Did the nerds win?

[Mannahnin]

Man Ray? Or somewhere else?

Of course. Then some friends started Ceremony, and there were a few other nights over the years at other venues, like Hexx.

 

[Mannahnin]

I think this is a very goofy opinion to have. People don't accidentally write a hundred pages of heavy crunch. If they had a "disdain for mechanics" or did not think the mechanics mattered, they would simply not have written them. Game designers do, in fact, design games.

Disdain is too strong, absolutely, but I think he's got the core of a real observation in there. Although I agree with you that the designers didn't accidentally write a bunch of rules, and were gamers first, the high priority put on establishing mood and themes is indicative of what they wanted to emphasize. I do think the game would have worked better if it were significantly lighter crunch, but they weren't able to see ahead to the innovations of the real storygames movement.

I'd say Starship Troopers is very faithful to the book's themes, it's just Verhoeven identified that the themes were foul.

Absolutely not. (Although Heinlein was way off base about corporal punishment; pure wrong there).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Game designers do, in fact, design games.

I feel like this was less true that it, like, should be... especially in the 1980s and early 1990s, and even a little bit in the 2000s, a lot of games weren't really very consciously or thoughtfully designed, but just sort of slapped together, mechanically, without a really clear eye for what they wanted to achieve. Rifts is a superb example of game that is not really very designed, just like, full of churned-out "content". Ideas seem to have come first there and mechanics only as a sort of afterthought in many cases, even though those mechanics occupy hundreds or thousands of pages.

oWoD wasn't that bad but a lot of the mechanics seemed to be pretty poorly-conceived and to kind of clunkily serve the purpose they were allegedly for - not least Humanity, where spraypainting graffiti onto some sick naughty word's car was considered worse than beating the hell out of an innocent.

That said, your point re: crunch existing for a reason is fair, but I think it was very clear at the time and in retrospect that there was a real tension within the people at White Wolf as to what was "supposed" to be going on with their games. That some people absolutely thought werewolves engaging in daiklaive duels was cool as hell, or vampires dodging gunfire to chop people up with their katana at hyperspeed ruled, and other people writing seemed to think if there was any actual combat in the game, let alone badass trenchcoats and katanas combats. You could see this in some of the Storyteller advice for 1E/2E oWoD books particularly. There was almost a sort of split-personality thing, and it even extended into Revised - Revised came down with very much a "body/existential horror is literally the only acceptable way to play VtM" position, but then it's still bringing out splatbooks and WoD: Combat and so on.

All that said I just opened up VtM 2E to look at it and GOOD GOD that is a GORGEOUS book. Wow. Astonishing. They don't make them like that anymore! Everything is so well-aligned aesthetically - the fonts, the art, the borders, just absolutely on-vibe in a way I have just not seen, not even in good indie RPGs, in the last decade. I've seen like, 50% as strong - mostly with stuff from Rowan, Rook and Deckard, but man, as good as Heart or DIE might be, they're just not on this level.

 

[Staffan]

Gloomhaven/Frosthaven are a great example. Playing those makes me realize that like, as much as I might like tactics and optimization, there is clearly a line beyond which it becomes deeply tedious to me, and basic competent play in those two is definitely way over that line! But I know the sort of chess club math nerds I used to play D&D with would absolutely love the to-me-incredibly-tedious strategizing and analysis of options the Xhavens are all about.

Xhaven is a bit of a different beast. It's certainly complex, but the complexity is on a tactical level rather than a mathematical one. You're generally not doing math that's more complex than adding two single-digit numbers. The complexity comes from, essentially, resource management: you have a hand of up to 14 cards and have to choose two of them to play for every round. Each card has a top and a bottom, with the top often (but not always) being an attack or other proactive thing and the bottom often (but not always) being a move or other support ability; and you will need to use both a top and a bottom ability in the round, but you don't have to decide which is which until it's actually your turn. When you've played a card, it usually goes to your discard pile where it remains until you rest, at which point you recover all your discarded cards except one which goes to the lost pile. If you take a long rest (a full round), you choose which card to lose, otherwise it's random. And some powerful effects go straight to the lost pile without being discarded. Some cards can have a weaker effect now, but set up an effect that can make a later card more powerful.

This creates an enormously complex game, which can honestly be pretty overwhelming. But the math itself is pretty simple.

No, it doesn't support that idea.

It supports the idea that TTRPGs aren't the right place for complex math-centric rules design.

And frankly they never have been - as I said earlier, the actual math and game design in the earlier, more complex and math-centric games wasn't high quality.

The problem is that it's pretty common to assume that just because something has complex math, someone must have thought long and hard about it and therefore it must be realistic. My favorite counter-example to this is the 3e rule about the availability of goods. Basically, each settlement has a certain max gp value which determines the most expensive things to be found in that settlement, and which depends on settlement size in different categories (ranging from thorp through small/large villages, towns, and cities, and eventually reaching metropolis size. But if you wanted to know how many of any given good you could find for sale in town (e.g. you want to buy swords for your whole army), you would multiply half the max gp limit by 1/10 of the population, to get the total gp value of any given good available. So Waterdeep had a population of 132k in the 3e FRCS, and a gp limit of 200k. So for any given good, you could find 1.32 billion gp worth of that good in Waterdeep. Since a chicken is worth 0.02 gp, that means Waterdeep has 66 billion chickens for sale. Or 44,000 galleys. Does that make any god damn sense? No, of course not. But it's a rule with math in it, which makes it look reasonable.

Not true. One of the members of my previous group bounced off 5e hard, precisely because it lacked the complexity that he craved.

Math complexity specifically, or complexity in general? There's a player in my group, who's generally the one who digs down the most in different games to explore various options, who doesn't really care for 5e because of the scarcity of options. Basically, after level 3 when you've chosen your class, background, race/species, and subclass, your character is more on less on rails mechanically. OK, you still get to choose ability increases/feats, but that's only once per four levels. Compare to Pathfinder 2 where you make at least two choices per level (class feat + skill feat at even levels, and skill increase and alternating between ancestry feat and general feat at odd levels), and occasionally adding more to that. That's not necessarily more math-intensive (though in the case of PF2 it is), but it definitely provides more complex choices.

Which is why burning it all down and starting over (and over) is so disatisfying. I hate reboots.

I've come to the conclusion that rebooting or drastically altering something that's active is usually a losing proposition. You lose many of the current fans who won't care for the changes, and non-fans will not be likely to flock to the New World Order because they already have an image of what the thing is in their minds and have already decided that it's not for them.

It can work out for properties that are basically abandoned, because whatever current fans there are won't feel like they're losing anything – there wasn't anything new happening anyway, and the difference between "getting the thing in a way I'm not into" and "not getting the thing" is rather academic. You didn't see an uproar among old TORG fans about TORG Eternity because TORG had been dead for decades anyway (of course, it helped that TORG Eternity was pretty nifty), but when Wizards blew up the Forgotten Realms in favor of the 4e version people got quite upset.

 

[TiQuinn]

So what are examples of games that are “math complex”?

Rules complexity, I get. Having to look up a bunch of tables because it’s impossible to remember, but that’s not math complexity IMO. The most complexity I’ve seen in a game was Chaosium’s having to figure out what an extreme success chance was (calculating what 1/5th of your skill roll was) or the self-inflicted pain (I.e. it wasn’t really in the rules) of calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle to determine range of a flying creature in AD&D 2e.

 

[Shades of Eternity]

I thought using Trig in gaming was a rite of passage?

 

[Ryujin]

So what are examples of games that are “math complex”?

Rules complexity, I get. Having to look up a bunch of tables because it’s impossible to remember, but that’s not math complexity IMO. The most complexity I’ve seen in a game was Chaosium’s having to figure out what an extreme success chance was (calculating what 1/5th of your skill roll was) or the self-inflicted pain (I.e. it wasn’t really in the rules) of calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle to determine range of a flying creature in AD&D 2e.

I previously mentioned Space Opera and I think it qualifies as both math complex and rules complex. Character creation would take upwards of an hour, involving modifications based on sums, averages, and percentages. Then there was starship building. If you have an hour and a half free, this video details character creation.

 

[delericho]

Math complexity specifically, or complexity in general?

As I said to my reply to @Ruin Explorer, the least-complex game he seemed able to tolerate was Pathfinder 1st with all the options in play. But even that I think was a compromise because he just couldn't find a game mathematically-complex enough to scratch the itch (or maybe people to play it with).

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

The way that you could mix & match the various attributes, in order to perform skill checks, seemed rather revolutionary at the time. My Tremere character could intimidate using innate charm, but my Gangrel team mate could use his physical attributes. A bit of a change from decades of RPGs in which you had to be the "Talker", in order to have interaction skills.

Also, the way that you could pick keywords for each stat to describe your character. So that what would've just been flavor text in other games, also had mechanical effects.

 

[Staffan]

So what are examples of games that are “math complex”?

Rules complexity, I get. Having to look up a bunch of tables because it’s impossible to remember, but that’s not math complexity IMO. The most complexity I’ve seen in a game was Chaosium’s having to figure out what an extreme success chance was (calculating what 1/5th of your skill roll was) or the self-inflicted pain (I.e. it wasn’t really in the rules) of calculating the hypotenuse of a triangle to determine range of a flying creature in AD&D 2e.

GURPS is pretty math-heavy, both on-screen and in character creation – particularly in its 4th edition. Right now we're playing involuntary time travelers who wound up in I-can't-believe-it's-not-40K, and the damage procedure for shooting super-high-tech weapons at super armor goes something like this:
Roll 5d6x2 for damage. Since the weapon has an armor divisor of 10, subtract 1/10th of the opponent's DR. If it's not a hit to a limb, increase the remaining damage by 50% because it's a heavy piercing weapon. Subtract damage from HP, and see how many HP the target still has to check if any thresholds are crossed. If the damage dealt is more than HP/2, roll for stun and other major wound effects.

In character creation, you get an issue partially due to having one single pool of points for the whole character and having to add up lots and lots of tiny numbers – the problem isn't "adding single digit numbers", it's "adding 30 single digit numbers because GURPS has hundreds and hundreds of skills". So adding up the cost of your skills looks like 1+2+4+2+8+12+2+4+1+1+1+4+16 and so on. And advantages/disadvantages often have various limitations and enhancements affecting their point values. Something as simple as "Bad sight" for example has a cost of -25, but if you're in a reasonably teched-up world you can take the limitation "Correctable: -60%" for a total cost of -10. Each individual calculation isn't the hardest thing in the world, but it all adds up, and up, and up.