Why the hate for complexity?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.