer support?  And writing quality?  Aren't those all factors in complexity?



In a recent(ish) review of Mekton Zeta, the one big complaint was the lack of software to help design mecha. It wouldn't change the number of decision points at all, but it would definitely make it easier to manage those decisions. I feel like writing quality is probably in the same category. Good writing doesn't make a game less complex, but it can make the existing complexity much easier to deal with.

That doesn't really support the premise of this thread, though, or explain the observed trend toward reduced complexity (if it exists). Tools and writing quality have both improved dramatically in recent decades, which should make complex games more appealing rather than less.


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## Umbran (Mar 21, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> We are taking the experience of gaming many times and many tables.  After we know what rules got used, both official and house rules, we are attempting the measure the complexity of the games.  Is this not practical and constructive?




Insofar as we don't actually have the data, and no realistic way to gather it properly, no.  We actually have rulebooks that don't depend on gathering data from statistically relevant samples of people.



> Every mass published RPG has thousands of pages of material beyond the core mechanics.




Define "mass published".  

I think saying *EVERY* one has *THOUSANDS* of pages of material is nowhere near accurate - either a poorly considered statement, or unreasonable levels of hyperbole.  Unless the only games that qualify as "mass published" are D&D, Pathfinder, and White Wolf, I suppose.... but then "every" is really "three", and your point isn't so strong.



> It's simply not possible to use every book for every game.  "Throwing out large chunks of it" is literally the only way to play any professionally made RPG.




First it is "mass published" now it is "professionally".  Please settle on one definition of what games we may or may not consider here.  Otherwise, intentionally or not, the goalposts are going to tend to move.  If you feel a need to limit what games we consider, let us lay that out early.



> It sounds like you want a very academic discussion of complexity using a specific set of game texts.  I don't think that's possible, simply because that's not how RPGs are played.  Discussion of complexity is only valid if we include real life experience.




And it sounds like you are somehow of the opinion that the real life experience is significantly different from what's in the text.  I am of the opinion that if the rules of a game are complicated, leaving out some of the most egregious parts still leaves you with a game that's complicated in play.  

I don't think, "the game as written is complicated, but in the majority of play, it turns out not to be complicated," is a real scenario.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 21, 2019)

DMMike said:


> Well, no.  Because the OP asked:
> 
> I don't think that there have been calls for fewer tabletop tools, less customer support, or lower writing quality.




Well, to start with, I'm well past the first round of questions and deep in to the discussion of exactly what makes something "rules light".  I think the answer is highly subjective, which makes the OPs question harder to answer.

And, honestly, yes, I can think of calls for all of those things on this very message board.

Re: Tools.  One thing some people dislike about OD&D is a reliance on tables.  For them, adding more tables (tools) is seen as adding complexity.  For those that prefer tables, tables are less complex than reliance on complex formulas for everything.  

For another example, one of the big concerns about 4e was how much it pushed people to rely on the Character Builder, DDI, and other online tools as part of playing.  For people who were used to books only and had a "no screens" rule at a game table, these tools were seen as complex technology that removed focus from the table.  For players that used the CB and online tools heavily, it was a great way to get away from the complexity of looking things up in books all the time.

Re: Customer Support.  Every seen a thread arguing about a Sage article?  How about rulings in any of the "Living ###" communities?  Does having a guru in charge of questions make things simpler for answering questions, or harder to stay on top of the rules when a Sage ruling contradicts the rule books?  Did the many Shape Change errata makes things simpler for 3.5e druids?

Re: Writing quality.  There have been many threads here about the tone and writing styles of the various versions of D+D.  Some people prefer the more literary tones of Gygax, because it's simpler to pull the style of the game from the text.  Others prefer game manuals to read like stereo instructions and be as dry as possible.  This requires all game flavor to be added in as a module.  Which style is more "rules light"?

Clearly, some of these are bigger factors that others.  My main point here is that TTRPGs are an experience, and complexity can come from anywhere.  If you focus on just the core mechanic, d20 and WEG d6 are the exact same complexity: role dice, compare to a number, determine result.  Everything else around the mechanics also plays a factor in how complex the game is perceived.



Saelorn said:


> That doesn't really support the premise of this thread, though, or explain the observed trend toward reduced complexity (if it exists). Tools and writing quality have both improved dramatically in recent decades, which should make complex games more appealing rather than less.




Is there a difference in "hate for complexity" and "hate for apparent complexity"?  If we just move the complexity around enough, does a complex system become "rules light"?


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 21, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> Is there a difference in "hate for complexity" and "hate for apparent complexity"?  If we just move the complexity around enough, does a complex system become "rules light"?



There's a difference, but there's also a strong correlation, in all but the most-degenerate of cases. If you build an app that does all of the dice-rolling and table-lookups at the push of a button, then you would have a very complex system that doesn't appear very complex to the player, but I would also argue that they aren't really even playing the game at that point. 

The decision to cast Reckless Dweomer means something very different when you _know_ that "fireball yourself" is a possibility. If all you know is that you should push the button, and you don't actually understand what the button does, then you're really more of an observer than a participant.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 21, 2019)

Umbran said:


> I don't think, "the game as written is complicated, but in the majority of play, it turns out not to be complicated," is a real scenario.




This is the part where we don't agree, but I can say that your summary here is an accurate description of my POV.

Lots of things feel like this to me, not just TTRPGs.  7 Wonders, Small World, Flash Point.  Card games like pinochle and euchre.  Video games like Castles and Dwarf Fortress.  My 5 year old plays baseball but the MLB rule book is 170 pages.


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## Umbran (Mar 21, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> My 5 year old plays baseball but the MLB rule book is 170 pages.




Yes, now, are you going to claim that someone actually took the MLB rulebook, and specifically cut that down to the game your 5-year-old plays?  Because I would be dubious of that proposition.  If not, then this example is not really relevant. 

I submit that the rules of baseball in general are pretty simple, and that the MLB has branched from that and produces Advanced Edition Baseball for Professional League Play, that they have added lots of rules to.

The argument you present here is like claiming OD&D is complicated, using the 3.5e rules as evidence.


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## MichaelSomething (Mar 21, 2019)

What's more complex, inventing a new sportsball game on the spot or refereeing a game of Cricket?


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## Staffan (Mar 21, 2019)

steenan said:


> Complexity is always a cost. It requires mental effort and time spent handling it during play.




That's a good point. I read a similar discussion over on the Paizo forums, where someone said something like "Complexity is the currency with which you buy depth," and I thought it was a great analogy.

It's very hard to have (mechanical) depth without complexity. You need the complexity to get the depth. But the complexity has to be spent carefully, where you get the most bang for your metaphorical buck. This is probably different for different games - a game about playing wizards can get away with tons of info on magic - summoning, research, magic languages and having those have different uses, and so on. But when the wizard is one character type among many, you don't need that much magic stuff.

And different people have different tolerances for complexity - and that tolerance may change over time. I sure know mine has - I used to love getting into the nitty-gritty stuff of 3e/Pathfinder, but I eventually got tired of that and had some vague idea about working out my own hybrid of 3e, Pathfinder, 4e, and Trailblazer. Fortunately 5e came along before that.


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## Deset Gled (Mar 21, 2019)

Umbran said:


> I submit that the rules of baseball in general are pretty simple, and that the MLB has branched from that and produces Advanced Edition Baseball for Professional League Play, that they have added lots of rules to.




I agree.  The game as written by the foremost authority is complicated, but in the majority of play, it turns out not to be complicated.



> The argument you present here is like claiming OD&D is complicated, using the 3.5e rules as evidence.




OD&D _is _complicated.  Have you ever compared THAC0 to the d20 mechanic in 3.5e?


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## The Crimson Binome (Mar 21, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> I agree.  The game as written by the foremost authority is complicated, but in the majority of play, it turns out not to be complicated.



They aren't even playing the same game anymore. They're literally using different rule sets. It's not that kids stay in the part of play that's less-complicated; it's that the kids literally aren't playing the game that contains the complicated rules.

I would say that the kids have house-ruled out a lot of the complexity, but the reality is more that the foremost authority has house-ruled a lot of complexity _into_ the game.


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## Ratskinner (Mar 22, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Grappling is complicated.  So, none of us initiate grapples.  Complicated rules.  Simple resulting behavior.




I'll set aside for the moment the idea that playing/using the rest of the 3e rules is "simple". I'm not sure I buy your line of thinking here.

1) If no one ever casts _Fireball_ is the _game_ simpler than if we do? I'm not sure that it is. I don't think American Football is more or less simple because people rarely use the "dropkick" rules anymore. (Thank you, Doug Flutie.)

2) If the behavior is the result of ignoring the rules, is that really "emergent" from the rules? I tend not to think so. (Flocking behavior is the result of boids/birds following simple navigation rules. Their grooming or mating habits are not.)

3) There is also the "what game are we playing/discussing here" bugaboo.


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## pemerton (Mar 22, 2019)

Deset Gled said:


> "Throwing out large chunks of it" is literally the only way to play any professionally made RPG.



I don't think this is true at all. When I think of systems I've played over the past few years, I don't throw out large chunks of Prince Valiant or Burning Wheel.

I wouldn't describe myself as throwing out large chunks of Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic, but that would depend whether you count not (yet) using _story situations_ that have been professionally published as "throwing out large chunks". I likewise don't think of myself as throwing out large chunks of Classic Traveller simply because there are published adventures or setting material I don't and probably never will use, but I'm guessing you classify that the other way.


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## pemerton (Mar 22, 2019)

MichaelSomething said:


> What's more complex, inventing a new sportsball game on the spot or refereeing a game of Cricket?



Cricket is umpired, not refereed, at least in the usage I'm familiar with. (I don't think you've got the match referee in mind.)


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## Celebrim (Mar 22, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Yes, now, are you going to claim that someone actually took the MLB rulebook, and specifically cut that down to the game your 5-year-old plays?  Because I would be dubious of that proposition.  If not, then this example is not really relevant.
> 
> I submit that the rules of baseball in general are pretty simple, and that the MLB has branched from that and produces Advanced Edition Baseball for Professional League Play, that they have added lots of rules to.
> 
> The argument you present here is like claiming OD&D is complicated, using the 3.5e rules as evidence.




I'm not hugely familiar with the rules of baseball, but if they are anything like the laws of soccer, the official rules spend far more time discussing the conditions of play than they do how to play.

For example, in the laws of soccer, the rules describing what is proper footwear to wear when playing soccer are the longest section of the rules, and the rules describing uniforms (including shoes) are longer than all the rest of the rules combined.

Similarly, I strongly suspect that of the 170 pages of rules issued by the MLB chairman, the vast majority are going to describe the requirements of uniforms, the playing surface, the stadium, the ball, the bats, and so forth and not how to play baseball.   Likewise, I suspect that a huge percentage of the rules concern the behavior of teams toward each other before and during the game, such as for example that the host has to commit to providing certain medical facilities, certain press facilities, and so forth and that the teams cannot or should not engage in spying on each other and so on and so forth - none of which has to do with playing the game, but which instead has to do with managing professional teams for profit when the players are employees in a union with contractual agreements with the employers.

One of the things that is of great personal interest to me as someone who thinks about RPGs intellectually as a hobby as well as who plays RPGs as a hobby and writes his own RPG rules as a hobby, is that no RPG fully undertakes to describe those processes of play in the same way the laws of soccer or the rules of baseball do, probably because they would be terribly boring, would be ignored in most play as often as they are in the real world, and RPG publishers have no real interest in ensuring uniformity of the play experience in the way that sellers of professional competitive sports do.

Indeed, really only when Indy games came out do I remember anyone trying to describe the process of play in a rigorous way at all, such as defining what a valid proposition was, or defining whether a proposition came before or after the stakes, or before or after the resolution, or before or after the fortune mechanic, whether the fortune is disclosed and/or reviewed and how and to who and in what situations, what situations require or do not require a fortune roll, and on and on and on.   And to the extent that prior systems did try to define the process of play, such as the 1e AD&D DMG actually seemed to be trying to do (one of the reasons I think it's been so enduring), I think at the time few people understood (including the writer) what they were actually describing, and how and why those processes of play prevailed at Gygax's table but were not necessarily functional in different situations.   I know at the time I didn't, and it took a lot of experience running games and an increase in maturity before things started clicking with me what he was trying to say and why he was saying it.

Every time complexity comes up, I find myself referring back to "The World's Simplest RPG" which I will frequently claim has one rule:

"Whenever a proposition is made, flip a coin.  On heads the proposition succeeds, and on tails the proposition fails."

But I'm actually being a bit coy here.  While the "The World's Simplest RPG" does have one rule in the since that we normally think of rules, the game actually has a book thick set of meta-rules that are implied, unstated, and left to the individual table.   You cannot play the world's simplest RPG without those meta-rules, because those meta-rules tell you want an RPG actually is.   All the rules of an RPG actually tell you is how to resolve in game conflicts.   People reading the above rule likely usually go, "Ok, I can see how that would let you play an RPG, dysfunctional though it might be.", but in fact they only see that because they have in their head a vast set of rules they don't think about concerning what an RPG is and how one is played.   In the same way that kids in a backyard can set up a practical baseball field, and get a game together with some balls, bats, and gloves without having to think about the rules and regulations concerning any of that.  They are house ruling or else relying on hidden rules built into the system (such as, "How is a baseball made").  

I'm convinced that for any RPG, this hidden rules are at least as complicated as the RPG is, and for a rules light game are often longer than the rules of the game are.   And if you've played with different tables, you'll quickly realize that these meta-rules shape the game quite as much as the rules of the game do.

MLB has rules that are so long not because baseball is complicated, but because they've had to write out all the meta-rules (well most of them) that are unspoken or else in a less casual game would be decided by consensus, such as, answers to questions like, "It's raining.  Should we quit and go home?"


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## Celebrim (Mar 22, 2019)

bah double post


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## MichaelSomething (Mar 22, 2019)

pemerton said:


> Cricket is umpired, not refereed, at least in the usage I'm familiar with. (I don't think you've got the match referee in mind.)



And complexity over roles already rears its ugly head!


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## Bedrockgames (Mar 22, 2019)

Derren said:


> Maybe I am wrong but I have the impression that for some time now (a decade at least) there has been an ever increasing dislike for complexity and calls for ever simpler "rules light" systems.
> D&D 5E is already much simpler than previous editions like 3E and 2E, yet people still look for even lighter systems up to a point that for large parts of the you are freeforming with no mechanics at all.
> And even though 3E was once widely played it is now decried as a complex monster no one could have had fun with (hyperbole).
> 
> So I wonder where this hate for complexity comes from? Was it always there? Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore? Do they feel rules are constricting or that the granularity complex rules add like characters being differently competent in different skills instead of having one modifier for everything doesn't add anything to the game?




I think it is just a cyclical thing. I go back and forth between wanting more complex rules and wanting simpler ones


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## Guest 6801328 (Mar 22, 2019)

I haven't read the entire thread, so this may not be a new thought, but I like "simple rules, deep implications".  Go, of course, is the canonical example.  You don't need lots of rules to be interestingly complex, you just need rules that make it hard to know, at any given time, what the optimal choice is.

(And, for the record, I'm not arguing that 5e achieves this.)


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## pemerton (Mar 23, 2019)

MichaelSomething said:


> And complexity over roles already rears its ugly head!



Nothing wrong with being a cricket hater! But out of curiosity, are you from a cricket-playing culture, or looking at it as a horrified outsider? (And apologies if that dichotomy is too simplistic.)


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## pemerton (Mar 23, 2019)

Elfcrusher said:


> I haven't read the entire thread, so this may not be a new thought, but I like "simple rules, deep implications".  Go, of course, is the canonical example.  You don't need lots of rules to be interestingly complex, you just need rules that make it hard to know, at any given time, what the optimal choice is.



Cortex+ (which I know through MHRP and the Fantasy Hack variants) is a dice pool system that is (according to designer commentary) designed to make it hard to caculate the odds - so shifting the emphasis to "I've got a handful of dice!" rather than "Have I got the right handful of dice?"

It's true that the maths is hard, but that doesn't stop my players trying to optimise their pools!


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## Zhaleskra (Mar 24, 2019)

Aebir-Toril said:


> It can't, but the average complexity of a rules system can be lower than the complexity of a section.
> 
> At least, that's what I think [MENTION=20544]Zhaleskra[/MENTION] is trying to say.




I know your post is a few pages ago, and that is indeed what I meant. A complex section of rules, which aren't applied all the time, do not make the entire game complex.


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## generic (Mar 24, 2019)

Zhaleskra said:


> I know your post is a few pages ago, and that is indeed what I meant. A complex section of rules, which aren't applied all the time, do not make the entire game complex.




I agree.


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## GrahamWills (Mar 25, 2019)

So, as a statistician, a lot of my job is to handle complexity. One of the measures used for complexity is the number of parameters that affect the outcome. So if I am trying to predict an outcome Y using an input X using regression, then a quadratic model is one parameter more complex than a linear model. A cubic model is one step more complex again.

It's not immediate how to map that to a roleplaying game, but I think (as has been proposed up-thread) that it makes sense to take resolution of actions as the primary activity in-game and so try and evaluate that complexity. There is a separate out-of-play complexity around character building and the like that would need a similar analysis.

So, for me, when I am playing a one-shot with pre-defined characters, all I care about is the complexity of playing the game, not the complexity of prepping for the game. And since I usually spend more time playing than prepping, that's really what I'll focus on even for long-running campaigns.

With the mathematical definition of complexity in mind, our base criterion is: *How many parameters (powers, stats, number, existence of feats, etc.) do I need to consider when resolving an action?*

For the theoretical "coin-toss" game where every result is 50-50, the answer is zero. This game could be said to have zero complexity. For every actual game the answer is different based on what action is being done. So I think we need to at least have *a rough idea of the distribution of types of action* to say what the "average complexity" of an action resolution is.

Mathematically, we might weight the complexity of each action by how often it occurs and use that as an overall measure. Although every game and table is different, I think it's reasonable to make very rough estimates and make it work. In many genres we could probably get by by saying that 2-3 exemplars are good enough to judge a system of. Perhaps:


Attacking in enemy with the most common form of weapon in an attempt to kill them
Sneaking past an opponent
Persuading someone to do something

So a very rough idea of complexity might be to estimate the number of factors that you need to consider for each of the above, add them all up, and divide by three.


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## pemerton (Mar 26, 2019)

GrahamWills said:


> With the mathematical definition of complexity in mind, our base criterion is: *How many parameters (powers, stats, number, existence of feats, etc.) do I need to consider when resolving an action?*
> 
> <snip>
> 
> ...



Classic Traveller:

* Attacking requires knowing an attacker stat number, range, target armour, and target stats (to apply damage) - that's 4 parameters;

* Sneaking isn't a precisely defined action, but resolving surprise (which is a precursor to evasion) requires knowing the number in each group, the skills in each group, and the equipment/vehicle of each group - that's either 3 or 6 parameters (I'm not sure if I'm meant to count each twice because I have to go to do bits of info, the PCs and the opponents);

* Persuading someone requires knowing character skills and world population - that's 2 parameters.​
So that's complexity either 3 or 4, depending on how I was meant to measure the evasion case.


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## Celebrim (Mar 26, 2019)

GrahamWills said:


> For the theoretical "coin-toss" game where every result is 50-50, the answer is zero. This game could be said to have zero complexity. For every actual game the answer is different based on what action is being done. So I think we need to at least have *a rough idea of the distribution of types of action* to say what the "average complexity" of an action resolution is.




My usual example after having discussed the limitations of The World's Simplest RPG, is to introduce a slightly more complex game.   It's rules are these.

1) If the proposition is trivially easy, it always succeeds.
2) If the proposition is impossible, it always fails.
3) If the proposition is doubtful, then flip a coin.  On heads it succeeds, and on tails it fails.

Thus, we are able to distinguish between, "I step across the puddle." and "I leap across the Atlantic Ocean" as propositions.

One thing to note about this slightly more advanced game is that I'm actually explicitly stating something that isn't always stated in the rules of an RPG, but which pretty much all of them have in common - namely, that by fiat we can decide when some proposition fail and some succeed.  Your very rough idea of complexity runs into the problem that the parameters you need to consider when resolving an action include those that aren't stated explicitly by the proposition->fortune->resolution rules, which is in this RPG only Rule #3.

Is the factor "doubtful" actually complexity 1?

We typically don't think of metarules like Rule #1 and Rule #2 as being part of the rules or part of the proposition->resolution cycle, because they skip over the fortune mechanic.   Still, a huge number of considerations often go into deciding whether to make a fortune check at all,  and these metarules by virtue of not usually being formalized will differ between tables.   A good example would be to query people who play variants of D&D 3.X as to what the minimum DC that they commonly will make a skill test at.   My impression is that the vast majority of tables do not test (regularly) actions that have a DC less than 10, whereas I suspect you'll find some tables that commonly make tests as low as DC 5 or DC 0.   The first set of tables are probably resolving the DC's under 10 by fiat in some fashion.

And further, back on me harping about how none of my examples have actually defined what an RPG is or how to play one, the above rules set does not specify _who_ gets to decide when a proposition is easy or impossible.  But it's a reasonable assumption that most people reading the above rules assumed the presence of a GM in the form of a referee, something which The World's Simplest RPG does not technically need, and which this game does not specify but which is common to most RPGs.  However, for the purposes of complexity, the additional step of needing to vote on whether or not a proposition is easy or impossible would in practice make the game feel more complex even if the number of factors in the fortune mechanic (heads or tails, no modifiers) were the same.


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## GMMichael (Mar 29, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Is the factor "doubtful" actually complexity 1?



Yes, if the GM simply says "no" after a tails, and "yes" after a heads.



GrahamWills said:


> With the mathematical definition of complexity in mind, our base criterion is: *How many parameters (powers, stats, number, existence of feats, etc.) do I need to consider when resolving an action?*



Allow me to clean this up a little bit, for the argument's purpose.  The question(s) should be:

*How many parameters (powers, stats, number, existence of feats, etc.) do I need to consider to gain my desired outcome?*
or
*How many parameters (powers, stats, number, existence of feats, etc.) do I need to consider to cause damage?*

I'm assuming a player's perspective on this, since players consider powers, stats, feats, etc.  (GMs consider story.)  Since "resolve an action" isn't something that players typically do, unless the game involves some sharing of GM duties or is GM-free, you can consider parameters based on what the GM could say (former question), or what the rules could say (latter question).  I hope it's fairly obvious that, once you include GM persuasion in the question, it's pointless to discuss how complex the former question is.  

So we're left with: how do I cause damage (or similar rules-only question).  _Now_ you can look at the complexity of the action, because your typical rules will explicitly state "if you do X, the target takes Y damage."...and Celebrim can't step in and complicate things with questions of "easy" and "impossible"...


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## Umbran (Mar 29, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> Is the factor "doubtful" actually complexity 1?




Probably, yeah.



> We typically don't think of metarules like Rule #1 and Rule #2 as being part of the rules or part of the proposition->resolution cycle, because they skip over the fortune mechanic.   Still, a huge number of considerations often go into deciding whether to make a fortune check at all,  and these metarules by virtue of not usually being formalized will differ between tables.




Yes, but it follows that, since these factors are in existence for most games, they are a "background" of complexity that will be roughly even across games.  These decisions probably aren't more complicated to make in D&D than they are in, say, Call of Cthulhu.  There will occasionally be a game (like, say, Nobilis) where the metagame rules take a bit more thought (and are so more complicated).  



> A good example would be to query people who play variants of D&D 3.X as to what the minimum DC that they commonly will make a skill test at.   My impression is that the vast majority of tables do not test (regularly) actions that have a DC less than 10, whereas I suspect you'll find some tables that commonly make tests as low as DC 5 or DC 0.   The first set of tables are probably resolving the DC's under 10 by fiat in some fashion.




Yep.  For me, again, the complexity is relevant for two reasons - 1) the time it takes to resolve events, and 2) the mental gymnastics required to get through resolution.  As these go up, the number of players happy with the system will drop.

Resolving the meta-rules questions is typically done lightning fast, and typically requires little mental gymnastics on the part of the player, right? So, they don't effectively add to the issues that complexity raises in play, and should be ignored for these purposes.

Unless you are spending several minutes resolving whether or not the GM should just fiat the result, that is.  Then they should be totally part of the discussion.


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## Celebrim (Mar 29, 2019)

DMMike said:


> Yes, if the GM simply says "no" after a tails, and "yes" after a heads.




I think you are missing my point.  In the above system, how complex are the factors that go into decided whether this is case #1, #2, or #3?   How many parameters go into deciding whether an action is easy, impossible, or doubtful?   Like say, the character proposes something like, "I attempt to kick open the door." or "I attempt to bash open the door with my fists."   Depends on the qualities of the door and the qualities of the fists.  

Back in the old days, these often became table arguments over "realism", as in, if this proposition could be made in "the real world" what would happen?   And that happened precisely because so much of the system was built on basically DM fiat, that in practice worked a lot like the hypothetical "simple" RPG above.

What I'm trying to get at is that the shortness of the rules isn't always a good judge of their complexity and that fiat is actually a very high complexity feature of a rules set.


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## Celebrim (Mar 29, 2019)

Umbran said:


> Unless you are spending several minutes resolving whether or not the GM should just fiat the result, that is.  Then they should be totally part of the discussion.




That's precisely what I'm getting at. 

As a GM, whenever the rules for resolving some doubtful proposition don't exist, that for me creates a massive complexity issue.  A complex procedure is to me less complex than no procedure.  When a proposition is made that no existing procedure covers, then for me it's like having an exception thrown in the code that has to be handled gracefully.  I have to stop and decide how it should be handled.  Should I just let it work (say, "Yes")?  Should I just let it fail (say, "No")?  Should I just flip a coin (In D20 this is usually roll a D20 and add a some bonus, on a 15+ you did it)?  Or, do we need some more complex procedure in order to be fair about things?  What are the long term implications for the game of setting this resolution methodology as precedent?  Am I risking creating an absurdity?  Am I risking unbalancing the game?  Am I risking stealing spotlight from a player?  If I extend the methodology to the NPCs, will it rob the players of agency?   Is this going to derail the fun or enhance it?  There are a huge amount of things that normally need to be considered.

It's crazy the sort of questions that come up in games once players start doing things like (for example) deforming the terrain.  Propositions come up like, "I'm going to spend an hour chopping on this wall with my magic axe to see how much progress I make." which not only involve questions of endurance and durability but sound production, or questions like, "I'm going to cast 'rock to mud' on the stone outcropping, does this cause the whole outcropping to collapse?" which involves figuring out just how the spell works, how finely the caster can control its shape, what portion of the rock face becomes mud, what happens to that mud, and figuring out whether the resulting damage is enough that the rock can no longer support its own weight.  Or you get into questions in a game like Call of Cthulhu were someone says, "My character is to going to run to the nearest town, how long does it take me to do this?", which involve questions of what is a realistic pace for a person to cover over a long distance and what level of athleticism does the character's stats translate to and to what extent the characters current physical condition should be taken into account.  And if you don't get this at least close to right, or if your answers don't match what the player is expecting, then you have to be able to justify your answers.

I suppose you could say I'm over complicating questions like these, in that I could as a GM answer the question with just, "What do I want to happen?", but I'm not the sort of person or the sort of GM that usually knows what I want to have happen, and that question for me is no more trivial than the rest of them (and probably, since it is me, equivalent to the rest of them).

These sort of "game stoppers" are annoying - like when the PC's ask for the name of an NPC you've not bothered to name or otherwise ask for details you've not bothered to construct.  Winging it for me is a high complexity situation - much higher complexity than consulting a table or looking up a rule.   Even things like, "Rule of Cool" are fairly high complexity, because now you have this subjective thing where the player might think it is cool, but other players at the table might not, and you might be ambivalent, and you are trying to decide, "Hmmm... is that cool.".  Really what is going on is a sort of table negotiation, and the more players you have and the more varied their tastes the more complex that negotiation actually is.   Sure, it might be obvious some of the time that everyone thinks its cool and you are all, "I'm happy to say "yes" to that." but in practice that rule gets really complex.  Then like the second time it happens, is it cooler or less cool, and ect.  

What I find is that the less "game stoppers" come up, the less complex the rules seem to me.  I'd much rather have a game system where when unusual propositions happen, a subsystem exists to handle them, so that at most what you are asked to do is flip to the right page and play a little mini-game to resolve them (and ideally, you the GM already know those rules and simply run the minigame quickly).  A system that has a lot of these minigames is less complex for me in actual practice than one that has none, because I'm never asked to make up the rules for said minigame or consider all the implications of a ruling on the fly.  It might happen that we eventually notice problems in the minigame if we use the rules frequently, and that's a problem, but that's still likely to happen if I smithed out a ruling on the fly (and perhaps more likely to happen).


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## lowkey13 (Mar 29, 2019)

*Deleted by user*


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## Celebrim (Mar 29, 2019)

lowkey13 said:


> "A Constitution, to contain an accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit, and of all the means by which they may be carried into execution, would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind. It would probably never be understood by the public. Its nature, therefore, requires that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves."
> 
> _McCulloch v. Maryland_, 4 Wheat. 159, 200 (1819) (Marshall, J.).
> 
> The issue of complexity, when it comes to rules written (and interpreted) has been often debated and the issues are always the same regardless of whether it is the 19th century or the 21st.




The relationship between "rules" and written law and "rulings" and common law is something I've thought about before.

I've always been a critic of the phrase "rulings not rules" because ultimately both seemed to me to be much the same thing - regardless of whether the law is derived from a Constitution or a body of common law, it's still going to be law and fodder therefore for lawyers.

I've never been a lawyer, but it seems to me that the great difficulty in being a lawyer always come from the common law, which in any legal system soon vastly outweighs the written law both in its volume and its influence over how a case is adjudicated.   I've read the written law and it's often struck me how the written law is just as badly written as RPG rules, and often much more so, so that it doesn't actually address the question or provide the answers you'd want to have in practice.

I don't think it is possible to write law or rules that are so complete that no common law arises from the interpretation of them.  But I think it is possible to write law or rules to varying degrees of quality so that on the whole, the situation is more ruled by the law than fiat and almost everyone reading the rules has some close sense regarding what the laws say and how they'll work in practice.

I likewise think that there is a more or less ideal state where the rules are short enough to be comprehensible and yet comprehensive enough that they seldom give rise to the need for rulings touching on things that the rules do not cover adequately.   

My suspicion is that that ideal state is for a rather large body of written rules, both by practical experience (trying to apply different rules set) and theoretically in that I think that the complexity of a rules set which involves simple operations tends to grow at a less than linear rate.   That is to say, I tend to think that doubling the page count less than doubles the complexity - at least for certain types of writing (the sort I prefer).

In fact, I think you can increase complexity by shortening the rules.  For example, consider the following variant:

1) If the proposition is trivially easy, it always succeeds.
2) If the proposition is impossible, it always fails.
3) If the proposition is doubtful, then the GM decides the outcome.

For most traditional RPGs, since the GM is the sole authority on resolving propositions, so this reduces to a game with only the following rule:

1) The GM decides the outcome of propositions.

This is in fact a game which contains only the rule frequently referred to as "Rule Zero".  Despite having the same number of rules as "The World's Simplest RPG", the complexity of "The World's Simplest RPG" defined by the number of factors that touch on the resolution is zero.  While the complexity of game based solely on "Rule Zero" has a complexity that approaches infinity.  Since the "Rule Zero" game is the only rule in a Braunstein, I see the entire history of RPG rule development as an attempt to _reduce_ the complexity of the rules compared to that of a Braunstein.


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## lowkey13 (Mar 29, 2019)

*Deleted by user*


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## Celebrim (Mar 29, 2019)

lowkey13 said:


> Tell that to Napoleon!




I can really sympathize with Napoleon.  As megalomaniac dictators go, he was one of the least despicable, and in particular I share his distrust of leaving legislative power in the hands of judges. 

But, I also recognize that no matter what you do, you end up with a body of rulings and some person tasked with interpretation where the law is silent.



> Just look at something as simple as, well, (American) Football.




There is nothing simple about American football.  By contrast, consider the laws of Association Football, which are simple (outside of the description of what footwear you can wear) but which are mostly subjective regarding what constitutes a foul.

I agree with you that there are always tradeoffs.



> The trouble with your assertion (doubling less than doubles complexity) is that it doesn't take into account how different provisions interact with each other. Unfortunately, most rules you add tend to interact with other rules, and then you have rules that specifically change, modify, and otherwise alter the impact of already-extant rules. So IME doubling the length of something more than doubles complexity- first, because of the actual increase, and second, because it becomes more difficult for someone to fully understand all of it.




Depends on how you do it.  I write code for a living and it's certainly possible to write code that increases in complexity at a greater than linear rate, but if you do that when working for me you probably ought to polish your resume.   There are ideas in code like "separation of concerns" and "separation of layers" and "encapsulation" that are designed to prevent complexity from increasing at a greater than linear rate.   Now, writing code isn't exactly like writing game rules, and is even less like writing law, but there is some overlap between writing good code and writing good rules. 

For example, somewhere around here I defined an RPG, and I defined it in such a way that the increase in complexity is equivalent to the search time of a list stored in a B-Tree.   That is to say, a set of rules to handle an evasion/pursuit mini-game don't necessarily have to add complexity to a combat mini-game or to a diplomatic mini-game.  

If you look at rules sets that do this badly, 1e AD&D does have a bunch of separate systems for handling things, but the rules in them are scattered out in no obvious order, sometimes contradictory, and often have emergent properties that aren't clear until you attempt to collect them together into a coherent form.  The AD&D rules for covering surprise and initiative are extraordinarily complex and contain huge numbers of exceptions and caveats.  

An example of how you end up creating exception based systems that are complex when you were meaning to create something simple are absolute rules.  As example, simple sounding rule like, "X always goes last.", becomes an immediate problem with X faces X.  Or you might have a rule, "X can't be lifted." which runs into a problem when elsewhere in the rules it says, "Y can lift anything." D&D rules in general contain too many absolutes intended to be simple but which become complex in application.  Immunities often end up with situations like, "X is immune to Y.", followed by a rule elsewhere the creates an exception, "Y works even if something is immune to it."   Minimizing these things for me tends to create fewer error handling moments, so I tend to rewrite absolute rules as much as possible into quantifiable rules.  

On the other extreme, the Mouse Guard rules define a single almost all encompassing game intended to cover absolutely all situations that could occur, and involves less than immediately translucent math (if I have 11 dice, what is the odds of at least 4 successes?), two different systems for resolving any question to choose from (single roll or combat, as in theory any thing from baking a cake to negotiation could be a combat), a system where every roll could have like 11 different factors modifying the roll in 4 separate non-equivalent ways (exploding dice, additional dice, altered difficulty, additional successes either automatically or if the roll succeeds), where the RAW guidelines for setting DC generally involve multiple factors that set all DC's too high for success to be possible under the same rules, and where despite all this complexity the rules provide absolutely no guidance regarding the stakes of the roll and to the extent that they do the largely leave the resolution up to a complex fiat based open ended table negotiation between the parties involved.  It is possibly the single most complex rule set for adjudication of propositions I've encountered - in many ways more complex than something like RoleMaster - and yet at the same time it seems to have no intention of simulating anything.  And to a large extent, it manages have the same problem of remote side effects that AD&D 1e has, for example a monster's tool might be describe as having the same effect as a sword, axe, or spear, but that requires you to look up sword axe or spear, only to discover that they have an effect like "+1s on a successful attack" which would have cost nothing to write instead of "As axe" especially considering the adjacent monster might well have a weapon that says "+1s on a successful attack".   Why not be both consistent and clear?  



> To give you an easy example from RL- the more trust there is between two parties, the easier it is to draft a short document (settlement, lease, contract, etc.). The less trust, the longer it becomes as a general rule (because of the need to account for eventualities, and additional language in case it goes to litigation).*
> 
> I think this applies to a lot of things; if you have believe that there will be a good-faith interpretation, you're less worried about the need to constrain the adjudicator and the other parties; OTOH, if you are worried .... this might apply to RPGs, too.




I think it does, but as it applies to my game, even if all my players trust me, the problem of "good-faith interpretation" still applies because for me at least, there is a contract I feel I must uphold with myself, concerning my duty toward the players.   So when asked to make a ruling, even if I know my players will accept whatever ruling I give, it's still no less agonizing because I still question my own judgment.  Or, to put it bluntly, I want to give the right answer and I have little trust in myself to know immediately what the right answer is.  For this reason, I'd rather outline the contract I intend to uphold after due consideration of the problem before the problem is encountered.  

Like Napoleon, I'm an megalomaniac autocrat that yet wants to establish the rule of law in a fair and translucent manner, so that justice is served and the strong do not oppress the weak.


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## MichaelSomething (Mar 30, 2019)

pemerton said:


> Nothing wrong with being a cricket hater! But out of curiosity, are you from a cricket-playing culture, or looking at it as a horrified outsider? (And apologies if that dichotomy is too simplistic.)




I just picked cricket out of the blue because I think people here aren't familiar with it.  I really wanted to bring up how rulings and rules can be complex in different ways and that some people may prefer one over the other.


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## pemerton (Mar 30, 2019)

As a matter of empirical fact - the claim that "common law" is the source of complexity in a legal system, compared to written law, is not true in the case of Australia, at least in the opinoin of most superior court judges. Statutory interpretation is where the intellectual action is both in argument and in adjudication.


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## LostSoul (Mar 30, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> The relationship between "rules" and written law and "rulings" and common law is something I've thought about before.
> 
> I've always been a critic of the phrase "rulings not rules" because ultimately both seemed to me to be much the same thing - regardless of whether the law is derived from a Constitution or a body of common law, it's still going to be law and fodder therefore for lawyers.




I've found that, with written rules, players focus on the text; with rulings, players focus on the game world.


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## GMMichael (Mar 30, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> What I'm trying to get at is that the shortness of the rules isn't always a good judge of their complexity and that fiat is actually a very high complexity feature of a rules set.



Fair, but [MENTION=75787]GrahamWills[/MENTION] used a good starting point, because the coin-flip RPG is literally the simplest RPG possible, given my stipulation that GM "resolution" is removed and replaced with GM permission-or-denial.  [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] explained properly that GM fiat will be a feature of any(?) role-playing game, so my question is: can having more rules actually simplify a game, by virtue of limiting Rule Zero?

For something we can wrap our hands around (and strangle): I opened up my copy of the D&D Rules Compendium.  There are over 50 types of actions listed, divided into 5 (or so) categories.  Which, upon reflection, makes me think that D&D 3.5 is actually a rules-heavy game, since that's just the tip of the iceberg.


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## Ratskinner (Mar 31, 2019)

DMMike said:


> Fair, but [MENTION=75787]GrahamWills[/MENTION] used a good starting point, because the coin-flip RPG is literally the simplest RPG possible, given my stipulation that GM "resolution" is removed and replaced with GM permission-or-denial.  [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] explained properly that GM fiat will be a feature of any(?) role-playing game, so my question is: can having more rules actually simplify a game, by virtue of limiting Rule Zero?




..there are games that claim to rpgs and have no GM. Capes, in particular, is one that I think is imminently suitable to this discussion. Capes is super-simple in play, although hard to describe.


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## Zhaleskra (Apr 1, 2019)

In my non-experience, "GMless" games tend to be "whoever's the loudest is the GM" games.


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## steenan (Apr 1, 2019)

That's definitely not the case with Capes. The flow of play in Capes is very structured. It's clear who makes each decision, who narrates each part and what exactly is resolved by dice. 

What is, in traditional games, the responsibility of GM, in Capes is not only distributed between players but also moves from one player to another during play. Each player in turn sets a scene. Within a scene, each player may use their action to define a stake that must be resolved and it's typically other players who select sides on given issue (which allows them to narrate its resolution). It's impossible to be a "backseat GM" without clearly violating the rules of the game.


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## Celebrim (Apr 1, 2019)

Zhaleskra said:


> In my non-experience, "GMless" games tend to be "whoever's the loudest is the GM" games.




True of cooperative games in general, but most modern games that are gmless will have some sort of narrative token that is passed between players, which grants ownership of the narrative to whomever holds it.

While this can be overruled in dysfunctional groups where one of the players bullies the other participants into always doing things his way, the same is even true of games with GMs.


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## Ratskinner (Apr 2, 2019)

steenan said:


> That's definitely not the case with Capes. The flow of play in Capes is very structured. It's clear who makes each decision, who narrates each part and what exactly is resolved by dice.
> 
> What is, in traditional games, the responsibility of GM, in Capes is not only distributed between players but also moves from one player to another during play. Each player in turn sets a scene. Within a scene, each player may use their action to define a stake that must be resolved and it's typically other players who select sides on given issue (which allows them to narrate its resolution). It's impossible to be a "backseat GM" without clearly violating the rules of the game.




Capes is near-miraculous, IMO. Totally changed my perspective on what story/role-playing games could be:
clearly-structured Conflict Resolution, insanely fast character creation including drives, as well as the power and speed of completely abandoning Simulationism. I've often wished for a "Second edition" that had the rules more clearly explained. OTOH, the guided playthrough is almost more helpful than the rules for giving you a grip on how to play.


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## DrunkonDuty (Apr 2, 2019)

I like complexity when it adds something that I enjoy to the game. And since I'm not (very) silly I avoid those games that add complexity that I don't get enjoyment out of.

I prefer complexity when it is modular, that is when complexity comes as sub-systems that can be added or removed from play as desired. This allows players to engage with it as they see fit.

For example: I liked the old 3.X Undead Turning subsystem. Was it it elegant? God no. It took time and effort to check up tables every time it got used. It's results were either too effective or not effective at all.

In 3rd Ed. Legend of the 5 Rings I really enjoy the dueling mechanic. Is it simple?  No. No it is not. It is complicated, it requires learning a whole new sub-system.  But I would say the outcomes were worth the complexity.

What I like about them is that they are both mini-games that give me, as a player, something. 

I think the L5R dueling is the better mini-game of the two. The stakes rise the longer the duel goes on and players have a fair amount of agency in deciding how things will turn out. (Do I spend Void now to assess my opponent's stats? Save it to increase my chances of focusing successfully, and thereby have more chance of getting the first shot in? Or use it to do more damage come the actual attack roll?) It gives good drama in return for the complexity. Also, genre appropriate drama: Two samurai in the misty dawn, standing a sword's length apart, staring at one another, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Gold.

The 3.X turning sub-system gives comedy. It's one of those old, gonzo sort of game constructs, that I am generally against, in which random crap happens. (I have no idea why I like the gonzo style here but hate in most other places. I just do.)

Obviously not everyone will agree with me on these two sub-systems. But if they are modular sub-systems then most players don't need to worry about understanding them. And if I like them then I'm going to end up with a bit of system mastery over them and be able to get through the mechanics of it quickly, so I won't bore the other players too much.

When complexity gets in the way for me is when it's a part of the core mechanics. When you must engage with a complicated mechanic to be playing the game at all then I feel it is bad complexity. Exalted comes to mind here. (Of course what is complicated to one person is not necessarily complicated to another. But if a game wants wide appeal it has to consider a wide range of people and they should aim to simpler if they want broad appeal. Also, Exalted is _very _complicated.)

This is why I like HERO system. At it's core conflict is resolved with: Roll to hit, roll damage, subtract defenses from damage, apply result.

Want to punch someone? Roll to hit, roll damage, subtract defenses from damage, apply result.
Want to Mind Control someone? Roll to hit, roll damage, subtract defenses from damage, apply result.
Turn someone into a newt? Roll to hit, roll damage, subtract defenses from damage, apply result.
Drain their strength? Roll to hit, roll damage, subtract defenses from damage, apply result.
Grapple someone?  Roll to hit. (Damage is optional.)

Of course there are distinct sub-systems for some things.
An attack that blinds the target, like a flash-bang, has the same basic method BUT you count the damage dice differently. 
Killing attacks, that is, attacks in which you are using lethal weapons, also count the damage dice differently. (This seems odd until you remember the system came out of super heroes genre, where attacking to kill was the unusual choice.)
And famously, character design. If you're doing up a super hero, you better like character design. (The equivalent of a level 1 DnD character is actually pretty easy.)

But these are modular elements and can be ignored, or minimised in one's experience of the game.

D20 has, at its core, a very simple mechanic. Roll and add your bonus. (If it's an attack and you hit, roll damage.) Higherer is betterer. I mean, how good is that?

Yes, D20 has a lot more complexity that can be added. Character design isn't simple. The magic system isn't simple (and in many places just downright screwed up.) But again, these are modular sub-systems and can be avoided by players who want to avoid them.

So no, I don't think all complexity is bad. Hell, even Exalted is perfectly fine if that's what you want.

The real trick is getting your group to all agree on a given level of complexity that they want for their game. Now that's complicated.


I have just noticed (while writing up this post) that 4th ed L5R has simplified the duel mechanic. Gone are the rising stakes of each player focusing in turn, with increasing target numbers, waiting to see who will be the first to blink. <sad face> It's now a three turn, one roll per character per turn, thing. Much less drama, in my opinion. But it is simpler.


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## Samloyal23 (Apr 2, 2019)

A real simple example of how a lack of complexity can be annoying. I was in a discussion on Facebook about a way to use ball bearings to add damage to a spell attack in a 5E D&D game. Someone had the allegedly bright idea of animating the ball bearings and said since they would do 1d4 + 4 hp of damage because they are size Tiny. I said that is ridiculous, a ball bearing is the size of a marble, less than an inch on a side, and would not meet the minimum size for Tiny. Come to find out, the smaller sizes like Delicate and Fine had been skipped in the new rules. Why? No idea. But now a rolling marble can do up to 8 hp of damage.


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## Sword of Spirit (Apr 2, 2019)

The thought comes to me that what people mostly want is _efficiency_. The rules can be intricate and complex as long as they are giving you what you want to get out of them in an efficient manner. Which of course generally means that the more complex the rules are the more you need to be getting out of them.

Even simple rules are unsatisfying when they are inefficient at giving you what you want (including failing to do so altogether). As simple as the coin-flip game is, the reason most of us have no interest in it is that it manages to avoid efficiently giving us what we're looking for in a role-playing system.

This is kind of a conceptual breakthrough for me (though it's obvious in hindsight) and now I'm going to try to remember to periodically re-check my designs for efficiency.


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## pemerton (Apr 2, 2019)

What are the rules of an RPG for? What function are they expected to perform, as far as the play of the game is concerned?

I think Vincent Baker's answer from 2003 is as good as any:

Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players _and_ GMs, if you've even got such things) have to understand and assent to it. When you're roleplaying, what you're doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they're actually true or not. . . .

So look, you! Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.​
Baker even gives a nice little illustration that flags possible degrees of complexity:

So you're sitting at the table and one player says, "[let's imagine that] an orc jumps out of the underbrush!"

What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush?

1. Sometimes, not much at all. The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment, and everybody else just incorporates it smoothly into their imaginary picture of the situation. "An orc! Yikes! Battlestations!" This is how it usually is for participants with high ownership of whatever they're talking about: GMs describing the weather or the noncombat actions of NPCs, players saying what their characters are wearing or thinking.

2. Sometimes, a little bit more. "Really? An orc?" "Yeppers." "Huh, an orc. Well, okay." Sometimes the suggesting participant has to defend the suggestion: "Really, an orc this far into Elfland?" "Yeah, cuz this thing about her tribe..." "Okay, I guess that makes sense."

3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" The thing to notice here is that the mechanics serve the exact same purpose as the explanation about this thing about her tribe in point 2, which is to establish your credibility wrt the orc in question.

4. And sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing. Wave a stick in a game store and every game you knock of the shelves will have a combat system that works like this.​
How complex should the rules be? As complex as is needed to establish credibility, resolve the questions at issue, and perhaps do any desired modelling on the way through.


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## DMZ2112 (Apr 2, 2019)

Sword of Spirit said:


> The thought comes to me that what people mostly want is _efficiency_. The rules can be intricate and complex as long as they are giving you what you want to get out of them in an efficient manner. Which of course generally means that the more complex the rules are the more you need to be getting out of them.




And if you're looking for a great example, I think FFG's WH40KRP games are a wonderful place to start.  I recently restarted a PbP game of _Deathwatch_, and everyone, myself included, was dreading relearning what seemed like a cyclopean wall of rules.  But once we got started, we were all struck by how smoothly we slipped back into play.  

When a system works, it works.  I think there's a strong predisposition to mistrust when it comes to complex systems, because so many of them originate in an era when efficiency was an underappreciated feature of a game.

As for the original question, I blame shortened attention spans.  That's not a generation gap thing -- I know my attention span has shortened in the last 20 years.  Everything is easier now.  If we have to work for something, we'd better really want it.


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## The Crimson Binome (Apr 2, 2019)

Samloyal23 said:


> A real simple example of how a lack of complexity can be annoying. I was in a discussion on Facebook about a way to use ball bearings to add damage to a spell attack in a 5E D&D game. Someone had the allegedly bright idea of animating the ball bearings and said since they would do 1d4 + 4 hp of damage because they are size Tiny. I said that is ridiculous, a ball bearing is the size of a marble, less than an inch on a side, and would not meet the minimum size for Tiny. Come to find out, the smaller sizes like Delicate and Fine had been skipped in the new rules. Why? No idea. But now a rolling marble can do up to 8 hp of damage.



I'm pretty sure that's supposed to fall under DM discretion. The DM is expected to say that something much smaller than a house cat is too small to be animated with the stats of a Tiny object. Fifth Edition is intentionally written to support such rulings.

Codifying stats for things that should be irrelevant is one of the areas where 3E went overboard with its complexity.


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## Celebrim (Apr 3, 2019)

Sword of Spirit said:


> The thought comes to me that what people mostly want is _efficiency_.




At several points in this thread, conversation has been stuck for the need of a good word.  I think _efficiency_ is a good word.


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## ParanoydStyle (Apr 3, 2019)

Okay, here's some real talk from a professional game developer and publisher. As I have a tendency to, I'm gonna speak directly to the OP.



> Maybe I am wrong but I have the impression that for some time now (a decade at least) there has been an ever increasing dislike for complexity and calls for ever simpler "rules light" systems.




You aren't wrong, and it's closer to two decades.



> D&D 5E is already much simpler than previous editions like 3E and 2E, yet people still look for even lighter systems up to a point that for large parts of the you are freeforming with no mechanics at all.




You are mischaracterizing "rules-lite" and "story games". Most of them have BAD mechanics. Others, like Fiasco, aren't RPGs at all (Fiasco is an "exquisite corpse" or "spanking yoda" game with dice, it shares more DNA with Apples to Apples than Dungeons & Dragons). To be clear, I'm not biased against this genre. My own _Anathema_ is a storygame of Forge vintage. My own _Dicepunk System_ is something I often advertise as rules-lite (although it's more like rules-medium, it IS substantially simpler than D&D 5E). 



> Have people grown up, gotten jobs and dont have time/interest to learn rules anymore?




Well, yes. So you already knew at least part of the answer to your own question, I see.



> Do they feel rules are constricting or that the granularity complex rules add like characters being differently competent in different skills instead of having one modifier for everything doesn't add anything to the game?




No. Here's the truth: *accessibility*. 

"The average tabletop roleplaying gamer has at least close to genius IQ."

If you were to create a graph tracking the truth of that statement, with a timeline from the 1970s until 2019, you would watch the truth plummet continuously. At the same time:

"Virtually no one plays roleplaying games."

If you were to graph the truth of that statement over the same timeline, it would do the same thing.

You see where I'm going with this? The gates are opening. You don't need to be a genius, or even smart, to play RPGs. This "dumbing down" outright frightens some people, even people who don't necessarily understand what it is they're frightened of, and it's very reasonable for them to be frightened. But it makes perfect sense from a marketing perspective. When you reduce the barrier to entry, younger and dumber people can play the game, you get more sales, and you grow the hobby. *5E Worked.*

There is something I like to call "bounce rate", which is the percent chance someone will try their first RPG, decide it's not for them, and never play an RPG again. 5E has the lowest "bounce rate" of any edition of D&D ever. While other factors effect it, primarily GM skill (specifically spotlight management skill, also skill at creating a welcoming atmosphere), the most important thing to understand is that bounce rate is directly related to complexity. The people who make D&D want an edition of D&D that doesn't scare people away with too many rules.

*BUT THAT IS NOT ALL* 

See, while I would hope we all want to grow the hobby, I personally don't have a financial stake in how many D&D books sell, and I prefer to play with very smart people. Right now, I am running D&D 5E because it's what everyone is playing but if I could get the same turnout for 3.5E I would do so in a heartbeat. In a sense I was just born a little too late, or maybe got into the hobby a little too late. It would have been awesome to be part of Living Greyhawk...but I digress.

So why do I care about rules not being too complex?

*Speed of play.*

As an example, here is a complexity problem that both D&D 3.5 had that D&D 5E has improved upon. In D&D 3.5 every single spell is a special snowflake which totally unique rules all of which are slightly different from every other. There is no consistency to them. And there are a TON of them. Many of them with their own tables. So even if you have the mental capacity to memorize the spells that are commonly used, how many spells can you really memorize that way? Not enough that you don't wind up flipping through the PHB multiple times per session. 5th Edition didn't fix this completely, but it did improve upon it. First off, the number of spells was reduced, while the ability to use higher level spell slots to amplify lower level effects (my favorite examples being _sleep_ and _magic missile_, especially _sleep_) was introduced. Big improvement right there. Secondly, they added at least a degree of consistency. In 3.5 a spell might or might not require a ranged touch attack roll and/or allow for a save and/or care about spell resistance and/or have some orthogonal means of resolution. In 5th Edition, generally, offensive spells either call for a spell attack roll OR allow for a save. Very few spells fall into the "both", "neither", or "other" category. Spell resistance has been stripped down to certain monsters having advantage on saving throws which is simpler and more elegant. When spells do violate these "rules", they're usually well known cases, like again, _sleep_ and _magic missile_. The former effects 5d8 hit points of monsters in the area, starting with the enemy with the lowest hit points. There is no roll to attack, and no save. _Magic missile_ always hits, requiring no attack roll, and allowing for no save, but if there is anything virtually every D&D player from any edition knows about the rules of D&D, it's that that is how _magic missile_ works and has always worked. 

You _can_ shed complexity without shedding granularity. I would argue that 5th has done very well at this.

So, speaking as someone who has done this (and pretty much nothing else) for a living/for a career since 2011...5E is objectively a better game than Pathfinder or 3.5E. But I personally would rather play 3.X than 5E because I know it and love it, even for all its many, many, many flaws. 

Final consideration: *the simpler a game is, the easier it is to balance.*


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## Jonathan Tweet (Apr 3, 2019)

As RPGs become more normalized and popular, one would expect them to become less complex. There's a certain geeky personality type that has a high tolerance for weapon lengths, weapon speed factors, etc. The broader the appeal of the games, the more gamers there will be who don't put up with those sorts of rules. Some people love systems, and for them following detailed rules to achieve a simulation is its own reward. Most people don't feel that way.


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## Jonathan Tweet (Apr 3, 2019)

ParanoydStyle said:


> There is something I like to call "bounce rate", which is the percent chance someone will try their first RPG, decide it's not for them, and never play an RPG again. 5E has the lowest "bounce rate" of any edition of D&D ever.




Yes. And as for 3.5 spells, they were special snowflakes even after our work to standardize spell descriptions that came to us from 2E.


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## ParanoydStyle (Apr 3, 2019)

Wow am I ever mortified to have prefaced my rant with "okay, here's some real talk from a professional game developer and publisher" and having my rant followed by Jonathan )ING) Tweet. I never realized there was such a thing as a tough act to precede!

Edit: new forum rule Jonathan Tweet can post as many times consecutively as he wants.



Jonathan Tweet said:


> Yes. And as for 3.5 spells, they were special snowflakes even after our work to standardize spell descriptions that came to us from 2E.




Oh, I imagine (I sometimes forget the sheer amount of content 2E had because I was 14 in 2000 when 3E came out). As far as I know, your team were the guys who got rid of THAC0, though and for that alone you are *golden*. IMO, the death of THAC0 was the most important single step ever made towards improving the playability of _Dungeons & Dragons_​. Seriously you made my favorite edition of D&D, it is surreal just to be talking to you.


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## Zardnaar (Apr 4, 2019)

Jonathan Tweet said:


> Yes. And as for 3.5 spells, they were special snowflakes even after our work to standardize spell descriptions that came to us from 2E.




Mind me asking about design decision s to power up 2E spells going to 3.0? We played 2E again in 2012 and noticed to lower power level on the spells straight away.  Similar things on saving throws in 2E the got better, technically true in 3.0 in practice saves got worse. A good save you could make 95% of the time, 3.0 you could blow a good save 95% of the time with enough min/maxing. Even on a casual level bad saves were terribad relative to 2E.

+1 on the good job on THACO that's really hard for new players now to get. We use BAB in 2E now.


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## Zhaleskra (Apr 4, 2019)

I think the "barrier to entry" idea is on point. At the same time, some of us want that barrier to entry, not to keep new players from gaming but as a form of gate keeping to discourage players whose interest level or playstyle would not be welcome in a group from trying to join that group.


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## Jonathan Tweet (Apr 4, 2019)

ParanoydStyle said:


> Wow am I ever mortified to have prefaced my rant with "okay, here's some real talk from a professional game developer and publisher" and having my rant followed by Jonathan )ING) Tweet.




You were telling it like it is.


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## Jonathan Tweet (Apr 4, 2019)

Zardnaar said:


> Mind me asking about design decision s to power up 2E spells going to 3.0?




The spells were overwhelming, and we didn't have a great handle on them. We up-gunned lots of spells because there were a few really good spells plus lots of mediocre ones. We did not successfully suppress the best spells (eg, haste).


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## Celebrim (Apr 4, 2019)

Funny to watch the younger professionals fan boying over the older professionals, though I will second [MENTION=6984451]ParanoydStyle[/MENTION]'s comment and say that 3e D&D was and is my favorite RPG game system ever.

D&D spells are in and of themselves what takes a D&D game from more rules medium to rules heavy (though the introduction of feats goes a long way toward that as well).  By page count half of a given players guide will be spells in any edition of the game, and over the long run spells tend to cause the most bloat and the most opportunities for breaking the games balance.

In 1e Haste was really good, but technically had to put up with it aging you by 2 years every time you cast it.  If I had to make any criticism of the work the 3e team did, it was failing to appreciate how many spells in 1e were good, but had horrific side effects to balance them sometimes hidden away in the text of the DMG, or which were good but tactically suppressed because spells like Fireball and Lightning bolt were so over powered in 1e/2e.  I think the team did an excellent job of balancing direct damage, which had been such a go to thing for M-U's in earlier editions, but failed to recognize just how much they were opening up alternatives like save or suck and buffing strategies (particularly around shapechanging spells).  I think it's the sort of thing that would have likely escaped play testing, in part because groups of experienced gamers would have tended to glom onto existing known spells, spell selections, and strategies.  

But what I've learned in going on 40 years of playing RPGs, is that the weakness of an enduring system is often the same as its strengths.   Systems that try to systematize magic or fit it into some other neat box tend to produce colorless magic compared to the esoteric and often weirdness that is each distinctive D&D spell.  They also tend to produce casters that have single knacks and largely stick to just a few big hammers that they use to solve every problem, where as the structure of fire and forget spell slots holding highly distinctive spells tends to force variety on the caster.   Ars Magicka is extremely evocative, but I'm not sure that actually outdoes D&D in terms of capacity for making magic odd.  And to the extent that it does, it would do so through the same sort of bloat that you'd find in a long list of D&D spells, as the abstract mechanics and creative ideas were reified into specific effects.  (I guess while I'm at it, I'll say Ars Magicka is really great work as well.)


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## Zardnaar (Apr 4, 2019)

Jonathan Tweet said:


> The spells were overwhelming, and we didn't have a great handle on them. We up-gunned lots of spells because there were a few really good spells plus lots of mediocre ones. We did not successfully suppress the best spells (eg, haste).




Thanks for the reply. The unified xp tables and faster progression also meant PCs would use the spells.


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## ParanoydStyle (Apr 4, 2019)

> D&D spells are in and of themselves what takes a D&D game from more rules medium to rules heavy (though the introduction of feats goes a long way toward that as well). By page count half of a given players guide will be spells in any edition of the game, and over the long run spells tend to cause the most bloat and the most opportunities for breaking the games balance.




One of the things I like the most about 5E is that "only" around 30% of the PHB (28% actually, by my calculations) is spells. Obviously that's still a HUGE chunk but in 3.5 (and yeah, now that I think about it, any PHB I've ever really looked through) LITERALLY HALF (at least) of the PHB was spells. Collapsing "sleep, sleep harder, and sleep hardest" into one spell called sleep that scales with level was a great move (collapsing vertical spell trees). Collapsing horizontal spell trees (changing six second level spells named after animals into one second level spell called enhance ability) in addition really gave us the most reasonably sized spell section I think we're ever gonna get. 

While I'm singing its praises anyway, 5E feats are implemented so much better than 3.5 feats, which especially after all of the splats came out were just crawling with way too many underwhelming choices and outright trap options (and I don't just mean the ones everyone knows about like toughness) while you would find the occasional diamond while dumpster diving (while there were many, many broken character builds you could make by combining feats that were never meant to be combined, the most obvious 'feat to rule them all' from the core of that edition is probably Improved Initiative, of which the 5E version of is pretty damn good too). Grammar is hard.


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## Zardnaar (Apr 5, 2019)

ParanoydStyle said:


> One of the things I like the most about 5E is that "only" around 30% of the PHB (28% actually, by my calculations) is spells. Obviously that's still a HUGE chunk but in 3.5 (and yeah, now that I think about it, any PHB I've ever really looked through) LITERALLY HALF (at least) of the PHB was spells. Collapsing "sleep, sleep harder, and sleep hardest" into one spell called sleep that scales with level was a great move (collapsing vertical spell trees). Collapsing horizontal spell trees (changing six second level spells named after animals into one second level spell called enhance ability) in addition really gave us the most reasonably sized spell section I think we're ever gonna get.
> 
> While I'm singing its praises anyway, 5E feats are implemented so much better than 3.5 feats, which especially after all of the splats came out were just crawling with way too many underwhelming choices and outright trap options (and I don't just mean the ones everyone knows about like toughness) while you would find the occasional diamond while dumpster diving (while there were many, many broken character builds you could make by combining feats that were never meant to be combined, the most obvious 'feat to rule them all' from the core of that edition is probably Improved Initiative, of which the 5E version of is pretty damn good too). Grammar is hard.




Unless in mistaken feats evolved out if late 2E splat. A modern take on micro feats could be good just need to learn the lessons of 3.x. 

 To get to 5E you kind if needed the hindsight of 3E and 4E. They started designing 1997 iirc.


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## Jonathan Tweet (Apr 5, 2019)

Zardnaar said:


> Thanks for the reply. The unified xp tables and faster progression also meant PCs would use the spells.




Yes, and you didn't have to roll dice to see which spells you knew. Much more accommodating.


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## Zardnaar (Apr 5, 2019)

Jonathan Tweet said:


> Yes, and you didn't have to roll dice to see which spells you knew. Much more accommodating.




I've kind of regressed in some ways. After playing AD&D some of the core mechanics were wonky but the balance and some of the reasons were better than 3E. The more feats, spells, magic items, prestige classes, and combos players can put togather the more things can go wrong and the harder it is for the DM.

 Having to find spells also put a bit more emphasis on the exploration pillar. The old adventures often hid treasure here and there so something like a wand of secret door detection was much more useful than post AD&D (xp for gold etc). 

 I'm probably one of the few who would like a new 3E type game, just not sure if I would want an AD&D 3E or something like 3E but with BECMI level math and some of the complexity toned down and things like feats overhauled. In late 3E (2009 or so) I was plugging a lot of AD&D back into it, then I found it easier to plug parts of 3E into AD&D 2E, less work. 

 Your guys legacy though I think will be the dumping of THAC0, I can use it don't really miss it. Just find I miss a few elements of AD&D here and here but I still break it out on special occasions and I am much more prone to hack it. I also liked the way magic resistance worked in D&D minis which was a nice mix of AD&D and 3E. Basically a static number like 2E but with a d20 roll a'la 3E. 

 I think my ultimate edition of D&D would use a lot of elements of 3E but with an OSR playstyle with BECMI numbers or the 4E half a level thing with the 4E or 5E type action economy. BECMI with a few more options and microfeats would be a close way of describing it. It would be grittier than 5E and with AD&D type magic item creation but use things like Fort/Ref/Wll, microfeats, might even go back to class based XP.


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## Staffan (Apr 5, 2019)

ParanoydStyle said:


> While I'm singing its praises anyway, 5E feats are implemented so much better than 3.5 feats, which especially after all of the splats came out were just crawling with way too many underwhelming choices and outright trap options (and I don't just mean the ones everyone knows about like toughness) while you would find the occasional diamond while dumpster diving (while there were many, many broken character builds you could make by combining feats that were never meant to be combined, the most obvious 'feat to rule them all' from the core of that edition is probably Improved Initiative, of which the 5E version of is pretty damn good too). Grammar is hard.




I think it would have been a cool thing in 3e to have Greater and Lesser feats, where Greater feats would be the ones that have significant game impact and the Lesser ones would be more flavorful. Perhaps you could alternate them  so you'd get Lesser feats at levels 2, 6, 10, and so on and Greater feats at levels 4, 8, 12, etc.

Because there are many feats in 3e that are *cool* and say neat things about your character, but you'd probably be better off with Improved Initiative or Power Attack.


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## Celebrim (Apr 5, 2019)

Staffan said:


> I think it would have been a cool thing in 3e to have Greater and Lesser feats...because there are many feats in 3e that are *cool* and say neat things about your character, but you'd probably be better off with Improved Initiative or Power Attack.




Feats in 3e ended up covering a lot of design space.

The issue I ran into most often is that I wanted feats to work something like spells, where as you took more of them of a particular sort, you start to get more exponential returns on investment.  This is needed to keep non-caster classes in line with caster classes.   Spells have so much impact, that non-casters need a lot of something else to equal out.  Feats and skills are pretty much the only tools in the box.

The "Tactical Feat" design pattern of giving you 3 small benefits with a similar flavor had a big influence on my design work with feats.  I also wanted them to take up much of the design space that PrC's ended up covering, so that you could use feats to say something defining about your character.   So, if you took a feat that required investment in 3 prior feats, that should be equivalent in impact to being able to cast 4th level spells compared to 1st level spells.  You should really get something good, especially when looking at the 4 feats collectively.  

But just as with spells, there is a real trade off on that complexity, and if anything feats are worse than spells in that feats work like long duration buff spells that have ongoing impact on the game.  5e actually took feats more in the direction I was taking 3e feats before 5e came out, and it really made me want to redo much of the work I'd done on feats once the concept was proved and clear.   

But the problem is that in order to support those feats, 5e also greatly limited how many you had access to and even went so far as to make them optional for those that wanted to stay more 'rules medium'.   And want I've also discovered is that players like taking feats and that since I level up pretty slowly, feats need to come early and often if they are really to do anything for you beyond something useful but not particularly cool like "Improved Initiative" or "Power Attack". 

If you have 10 or 20 feats, that give you 3 small situational bonuses each, then pretty soon you have a ton of fiddly things to keep track of.


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## Celebrim (Apr 5, 2019)

Zardnaar said:


> Unless in mistaken feats evolved out if late 2E splat.




I don't really know the history of the Feat, but I'd always assumed the video games Fallout and Fallout II were highly influential on the design of D&D feats, since that was where I first encountered true Feats in my gameplay.


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## Staffan (Apr 5, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> The issue I ran into most often is that I wanted feats to work something like spells, where as you took more of them of a particular sort, you start to get more exponential returns on investment.  This is needed to keep non-caster classes in line with caster classes.   Spells have so much impact, that non-casters need a lot of something else to equal out.  Feats and skills are pretty much the only tools in the box.
> 
> The "Tactical Feat" design pattern of giving you 3 small benefits with a similar flavor had a big influence on my design work with feats.  I also wanted them to take up much of the design space that PrC's ended up covering, so that you could use feats to say something defining about your character.   So, if you took a feat that required investment in 3 prior feats, that should be equivalent in impact to being able to cast 4th level spells compared to 1st level spells.  You should really get something good, especially when looking at the 4 feats collectively.




Have you looked at Iron Heroes, made by some hack named Mearls or something?

Iron Heroes was intended as D&D with little-to-no magic. It had a different set of classes, most of which focused on different ways of fighting (and were also buffed compared to 3e classes, to compensate for not having a Christmas tree of magic stuff). One of the ideas there was "mastery feats".

Essentially, these feats came in a variety of categories, like Power, Finesse, Ranged, Armor, and so on. The feats would be leveled, so you'd have Power Attack 1, Power Attack 2, Power Attack 3, and so on. In order to take a higher-level feat, you needed only the basic feat in that chain, as well as access to that feat level for that feat category. Each class would have different access to feat categories - berserkers would have great access to Fury and Power feats, but suck at Archery feats, for example (I think - I'm writing from memory, and haven't looked at those rules in over 10 years).



> But just as with spells, there is a real trade off on that complexity, and if anything feats are worse than spells in that feats work like long duration buff spells that have ongoing impact on the game.



There are two issues with comparing feats and spells, particularly high-prerequisite feats to high-level spells. One is the issue you bring up - spells are a limited resource in play, while feats are almost always permanent increases. The other is that high-prerequisite feats channel you into a narrow specialization. There's nothing stopping a wizard from learning both _stoneskin_, _scrying_, and _confusion_ as 4th level spells, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a fighter with both Great Cleave, Improved Precise Shot, and Greater Two-Weapon Fighting.



> If you have 10 or 20 feats, that give you 3 small situational bonuses each, then pretty soon you have a ton of fiddly things to keep track of.



My initial comment was mostly off the cuff so one shouldn't put too much weight on the actual numbers in it. I just think 3e would be cooler if strong feats and flavor feats were siloed off from one another somehow.


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## Zardnaar (Apr 6, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> I don't really know the history of the Feat, but I'd always assumed the video games Fallout and Fallout II were highly influential on the design of D&D feats, since that was where I first encountered true Feats in my gameplay.




I'm not 100% sure if the idea of feats came from this but 1989's Complete Fighters Handbook started tinkering with what you could do with weapon proficiencies. This continued in later 2E splat With things like Combat and Tactics and the historical series of books. They were in effect feats or proto feats at the very least. For example the 3.0 TWF/ambidextrous feat tree was more or less lifted as is from the 2E Complete Fighters Handbook. 

 Its another thing I noticed at the time from late 2E to 3.0, fighters kinda sucked relative to the 2E ones. This was due to changes in NWP to skills and optional rules we used such as high intelligence= more NWP (skills in 3.0), and warriors could use them to get extra weapon proficiencies. We had a high level fighter with multiple weapon specialization, and proficient in 3 weapon styles at level 1 as he had a 16 Intelligence or so.


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## GMMichael (Apr 6, 2019)

Zardnaar said:


> then I found it easier to plug parts of 3E into AD&D 2E, less work.



XP for following the Way of the GM.



Staffan said:


> I think it would have been a cool thing in 3e to have Greater and Lesser feats



It would be cool to add _more_ complexity to 3e?  Well, now I know on which side of the "hating complexity" table you sit.



Celebrim said:


> I don't really know the history of the Feat, but I'd always assumed the video games Fallout and Fallout II were highly influential on the design of D&D feats, since that was where I first encountered true Feats in my gameplay.



Wow.  Rockin' my world right here, Celebrim.  The first time I saw Perks was in CoD: Black Ops.  I'm not sure that D&D got feats from perks, but Interplay was definitely a good group from which to gain...inspiration? :: Dr. Evil Face::


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## Jonathan Tweet (Apr 6, 2019)

Feats in 3E derive from Virtues and Flaws in Ars Magica (1987), which derive from advantages and disadvantages in Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip (1980).


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## Staffan (Apr 6, 2019)

DMMike said:


> It would be cool to add _more_ complexity to 3e?  Well, now I know on which side of the "hating complexity" table you sit.




Well, I mostly want to reduce complexity, but I'm thinking this bit might have been worth it. There were many, many flavorful feats in 3e that few people ever took because things like Improved Initiative, Power Attack, and Spell Focus were too shiny.


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## Voadam (Apr 7, 2019)

ParanoydStyle said:


> _Magic missile_ always hits, requiring no attack roll, and allowing for no save, but if there is anything virtually every D&D player from any edition knows about the rules of D&D, it's that that is how _magic missile_ works and has always worked.




That's actually a 1978 change to the way magic missile had worked. 

Holmes Basic in '77 required an attack roll.


			
				Holmes said:
			
		

> Magic Missile — Level 1; Range: 150 feet
> A conjured missile equal to a magic arrow, and it does 1 die roll plus 1 point (2-7) to any creature it strikes. *Roll the missile fire like a long bow arrow (Missile  Fire  Table).*  Higher  level  magic-users fire more than one missile.




In OD&D Greyhawk it did not specifically say.


			
				 OD&D Greyhawk said:
			
		

> Magic Missile: This is a conjured missile equivalent to a magic arrow, and it does full damage (2–7 points) to any creature it strikes. For every five levels the magic-user has attained he may add an additional two missiles when employing this spell, so a 6th-level magic-user may cast three magic missiles at his target, an 11th-level magic-user casts five, and so on. Range 15”.




AD&D 1e PH in 1978 is the first place it explicitly auto hits


			
				1e PH said:
			
		

> Magic Missile (Evocation) Level: 1 Components: V, S Range: 6" + I"/level Duration: Special Saving Throw: None Area of Effect:   One or more Casting Time: 1 segment Saving Throw: None Casting Time: 1 segment creatures in a 10 square foot area Explanation/Description: Use of  the  magic  missile spell creates one or more magical missiles which dart forth from the magic-user's fingertip and *unerringly strike their target.* Each missile does 2 to 5 hit points (d4+ 1) of damage. If the magic-user has multiple missile capability, he or she can have them strike a single target creature or several creatures, as desired. For each level of experience of  the magic-user, the  range of his or her magic missile extends 1" beyond the 6" base range. For every 2 levels of experience, the magic-user gains an additional missile, i.e. 2 at 3rd level, 3 at 5th level, 4 at 7th level, etc.


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## ParanoydStyle (Apr 8, 2019)

Ah, good to know! Rules changes made eight years before I was born are a definite weak spot for me!


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## Greg K (Apr 8, 2019)

Voadam said:


> That's actually a 1978 change to the way magic missile had worked.
> AD&D 1e PH in 1978 is the first place it explicitly auto hits




Back in 3e, there was an online article  on the official D&D website (I think it was by Monte Cook) that provided an optional magic missile variant that returned magic missile to its original rules of requiring an attack roll and then doing 1d6 damage (or was it 1d6+1) upon a hit.  I do seem to recall this 3e variant's attack roll being a ranged touch attack, but I really liked it.


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## Samloyal23 (Apr 11, 2019)

Saelorn said:


> I'm pretty sure that's supposed to fall under DM discretion. The DM is expected to say that something much smaller than a house cat is too small to be animated with the stats of a Tiny object. Fifth Edition is intentionally written to support such rulings.
> 
> Codifying stats for things that should be irrelevant is one of the areas where 3E went overboard with its complexity.




I looked through the SRD online and my copy of the 5E PH, I could not even find an exact definition of "tiny" or any other size category. That is not streamlining, that is just sloppy.


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## Voadam (Apr 11, 2019)

Samloyal23 said:


> I looked through the SRD online and my copy of the 5E PH, I could not even find an exact definition of "tiny" or any other size category. That is not streamlining, that is just sloppy.




5e Monster Manual, page 6.


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## Sword of Spirit (Apr 12, 2019)

There is no description of the actual dimensions of creatures if various sizes categories in 5e, just the space they control in combat (which is similar to the space controlled by 3e monsters).

My examinations of the monsters and animals kead me to believe the dimensions are intended to be similar to 3e, but it's much more fuzzy and takes mass into effect rather than just longest dimension. An elephant for instance is Huge in 5e rather then just Large. They also inconsistently make some things Tiny that would probably be bigger than 2 feet (like a velociraptor that is described as the size of a large turkey).

Recommendation: use 3e scale but be loose and go by impression of size more than specific details.


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## Celebrim (Apr 12, 2019)

Sword of Spirit said:


> Recommendation: use 3e scale but be loose and go by impression of size more than specific details.




3e has two very different scales: the more realistic scale used by 3.0e where monsters can take up rectangular space based on body shape, or the 3.5e scale where all monsters take up perfectly square areas in order to not have to introduce a bunch of complex language describing all the edge cases that can happen when you assume monsters aren't perfect squares.

Thus, horses in 3.0e take up a 5'x10' space, while they take up a 10'x10' space in 3.5e.  Elephants in 3.0e take up a 10'x15' space, while they take up a 15'x15' space in 3.5e.

I prefer the realism and rule on the fly when the edge cases on changing facing turn up.   If you want perfect tactical consistency without a lot of headaches, the 3.5e spacing might work better for you.


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## Sword of Spirit (Apr 12, 2019)

I was more referring to the actual dimensions of the creature in 5e, rather than the combat space they control, since there are rules for the latter but no information on the former.


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## Samloyal23 (Apr 14, 2019)

Sword of Spirit said:


> I was more referring to the actual dimensions of the creature in 5e, rather than the combat space they control, since there are rules for the latter but no information on the former.




This is where "streamlining" becomes "dumbing down"...


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## Celebrim (Apr 15, 2019)

Samloyal23 said:


> This is where "streamlining" becomes "dumbing down"...




I suspect that there is a certain amount of hiding the man behind the curtain as well.  There are reasons to not want players to think about how it works.

The streamlining of monsters to abstract combat space tends to hide the actual size of the monster.  The most egregious case is something like a "large" sized snake in 3.5 or 5e D&D.  The trouble is that a 12' long snake might actually only weigh 15 pounds.   So is the snake large because of its ability to take up space, or medium size because of its reach, or tiny because of its weight?  

By not describing the actual physical dimensions of the monster, you avoid the problem of players or GMs of having a prompt to ask these questions about your system.  5e is very much designed to encourage people to be satisfied with a simplified rule set.  Thinking about it is discouraged compared to having fun.   It's a valid aesthetic choice, and not getting people to think hard about it is a valid design choice, and I wouldn't be surprised if not including real physical measurements was an intentional decision.


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## Sword of Spirit (Apr 15, 2019)

What they really should have done is just given some examples of the size categories to give us some sort of idea of what they are thinking of. Now, of course the Monster Manual is filled with examples, but that requires studying it with that in mind. Having three examples of each size category of monsters with different dimensions (as far as possible, including at least one real world animal in each) would help I think.


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## Samloyal23 (Apr 16, 2019)

Celebrim said:


> I suspect that there is a certain amount of hiding the man behind the curtain as well.  There are reasons to not want players to think about how it works.
> 
> The streamlining of monsters to abstract combat space tends to hide the actual size of the monster.  The most egregious case is something like a "large" sized snake in 3.5 or 5e D&D.  The trouble is that a 12' long snake might actually only weigh 15 pounds.   So is the snake large because of its ability to take up space, or medium size because of its reach, or tiny because of its weight?
> 
> By not describing the actual physical dimensions of the monster, you avoid the problem of players or GMs of having a prompt to ask these questions about your system.  5e is very much designed to encourage people to be satisfied with a simplified rule set.  Thinking about it is discouraged compared to having fun.   It's a valid aesthetic choice, and not getting people to think hard about it is a valid design choice, and I wouldn't be surprised if not including real physical measurements was an intentional decision.




That is what it looks like. I do not like this approach at all, it rubs me wrong. I want to see the gears turn so I know how things work.


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