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Was. And mostly through the basic box which didn't deal with much of that nonsense. Also the bar was much lower back then. And modern narrative games didn't exist (the first is generally agreed to be 2003's My Life With Master)

Except size. Size is inherent and very obviously measurable. Oh and dark vision. And tremor sense. And powerful builds. And poison resistance. And... Not that I disagree in the slightest with the take "GURPS is more appealing than D&D because it is more realistic". GURPS was ternage-me's...

As a GM I want to focus on the game and not on dealing with either pointless minutae or dealing with flaws the designers have dumped on my world by trying to make and force me to run a physics option. And I don't want to be all powerful; it harms my GMing and it harms the game. So to fix the...

Mea culpa. It's been about as long for me too.

The old lady who swallowed the fly would approve! The problem happened when the writer of the game rules decided to try making a physics engine saying "this is so" rather than a user interface that aids communication and interaction regarding a shared narrative world.

Just to put this into context for those not used to GURPS the power plant is a different system to the engine. But the power plant rules were written for consistency with the battery rules which were always in kilowatt-hours

This one is a yes. The giant is Huge and therefore has their lifting and carrying capacity multiplied by four for being two size categories above medium. Even a Str 6 giant can lift more and is thus meaningfully physically stronger than a Str 20 medium character. But Str is not just about raw...

GURPS isn't actually a game, it's a toolkit and most of the complexity is in the options and was worse in 3e. To take an extreme example I own GURPS robots 3e and GURPS vehicles 3e; to find the weight of the structure of a vehicle start with the square of the cube root of the volume measured...

Whether Shadowdark is rules light depends whether you consider 5e rules medium or rules heavy. Because it is clearly lighter than 5e but there are clearly games in a heavier category than 5e (trivially 3.5 with all splats) and clearly games in a lighter category than Shadowdark (trivially games...

I think grappling's easier in GURPS than 3.X. They cleaned up the core of 3.X then weighed it down with as much as they thought it would carry. Meanwhile almost any system feels easy and intuitive if it's what you are used to. Multiple subsystems make things more complex with minimal payoff.

Depth. Or Complex Choices. Cases where you have to make a choice in character and there is not necessarily a right answer. PbtA "success with consequences" are often examples here as are risk-reward balances. Things where there is no clear answer so the choice reveals things about the character.

The problem isn't that AD&D isn't "small number good". It's that it's "sometimes a small number is good and other times a large number is good." Sometimes you're on a roll high, other times you're on a roll under. Sometimes it's a d20, sometimes a d100. The system shock and resurrection...

That is because you played AD&D back in the day. Daggerheart is more like modern D&D than 1e is. Mechanically I'm trying to think of the actual similarities between 1e and 5e. I can't get much beyond "It has six stats called the same things as they are in 5e, has some spells with the same name...

The thing here is that 1e is probably less like a d20 game than Daggerheart - and in Daggerheart the players almost never touch d20s. The d20 family is WotC onwards - and many (although not all) of the deviations of 1e from the d20 framework are simply annoying and add almost nothing An...

I'm trying to think of any RPGs except PF2e that are new in the last 15 years that are more crunchy than 1e. Maybe Lancer. (This doesn't count relatively minor updates to games like Shadowrun that are significantly older) D&D 5e for example is less crunchy than an out of the box 1e because it...

To me this seems to exemplify the false assertion that all RPGs are designed with the same intent and all players want the same thing. Neither of which is true.

I think different people have different tolerances for rules complexity - and different people are drawn to different types of game. Every minute spent dealing with the mechanics is one spent not roleplaying. And every minute spent looking up rules might as well be an emergency stop. Also...

Shadowdark is IIRC 300 pages including its DMG and MM. But I find the size of a "full" character sheet a much better indication and comparator especially on an exception based game. By full character sheet I mean including things you might need to reference in play that are non-standard, like...

Which is why I'd put 3.X in very high. I definitely need at least four categories.

What, as the conversation seems to be getting to, needs discussing first is where we think the baselines are. I mean I can accept Daggerheart as medium crunch and Draw Steel as possibly high crunch (I'd need to play to work out if it's high or medium) if and only if we use a baseline that 5e is...