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Like several posters already, I follow an iterative process - do enough top level prep to provide a ‘helicopter view’ of the campaign as a whole which could mean geography or themes or more likely some of both. Then drop into more immediately useful detail that will ground character creation and...

That’s probably fair. Meta currencies, things like the Doom pool from Cortex and so on, the escalation dice from 13th Age, are all familiar to me so they didn’t jump out. But I’ve never played a PbtA system so that stood out for me personally.

I’m not the person you are asking, but I do have Draw Steel. The only particularly ‘modern’ element in my opinion is the use of an evolution of the PbtA tiered success mechanism. For example, in combat you will always do some / average / more damage. There is no ‘miss’ result. Skills are...

For sure, it’s a more realistic game in many ways - charging that machine gun nest is truly heroic! Though when highly skilled characters are up against more mundane opposition heroics can be back on the table. I think a good route to enjoyable outcomes in GURPS is to play with a smaller group...

I don’t think that @Reynard was commenting on games being played, I think it was more about new games being made. There are definitely an order of magnitude more light games released each year, for all the good reasons given. I think the original question was more a case of - with big numbers...

I think systematic versus exception-based design is another big factor in complexity. In play, GURPS isn’t actually very complex as it is very systematic - the rules work the same way consistently pretty much all the time. What varies are modifiers and procedures. This might seem like sophistry...

Another responder here - it would be really interesting if you posted a link to your findings once completed, please?

That’s not what I said. I refuted the point that “all gamers like simple games” by showing some players like complex games.

The post I was replying to stated: I merely pointed out data that showed this to be not true.

Your premise seems to be ‘most people don’t bother to read the GM advice or bestiary powers’ @Thomas Shey? Both my comments and @Dalekdad‘s comments are drawn from there.

That’s interesting. I haven’t read the Monsters book yet. Presumably that was a group of minions the Null attacked?

I would agree; in my 30 years experience of GURPS 3e and 4e it is extremely tactical and one of the few games where players can apply real-world tactics with confidence of the system rewarding that play.

The book recommends (core p199): “A good fight for a party of heroes is two Extras per hero plus an enemy Wild Card leader with roughly the same number of combat Edges (or other advantages).” If people are regularly facing multiple Wild Cards in a fight scenario then the GM isn’t following that...

Features like Unstoppable, Hardy, Resilient / Very Resilient, and large size mean even an Extra can be extremely hard to take out.

When I am running supers with Savage Worlds the Inverse Rules of Ninjas applies - a solo foe is likely a Wild Card but a team of enemies are probably Extras even if they are supers. When I ran Lost Colony for my group maybe only half of the fights actually included a Wild Card amongst the...

I haven’t played ETU, only read it. My understanding is a trope of the genre is finding an enemies weakness so you can exploit it and turn a fight from unwinable to something a group of teens might pull off. It’s not really a standard combat scenario. Similarly with supers, wailing on your foe...

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...