How Crunchy is Too Crunchy, For You Personally

5e is probably my sweet spot. Enough crunch that the way you build your character matters, but combat doesn't feel like doing your taxes.

Anything more crunchy doesn't really appeal to me. I've never given Pathfinder 2e a try for that reason. It looks like a good game, but I have no interest in a more complex variant of D&D. Less complex is great, which is why I dig Shadowdark. As for 3e/PF1, no disrespect, but you'd have to pay me to play it.

overgeeked said:

I feel the same way, only I want that crunch to be as close to zero as possible. I've played these games for almost 40 years and internalized several editions of D&D along with a dozen other game systems. The players only need to tell me what they want to do and I can either narrate what happens or tell them what to roll, then narrate what happens. We don't need 500-pages of rules getting in the way of that.

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Well, yes we do, if only to stop the exploiters and rules lawyers in their tracks.

Lanefan said:

Well, yes we do, if only to stop the exploiters and rules lawyers in their tracks.

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Why? The referee can do that by saying no. More rules produce more rules lawyers.

overgeeked said:

Why? The referee can do that by saying no. More rules produce more rules lawyers.

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Saying no without a rule to back you up is an open invitation to an argument.

Lanefan said:

Saying no without a rule to back you up is an open invitation to an argument.

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It's not an argument, it's using skilled play to communicate how they manipulated the fiction to achieve a certain result.

Lanefan said:

Saying no without a rule to back you up is an open invitation to an argument.

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Precisely. Players are going have questions for all sorts of situations, and I want coherent answers that follow from the setting and the situation at hand.

Too crunchy, for me, is when the rules allow for players to plan "builds" in advance. Simple as that.

Lanefan said:

Saying no without a rule to back you up is an open invitation to an argument.

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Only if you have disrespectful and argumentative players.

I care more about fun and efficiency. Complexity and/or crunch are entirely irrelevant to those qualifiers.

In a lot of ways, its the difference between hopping into a plane in a Battlefield game, playing DCS with a Keyboard, and playing DCS with a basic HOTAS setup.

All three are ostensibly similiar experiences, as in games about flying a military jet plane. Battlefield exists at the low end of the complexity scale while DCS is at the high end.

Battlefield is efficient with a keyboard as its designed to be easy to play, and its good fun all around.

DCS, despite its complexity and engagement requirements, is also efficient once you learn the plane you're flying and the HOTAS set up you're using. A lot like real flying, its easier than riding a bike, and naturally its a heck of a lot of fun.

DCS with a keyboard however is a nightmare of inefficiency, as being a simulation of real planes with realistic physics neccesitates a control scheme that simply doesn't work through a keyboard. The inefficient controls obscure the fun you can have, and make the complexity of the game all the much worse.

A lot of "crunchy" games fall into that same trap. They're complex, but have a terrible user experience, and the best ones tend to be best when either a computer off-loads some of the inefficiencies or when the participants have groked the system so hard that it stops being an issue.

overgeeked said:

Only if you have disrespectful and argumentative players.

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I'd rather have argumentative players than players without backbones, which is the alternative.

Without rules (and even with them, sometimes) DMs can and inevitably will at some point get it wrong. For a player to be able to point this out, however, there needs to be something - almost always, a rule - to back that player up.