doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Lasers and Feelings is playable, IMO, because it's "when there is a conflict between your fiction and mine, we use a coin toss to determine whose fiction is right" layered onto freeform roleplaying to keep things moving. It works for what it is, with its fairly tight theme and game style, but, again IMO, it literally could not support the same kind of play as a more complex system. It is necessarily more limited, by it's extreme simplicity.To add to this, when it comes to game design... adding rules is EASY. Adding more and more systems for various stuff like in 1e because it's 'realistic' or whatever? That's EASY. Complications? That's EASY. I mean... FATAL exists after all.
Paring your system down to less rules but keeping the feel, the theme and the excitement? In other words, making them elegant? That's where the GOOD designers shine.
Of course, when it comes to RPG you can go too far for certain people's tastes... but the games are still there and still playable. Just look at Lasers & Feelings for exemple.
My friend is wanting to run a series of games wherein we use a single very simple "system" to run sessions with very different themes and tones, where a player chooses each session if the next game will be Horror, Mystery, Pulp Adventure, etc. His preference at first was to literally just have a discription of a character derived from a 5 part questionnaire, and the basic dice mechanic from pbta games (2d6 with a success ladder). That's it.
However, when I pointed out to him that this would mean that my Constantine style street warlock who is expert in ritual magic, deductive reasoning, and forensics, had no way to actually be expert in anything at all, he agreed that we should at least have some manner of system by which to slightly increase my chance of success on tests regarding my areas of expertise.
I suggested a simple advantage/disadvantage system, wherein I roll with 3 dice and drop the lowest if I am rolling for something I am expert in, and if the check should be extra hard for me I do the opposite (3d6 drop highest). In this way, who my character is is allowed to matter.
This system will probably work just fine for us for this specific experiment, and teach us about our roleplaying and storytelling skills, and help us make better games in the future, but it isn't the seed of a great game. It is very limited. It has large pitfalls. It would fall apart in a context other than playing with people who are fully onbaord and not prone to gaming the system in order to "win".
In my games, I'm considering a rule that you can use a bonus action on your turn to prepare to interrupt a complex action by someone else on the field, and if you get ot use that Reaction, it interrupts the action rather than happening after it. In this way, you can set yourself up to interrupt casters. If you do, they have to make a Concentration Save to keep the spell.I wish D&D still had some form of interruption of casters. It makes the need for teamwork that much stronger.
5e characers are somewhat too independent.
I've also added counterspell variants like a smite that allows you to move up to 10ft as a reaction while the spell lasts and make an attack that interrupts a spell casting, with a little extra damage.