Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9848868" data-attributes="member: 18">For me, complexity isn't inherently a problem or good thing, it's whether that complexity is justified by creating interesting and engaging results, or whether it just leads to lots of calculation and/or rolling and/or analysis paralysis.In far too many older (pre-2015) RPGs, there's tons of mechanical complexity, but in the end just leads to the same exact narrative place as another game could manage with far less.Some kind of earn their complexity. Like the Friday Night Fire Fight system in Cyberpunk 2020 was pretty fiddly but tended to produce results that were fun to describe and think about and very thematic to the setting. Whereas Cyberpunk RED has a somewhat simplified system which is a bit faster and more efficient, but doesn't produce the same engaging results. It feels like 2020 got streamlined too far there to me.Whereas 3E D&D could often bog down into endless modifiers and stacking discussions and so on, just to give a result somehow more boring than what 2E managed. Thankfully 5E got away from this.Overall though I feel like less complex games tend to be better designed and better at achieving their goals, so I voted 5. Even 5E has some pointless or counterproductive rules (2024 totally failed to fix this, too) and I don't think being able to roll a good hit then roll bad damage ever makes what D&D is trying to do better.</blockquote>