EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
There is a difference between making it hard to understand and involving things which are harder to understand. The former is obscurantism, which is a thing 5e actually does, albeit not as much as 3e (and certainly not as much as early D&D.) The latter is, unfortunately, a necessary element some of the time if you want to do more impressive things. A very young child that hasn't yet learned multiplication, for example, is going to struggle with D&D, regardless of edition. Choosing to use multiplication doesn't mean you're trying to make it hard to understand. It means you're using something that requires a minimum level of understanding, because that thing is useful.
As I said previously, I agree with you that many people underestimate the intelligence and adaptability of children, treating them like simpletons, which is incredibly disrespectful. However, an 8-year-old child will, generally speaking, only recently have been introduced to the concept of multiplying single-digit numbers, or dividing one two-digit number by a single-digit number. The concept of decimals, likewise, will be something they've relatively recently learned at school. Obviously some children will pick these up swiftly and others more slowly, but the point is, this is asking young people to play a game based on math they've either only recently learned, or genuinely haven't learned yet. That has some risks to it, and means that the system by its very nature, simply by having things like "area of effect" and "half damage" and the like, is going to be more difficult to explain to them than it would be to a child a few years older who will, in general, have achieved comfortable mastery of these topics.
As with debates about "simplicity" vs "complexity," there are quite simply two virtues in play here, which are incommensurate but both valuable. When people call for simplicity, in general what they are asking for is elegance, parsimony, and clarity: choosing the correct point on the spectrum between the deficient vice of triviality and the excessive vice of inscrutability, seeking the game design virtue of accessibility. When people call for complexity, in general they are asking for depth, significance, and variety: choosing the correct point on the spectrum between the deficient vice of vapidity and the excessive vice of perplexity, seeking the game design virtue of subtlety.
An inscrutable thing need not be perplexing, indeed it may be vapid if properly understood, it just happens to be impossible to read (consider some of the allegations made during the "Sokal affair.") Conversely, a perplexing thing need not be inscrutable: you might be fully capable of understanding what each option does, but if you have six thousand options, correctly choosing the best among them will be a Herculean task. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to make a game that involves absolutely no complicated elements while also offering strategic depth. There is a reason Go is famous very specifically for its unusual combination of extremely simple rules and extremely deep strategic play.
Hence, we accept various elements of complication--which, for a child, can quite easily include things like probabilities, multiplication, decimals, and calculating areas or perimeters--in order to unlock more possibilities of strategic depth. This is, in general, a necessary trade-off up to some point. That doesn't mean one is intentionally trying to make the game "hard to explain"; one is instead accepting a certain minimum level of required explanation (or, frequently and often in tandem, a certain minimum level of expected background knowledge) in order to make the game more enjoyable in the doing.
Edit: The ideal, of course, is to create a game that is both subtle and accessible: one "easy to learn, but hard to master," as it were. In the video game design community, this is usually referred to as having a "low skill floor" and a "high skill ceiling." That is: the skill floor is the minimum skill you must show in order to use some particular thing effectively, while the skill ceiling is the maximum performance you can reach no matter how skillful you personally might be. Folks wanting "simplicity" in tabletop gaming are generally asking for options, or even entire game systems, that have a low skill floor, while folks wanting "complexity" in that space are doing the same but wanting a high skill ceiling. Unfortunately, doing both things is hard! So many games either "cheat" (offering some options where both the skill floor and the skill ceiling are low, and others where both are high), or they stick with just one end and call it good. Fighting games like Tekken and MOBAs like League of Legends generally do the former. Strategy games, particularly grand strategy games, generally do the latter.
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