Why the hate for complexity?

[dragoner]

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.

 

[pogre]

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.

 

[Morrus]

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.

 

[Zhaleskra]

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.

 

[Celebrim]

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.

 

[Yaztromo]

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.

 

[5atbu]

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

 

[Umbran]

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.

 

[GMMichael]

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.

 

[Zardnaar]

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.