What I mean is a game with 1000 character options and a bunch of situational modifiers and multiple steps to achieving singular and simple results are "rules heavy" and make dungeon crawling unfun. Complex, long, grindy combats. System where you have to count up a bunch of situational modifiers before you can make the roll to do whatever. Basically, modern D&D system isms.
(I haven’t read the next 16 pages of this thread yet)
I think there are a couple of factors which can make dungeoneering more or less fun and they are kind-of two sides of the same coin. It’s about where the game spends its complexity IMO. Most modern RPGs spend their complexity on combat and put comparatively little into other facets of game play. The best systems IMO have a range of sub-systems which allow you to zoom in or out on different types of character activity based on your needs at the time.
To a degree this is exasperated by a reinforcement cycle - if the game has rules for combat and not much else then play tends to become combat and not much else so the next iteration of the rules becomes even more focused on combat and so on. We can break that cycle, of course, and some systems do explicitly aim to do that.
If you want exploration to be the focus
in a session, rather than combat, the system should give you rules which let you put focus on that (exploration) and ideally it also gives you tools to de-emphasise any minor combats that do come up. I suspect the disconnect you experienced might have been that the activities you wanted to put focus on were poorly represented in the system you were using, while other systems do have good rules (or good
procedures, for example tracking resources) for those activities.
Older iterations of RPGs seem to have more focus on exploring over combat (in early D&D you got XP from treasure, not killing things, so combat was less the assumed default). And older print games often had to de-emphasise other bits of the game given the real-world restriction on page count. That might make them look rules light in comparison to modern games but it may just be ‘rules different’.
I think that in many cases either the game is missing these tools, or the use of those tools is poorly explained. I think playing toolkit systems has helped me get this idea and internalise it; you can’t use all the rules in GURPS all the time as some sub-systems are clearly contrary to each other.
This is why Savage Worlds is my favourite system these days since it has good and scaleable options for handling combat, chases, interaction, and skill challenges in general with more or less emphasis depending on my needs at the time. And it does that in a more concise yet flexible way which consistently interacts with the PCs so that their abilities help in sensible ways whether you are in a fight, a car chase, rescuing people from a disaster or navigating an underground environment.
