The calculations isn't a problem, but amount of things you need to keep in RAM is.
But more importantly, I don't think that excessive crunch actually adds anything to the game, even from simulationist point of view -- I can't say that GURPS Martial Arts is particularly realistic, at least when it comes to MAs I'm familiar with: BJJ and Muay-Thai.
Okay I hear you and agree with you on that first part. I guess we all have very different thresholds for that.
Personally I've always written things down or done pre calculations on my character sheet or cheat sheets as a GM so that I'm just adding two numbers at most. Even at the height of 3.5 I got good at streamlining calculations. But again, that's just me and not at all typical.
The second thing we might just going to have to respectfully disagree on.
While there are some systems where for what you say is probably true, for me at least, it's not the case for all of them. It also goes to what a person thinks is "excessive" crunch.
I used to use a palladium system mash up of TMNT and Other Strangeness, Ninjas and Superspies and Mystic China for a martial arts based game that I ran for a little while. Mostly based less around the crazy Wuxia martial arts and more around the late 70's early 80's Shaw Brothers and Joseph Kuo movies like THE MYSTERY OF CHESSBOXING, SEVEN GRANDMASTERS and SEVEN COMMANDMENTS OF KUNG FU. My own martial arts training has been a little but of Northern Style Kung Fu, some Capoeira but I'm most proficient in Boxing. I'm by no means an expert in ANY of those. Even boxing which is what Im most practiced in.
But for the purpose of running those games I was trying to emulate a genre. The martial arts themselves didn't need to be completely accurate as long as everyone at the table could visualize what they were doing and wanted to do with those martial arts in question. Personally, I've found almost every depiction of boxing in RPG's to be kind of basic. And for anyone who's trained under a trainer who has actually boxed and knows what they're doing? there's a lot of nuance in boxing that tends to get overlooked. The same with BJJ. The first time I saw ANY BJJ at all (but didn't realize it at the time) was at the climax of the first LETHAL WEAPON. Riggs uses a guillotine choke to subdue Mr. Joshua in the final fight. But later on when watching it in the UFC I couldn't make out what was going on. It took a while to understand that BJJ is pretty complex and theres a lot of setup and payoff in some of those fights. My son started taking grappling / BJJ at 4 and did so off and on up until he was around 11 or 12.
If we had a game that was JUST based around a series of BJJ matches that got into the intricacies of the art I guess that would be great. But using it in a typical RPG? I guess most of us just want to apply that Kimura, armbar or Guillotine to end a fight.
Apologies for being so long winded but your reply actually got me thinking a bit about this...