Rules, too much or too little? YOU DECIDE!

If you've been following some of my posts (Initiative, d20 simplicity, etc.), you might guess how I am torn between a desire for easier, faster game mechanics and more detailed, complex ones. Easier and faster speeds up game play and allows more to get done in the session. More complex and thorough mechanics can detail nearly everything so you know exactly what is going on.

How do you feel about the mechanics and the degree of necessary details or complexity?

EDIT: tried to make this a poll and it took to long.

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lowkey13 said:

I prefer simpler and faster mechanics, now. More time playing (in terms of advancing the game and having fun), less time playing with the fiddly bits.

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Likewise.

I don't need to let the players' eyes gloss over as I lookup some obscure rule about how silken rope reacts with humidity and whether the character is wearing gloves in order to have fun.

I have two separate RPG design projects going on.

One is a crunchy that codifies everything (not just combat and damage, but what a "charm 5" is vs. a "charm 4" so I can have a unified resistance mechanic and such. It uses in-depth initiative for when timing is important, based arund initiative phases with differing chances of coming up (like a Great Dalmuti or Dilbert card game deck) based on your character and the action - though you can have multiple actions happening at once, like recovering from a stab with your rapier, moving, and swinging your main-gauche (parrying dagger). Combat can be tactical, but so can something like trying to destroy someone's reputation in social combat.

I also have a mostly narrative-based system. It makes no difference about the types of challenges (combat, exploration, social, etc.), rather about how important they are to determine the level of detail and time spent. So a fight against a bunch of wolves could be done with a single (team) roll if that's not important to the party, while a negotiation could be a tactical, multi-round endeavor if it is important, with a few gradations in between. Reskinning is rampant.

I realized I could - strike that - SHOULD never combine all of my ideas together, I really had two different feels.

So I'm all for "BOTH".

dnd4vr said:

How do you feel about the mechanics and the degree of necessary details or complexity?

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The real interesting bit is buried in there, looking like an innocuous word, but waiting to trap you - "necessary".

What constitutes a 'necessary detail'? Is how well your particular weapon do against a particular type of armor a "necessary" detail, or is it unnecessary?

Whenever we say a thing is necessary, there's an implicit question - Necessary to do what?

Tell us what you are trying to accomplish, and we can tell you about necessary details to accomplish it. Unfortunately, what we are probably trying to accomplish is "satisfying gameplay" which is totally subjective.

I, personally, don't want huge amounts of complexity in my RPGs. I like them fine elsewhere (I used to play a lot of Advanced Squad Leader, for example), but in RPGs, they grind things to a crawl, and it just isn't as fun. I prefer my RPGs to flow more like an action movie, and that calls for lower-complexity, fast resolving mechanics.

I vote neither!

I find faster rules are often too simply. While complex rules require everyone to be knowledgeable, which rarely happens.
So I prefer something in between. Something easy but not fast, detailed but not complex.

They scratch different itches. There’s a lot of pleasure in carefully crafting a detailed NPC or spaceship or what-have-you. There’s a lot of pleasure in a game moving fast at the table.

Given that no one system can make everyone happy and that there is no such thing as a perfect game, I think 5E has hit a decent balance.

Enough detail to get the job done but not so much that I find myself flipping through pages because I know the average air speed velocity of a laden swallow is written down somewhere. Previous versions seemed to try to give you that detail but it became a never-ending rabbit hole of clarification (i.e. 3.x, Pathfinder).

The other direction is that you have very spelled out abilities like 4E did, which for many people seemed to suck some of the life and creativity out of the game. That and some of the resulting scenarios just weren't logical - a rogue could have a single thrown dagger that hit multiple targets? How? And it wasn't a magical spell? For me it felt very much like a board game with a veneer of RP after a while, and I was a big defender of the system for a long time.

I don't mean what I said as bashing previous editions, I spent many an hour playing them. But let's take stealth and hiding in 5E as an example. I like the vagueness of the rules. It may drive some people a little crazy, but as a DM it gives me a lot of options. Maybe you can sneak up on that guard that's bored and half asleep even though if he looked around he'd notice you. Or maybe the guard really is attentive and just pretending. Or maybe you try to sneak up and step on a stick you didn't notice, so on and so forth. The simple phrase "the DM decides" is fantastic IMHO.

dnd4vr said:

More complex and thorough mechanics can detail nearly everything so you know exactly what is going on.

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The point of mechanics is that they tell us what's going on, and while the amount of detail you want is going to be a matter of preference, the metric which I use for judging systems is in terms of efficiency. If I need to put in twice as much work in order to resolve an action, then I want at least twice as much detail when I'm done with it.

For example, consider an attack roll in D&D. You roll one die, and at the end of it, we know whether or not you hit. That's fairly efficient, in terms of information-conveyed-for-work-performed.

Now consider the damage roll, which follows a successful attack in D&D. You roll anywhere between one and thirty dice, compare that sum to their HP total, and that tells you how badly they were hurt by the attack. The amount of information added, relative to taking the average damage, is very low. It's difficult enough to describe the difference between 8 damage and 9 damage, so it's hard to justify spending (at least) 100% more effort to gain such a minute difference in the description.

On a side note, this is one reason why I refuse to play any game where a successful attack roll can be interpreted as not actually connecting. When you roll a bunch of dice, and the narrative outcome is that you didn't make contact regardless of what the dice show, then the mechanic is sitting at 0% efficiency.

Ideally, an RPG should have a simple framework that the DM can expound upon to the level of detail and complexity to suit the needs of the individual campaign. 5E does a fairly good job of this IMO.