Why the hate for complexity?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"