NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 6682229" data-attributes="member: 2525">I know you are.  You've said you feel 5e is utterly awful, just a couple days ago (which is fine).  Which is why I'm trying to remove the subjective opinions on whether these are things you or I like or dislike, and simply spell out the objective measures of whether or not these things do or do not simplify things.  I think you will agree even if these things are not to your personal tastes, objectively they do result in simplification.I think we could have a philosophical debate concerning the difference between game complexity and math complexity, but at the end of the day both impact the play of the game at the table concerning complexity.  If you reduce the math complexity, the game will in general move faster, combats will take a shorter period of time, turns will take a shorter period of time, time between games crunching numbers will be reduced, time a DM has to juggle between story elements and math elements will be skewed more towards story elements if they don't have to focus on math elements, use or need for electronic tools to do the math portions will be reduced, the barrier to new players entering the game and getting the sense from watching the game that it's math-intensive will be reduced, all sorts of complexity-related things come from reducing the math complexity of the game.  In other words, game complexity might not itself be directly reduced by math complexity, game complexity is indirectly benefited in a variety of ways by math simplification.  It's not infinite - you cannot reduce the math to always a single role and get maximum benefit out of it and there are diminishing returns from reducing math complexity.  But I think 5e strikes an interesting and overall pretty good balance in reducing math complexity to the benefit of game complexity.I do think you're right that in terms of game complexity elements that a player can flip switches on, 5e has a lot.  Race, Class, Subclass, Background, Story items that can result in inspiration, skills and tools, Factions, unique class features, feats, etc..</blockquote>

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