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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9425262" data-attributes="member: 7045072">There's the second and third parts of the problem though...A) Can you have a functional system that heavily mechanically supports EVERYTHING.  I don't think you can, not if you expect to actually prepare and play games.  Complexity takes play time, it takes prep time and it takes both player and referee attention.  It's easy to imagine the perfect simulation (not in the GSN sense here) that has everything and calculates everything ... impossible in practice of course, but a popular thing for designers to strive for.  You get something like GURPS or some 1990's huge heartbreaker type thing.  It's playable, but take so much real time that it's very very hard for anything to happen in the 4-6 hour game session.  Dungeon Crawling means moving through several rooms a session, because it depends on discovery, supply depletion and the tension around exploration's risk v. reward for its fun.  You can't get much of that if it takes 6 hours to run a search of a single room and a combat encounter with three vermin.So instead one has to pick what one emphasizes - define the locus of play.B) Rules though aren't the only or even main way to pinpoint the locus, sometimes they can do the opposite. For example, older D&D's extensive rules for combat can act as a guardrail - they make combat dangerous to the characters and represent a penalty or potential lose condition (an inevitable one that also has the fun of gambling in it) when players push their luck too far, navigate poorly or run out of other options/ideas.  The rules act to move play quickly through the combat and take agency away from the players to a degree, leaving their characters' fates to the dice and chance (at least to a degree). Resources like HP, spells, equipment and even PCs or retainers will be lost even in victory.the rules for exploration are instead relatively simple compared to combat.  Why?  Because exploration play is meant to take up more time, to be the product of decision making among the party and the loop of referee description of the environment, player questions, referee answers, player stating character activity.  The players interact directly with the fiction, largely unconstrained by rules, and instead appeal to and manipulate the fiction directly - they solve problems by reaching a consensus with the referee about how the setting functions (you can wade safely across a fast dungeon stream if your armor is in bundles you toss across and and you go over holding a secured rope etc).  This takes real world time of course, more then combat, because the players and referee have to work out that consensus through description -> question -> answer ->action -> arbitration. Rules to the extent they exist are about creating risk for caution, delay, and repeated questions or multiple efforts to act.  That's how supply depletion and random encounters work.  More rules don't make this process work better necessarily.It does seem somewhat unlikely in modern games ... but also in fantasy games where the location one is running is a single faction location.  So if you're playing cyberpunk and somehow you have "Corporation A" and "Corporation B" in the same location and they don't like each other, precisely the same thing could happen.  This doesn't really speak to mechanics though or the definition of Dungeon that I'm getting at, but more to the nature of most modern scenarios ... that they aren't exploration based by design but rather heists, sieges or assassinations. Such adventure types/goals and locations work fine in fantasy as well of course, and we have examples dating back to the earliest adventures.</blockquote>

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