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I don't think "crappy explanations and poor organization" are "crunch."

Page counts aren't complexity. Shadowdark is 300 pages. That said, I am not saying 5E is a "lite" game. I might quibble with your 7, but not by much. Almost all of 5Es complexity is in character ability exceptions. They have flattened or outright deleted most of the rest.

While I largely agree with your overall points, I don't think 5E is anywhere near "high crunch." There's are a lot of PC specific rules and exceptions, to be sure, but they nearly eliminated all the other granularity, complexity and subsystems from 3.x (the primary historical high crunchy D&D).

Emphasis mine. Interesting. Now, i think there are crunchy Fate games -- the original Dresden game, and Valiant Comics -- but that is more "complex overlay". Fate itself is not particularly crunchy (but is crunchier than most PbtAs and related narrative games, for sure).

What were the complex games of the 2010s and beyond?

Bladerunner was not a bespoke system, though, right? It is based on Year Zero Engine, which is not especially crunchy or complex.

5E is not a complex or especially crunchy game and has been dominant for a decade.

Except it is literally a major element of what I want.

What makes something post-post-apocalyptic is not how long after the apocalypse it is set, but whether the world has rebuilt to some significant degree. Not just individual factions having re-established themselves, but a whole society. For example, Fallout 4 is post apocalyptic at the beginning...

Folks seem to be misunderstanding what I am saying here, which suggests I have not explained it well. By allowing the VTT to do the math in play, you can have a lot of modifiers and knock on effects that are consequential. You aren't ignoring those things. You are ostensibly still examining...

This is a false dichotomy. Nothing in "crunch" impacts what TTRPGs do that CRPGs can't. I think the "why don't you just play a CRPG" underscores a lack of understanding of what crunch can bring to play, based on a p[reference for lighter systems. As to the idea of "why bother if the VTT is...

I have never been convinced by the argument that rules complexities impacts "roleplaying" at all.

I agree and am a big fan of the idea that we can leverage VTTs to make some games more detailed and granular without slowing down play.

My dad had a few dozen of these on the shelf, but I never read any of them.

I will check him out!

That is an excellent point. Thank you. That said, TTRPG rulebooks are significantly, almost ridiculously, bigger than necessary from a rules presentation perspective. There are many very complex noardgames, for example, that still manage to contain their rules in dozens rather than hundreds of...

With a couple of notable exceptions, such as Pathfinder 2E, it seems like the TTRPG industry has been trending toward simplicity for years now. But with the recent releases of Daggerheart and Draw Steel -- medium and heavy crunch system respectively -- maybe the pendulum is swing back toward at...

I did not play 4E a ton. Does it have systems that would map easily to the whole R&D and basebuilding aspects?

It is almost criminal.how good this show is.

I mean, no? Like, there’s no "misery" in Thundarr or Fallout, at least not the kind we are talking about here. Of course there’s Bad Stuff, but that's not the same thing.