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Board Game Geek refutes that premise. All the highly rated games are pretty complex. The top 10 games on BGG have an average ‘weight’ of 3.7 on a 1 to 5 point scale which puts them as medium to heavy weight.

They are, Exhibit A … Draw Steel. And there are many reasons, already discussed in this thread, which mean creating a new crunchy game is a much bigger task than producing a new light-weight game. These factors will naturally mean there are fewer new crunchy games of any kind (good or bad).

There are always new ideas and new ways of using existing ideas. That applies to crunchy games as well as light weight ones.

I think the type of crunch is important. Rules engines like D&D use an exception based design, where every special ability is typically designed individually (or at least, presented that way). Games like GURPS or HERO use a more systematic design which front loads the complexity in learning the...

I haven’t played DS yet but I have read through the Heroes book twice solidly to get my head around the new concepts and how they all work together. I think a big difference between DS and most other RPGs is the way Victories power you over time while Recoveries get consumed through attrition...

Maybe not so much on the ’clear signal’ aspect but Fate has the concept of a concession which would fit the ’retreat’ aspect nicely. When a player concedes, they are taken out of the scene but somewhat on their own terms - they get input into what that form takes (they also get Fate points as a...

EABA v2 has an interesting take on this. When you get to a certain level of injury you do take a penalty to skills. But that penalty also applies to the damage you take. The concept is that, once you are a certain level of beaten up, then more scratches aren’t going to make a difference. This...

That really, really says Draw Steel to me :) And to add to that - the model of Victories increasing resources while Recoveries deplete creates a very different play dynamic on paper in contrast to typical D&D style resource attrition where people keep wanting to take a short or long rest all...

I’ve often thought about this split between ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ systems. I put a name on the shift towards lighter systems as ‘appification’. What I mean by that is - consider desktop applications like Word, Excel and so on. They can do lots of different things but they are very complex and...

The Sci-Fi Companion plus Fantasy Companion gives you all the tools you need for Shadowrun in my opinion, especially if you are adapting it and don’t need an additional pre-made world.

Thanks both :) I did look at the preview, I was just wondering if more change had been shown cased as the campaign progressed.

So, any noteworthy changes? I tried Numenera and Cypher a couple of times but it didn’t impress enough to replace other genre flexible systems. Does it have more sophisticated rules for complex tasks (I.e. more than just a single dice roll)? Also, the characters seemed to me somewhat narrow...

I think leaning in to templates would be essential here. You could even have different templates for specialisms amongst the soldiers, similar to how modern XCOM has the different types of characters available. And at a later stage you could make additional templates available when Psionic...

Just looking at the Sci-fi Companion to refresh the details, it has three levels of hi-tech defined, with examples of weapons, armour, and equipment for each development level. So I think it could do a reasonable amount of ‘tech-development ladder’ play without you needing to create a whole lot...

I think the easiest answer to this would be addressing the tech element for SWADE. That could be done fairly easily IMO. For example, energy weapons becoming available vs using ballistic weapons would be a big change given how ballistic protection works in SWADE. Looking at how super-high tech...

Dresden Files includes lots of monsterous character options. Savage Worlds Horror Companion has rules for it.

My initial feeling was that the resource names were just useless chrome, but having read through the characters a couple of times, I think it serves a useful function of differentiation. Every class has specific ways of generating resources, and I think it will help people get the difference of...

Draw Steel is billed as a tactical, heroic, cinematic, fantasy game. They even suggest other games to try if you don’t want to play a tactical, heroic, cinematic, fantasy roleplaying game. Why should they be required to add character classes which don’t fit that bill? That’s not the game they...

They are a publisher, and little more. So different books by different authors have different systems. JM De Foggi has his own YT channel where he talks about a wide range of games including Jackals. He would probably answer whether he pitched Osprey or if it was some other way the game came to...

I can see the conceptual lineage, drawing from 4e D&D. We played it for several years, and I don’t remember it being quite as cinematic as Draw Steel clearly is. I’m starting in my second read through now I have a better understanding of what all the character stats mean.