How Complex Should D&D Be?

[M.L. Martin]

On a side note, 3E wasn't even trying for simplicity, according to Peter Adkison's comments in Thirty Years of Adventure on its design. Consistency and flexibility, yes, but simplicity wasn't on the radar of the design approach WotC wound up going with.

(I'd really love to see any notes that might have existed on the simplified, 'story-focused' version some folks at TSR were toying with.)

"The third school of thought [on what direction to take 3rd Edition] said that complexity was okay as long as it made sense. What we really needed to do was create a system that was more modular and supported more styles of play. . . . Like the previous camp, this school of thought argued that after twenty-five years D&D was due for a major overhaul but that the changes to the game should make the game's rules more consistent, more elegant, and support more possibilities for different styles of play. . . . I admit it, I was solidly in the third camp from the very beginning. D&D has always been complicated, and that never stopped it from becoming popular. Complexity wasn't the issue - the problem was that too many rules didn't make good sense. I believed that what D&D players wanted was a great set of rules. Rules that made sense, while maintaining the 'feel' of the original works by Gygax and Arneson."--Peter Adkison, Thirty Years of Adventure, pp. 257-258

 

[FireLance]

This is why I differentiated between "complicated" and "complex." The game should be complex but not complicated. Simplicity and complexity are like yin and yang; they are complementary but not antithetical.

Examples of things which are simple yet complex (in a good way) are games such as chess, reversi/othello and go, and toys such as Lego.

 

[Ariosto]

The problem with these [three options Mercurius presented in post #86] is that keeping them balanced against each other is insanely difficult.

I would not assume at all that they were to be "balanced against each other".

Do you assume that TSR-D&D characters are "balanced against" 3e characters, and both against 4e characters? How about versus characters from Spirit of the Century, or Panty Explosion, or whatever else 5e may happen to resemble?

Yes, if you're going to run a tournament then you need to settle on which rules set applies. It was just the same in 1976!

What was not the same in 1976 was the notion that all D&Ders must be bound by the same set of rules.

Neither was it assumed in '76 that D&D would be subject to continual "official" upgrades or expansions; Supplement IV was "the last D&D supplement". Even after the publication of AD&D, Gygax fulminated against the notion that gamers should be saddled with ... well, with what later became SOP for the brand, what many devotees now take for granted (even to the point of assuming that it must be just the same all across the industry).

Anyway, if you're going to try to be any notable chunk of "all things to all people", then I think you have got to accept that making every possible combination of elements "balanced" with every other is possible only with tight constraints on scope.

(That seems actually to be a guiding principle of the current line, which strongly favors balance.)

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I think that while I voted "slightly less complex", that option doesn't quite fit what I'm thinking very well.

I'm a fan of some complexity. I am! But I want the complexity to be modular. I want to be able to rip out a rule subsystem and not have it require me to re-engineer potholes everywhere.

I want to be able to buy in to a rules system at the newbie level and not be shovel fed epic rules at the same time. I want to be able to acquire increasing rules bloat . . . as I am ready for it at my own pace.

 

[Celebrim]

On a side note, 3E wasn't even trying for simplicity, according to Peter Adkison's comments in Thirty Years of Adventure on its design. Consistency and flexibility, yes, but simplicity wasn't on the radar of the design approach WotC wound up going with.

Which is probably why I loved 3E so much. I don't want 'simplicity'. I want breadth, and if I have to chuck some simplicity out to have it, then I'm ok with that. I want in a rules set something like what the the AEG Toolbox is to fluff. Need rules for something? There it is in Appendix B26.

My focus as a DM is always on proposition resolution. The DM asks to do something. I'm supposed to provide the consequences. I don't expect (or necessarily even desire) the PC's to know all the rules. What I want is for the PC to say:

"I want to do X." when no real understanding of what is or isn't provided by the rules, only assuming that its something he could 'really' try.

And be able to say:

"Yes, this is what you do...", where, "Yes" is understood by me to mean, "The system supports that and has an equitable resolution mechanic with the proper mixture of elegance (simple, quick, abstract) and mapping between the task and the mechanical resolution (intuitive, cinematic, versimilitude).

Simple doesn't cover it. If the rules system is too simple, it generally either produces wacky results all the time, is forced to go to fortune at the end (or beginning), or else I'm forced to make too many ad hoc rules creations on the fly - essentially building the missing peices of the system. None of those solutions are for me acceptable generally, either as a player or DM. I might accept wacky results in a silly one off sort of game. Ditto fortune at the end. Or I might accept fortune at beginning for a one off emo game that owes more to games where one person starts telling a story and another finishes, than to 'Cops and Robbers' or 'Cowboys and Indians'. But neither seems suited to what I want out of a D&D style game.

When I read Knights of the Dinner Table, I'm often envious at least to some degree of the tools BA has in his arsenal for resolving player proposition. Regardless of the situation, Hackmaster has a rule to cover it. Granted, the rules set is buggy and he's got a rules lawyer at the table that makes the most of that, but the rules are generally proven by play robust enough to survive even the hidebound confrontational approach he gets forced into.

Rules light approaches tend to get 'simple, quick, and abstract' down just fine, but they lean so far in that direction that they are wholly reliant on DM narration (and often DM fiat) to provide everything else I'm looking for in a rules system. Finding a good balance is the heart and soul of game design as far as I'm concerned.

Unnecessary complication is for me, when I turn to some subsystem (or worse, if it comes up all the time) and there are more than one or at most two 'moving parts'. I see this alot in the house rules forum. Some players designs a system and he thinks of all the variables that might realistically feed into it and he comes up with this long equation that produces a result that feeds into some other equation. The versimilitude is strong, but easy and quick it is not. You see this alot in 'Parry' mechanics, for example. Players of D&D have wanted to add a parry mechanic to D&D since the early days of 1e, and invariably they try to do this in the intuitive way - by adding an active defence roll to D&D. That's the obvious, intuitive approach, and it makes for strong correspondence between the mechanic and the action..."If I roll better than your attack, I block the blow." But adding an active defense roll to the already complex 3e D&D attack cycle is just too much.

For me, there is really only one aspect of 3E that unecessarily complex to the point it is also a burden and unfortunately its also pervasive, and that's the enormous number of named changable modifiers (meaning they can come and go from round to round) and the complex interaction between them. Static modifers don't bother me (so for example, skill synergies are fine so long as you never change ranks except when you change levels), but all the buffs and debuffs get hard to track at times. This is the reason that 4e doesn't appear simplier to me. It appears to have in spades the only part of 3e I cringe at - quickly changing buffs and debuffs.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Celebrim--A reasonable enough approach, and one that seems to have been close to Adkison's own design philosophy. (I tend to be indifferent to 3E not so much out of dislike for complexity, but because if I want that complexity--there are days I do, and days I don't--I'll try to finally use all this HERO System material I've been reading and accumulating for years, and get a more flexible and customizable system. 3E's edge in support generally doesn't look like it'd compensate for the hoops I'd have to jump through and the assumptions I'd have to use that I don't really care for. )

I was going to say that there's a tradeoff in the bigger picture--a loss of accessibility--but then I remembered another passage in that Thirty Years of Adventure book where they look back on the Basic game and say that it's the experienced gamers who tended to skew towards Basic, and that newer gamers seemed to embrace the greater structure of Advanced.

 

[Dausuul]

I would not assume at all that they were to be "balanced against each other".

Do you assume that TSR-D&D characters are "balanced against" 3e characters, and both against 4e characters? How about versus characters from Spirit of the Century, or Panty Explosion, or whatever else 5e may happen to resemble?

That was what my possibility #3 was about: In order to avoid custom-built combos from eclipsing weak prefabs, or power-boosted prefabs from overwhelming custom builds, you split your game into two separate product lines, one for the prefabbers and one for the tinkerers.

And then you crash and burn, because that's a terrible business model. Splitting up your brand like this will lead to massive confusion among buyers, and in all likelihood one of your two product lines will wither and die. And that's the best-case scenario. Worst-case, you go bankrupt trying to support multiple incompatible product lines in a fragmented market.

Lest you forget, TSR tried this exact thing back in the day, with AD&D and BECMI. It didn't work out very well then, and I don't see any reason to think it would go better now.

 

[Ariosto]

I am not talking about two different product lines.

Most of that stuff in AD&D? It came from supplements and magazine articles for the Original game.

Really, the "two different games" thing was more a superficial matter of appearance and marketing than anything else anyway. It's not as if anyone I've ever met really gives a flying fig if there's something under the other logo he wants to use.

If you're using "spell points", then you're probably not using "spells per day" as well. You probably don't treat Player A's AC as a penalty to hit him, and Player B's as soaking damage. If Player C starts with 20 hit points, then Player D probably uses the same formula instead of rolling 1d10.

Your highfalutin "Advanced" competition rules for the "charop" boards are going to be just a subset in any case. Where do you get this notion that they have to limit the whole game?

See, that is just bizarre to me.

 

[delericho]

But we do ourselves a disservice to describe that with shabby marketing terms like 'system mastery' which makes it sound like that is a feature instead of a bug. I'm glad to see that 'system mastery' which was a term that WotC seems to have invented to excuse itself for deliberately printing combinations of deliberately overcosted trash filler cards and deliberately undercosted 'chase rares' in Magic the Gathering as a way of extorting the player base into buying more of their product has gotten the negative reputation that it deserves, but I don't actually believe that WotC deliberately built 'system mastery' into 3.0 because it makes no sense for them to have done so.

IIRC, the first time I encountered the term "system mastery" was in a post by Monte Cook saying that they deliberately built it into the game. They did this to try to maintain interest amongst the 'gearhead' players - they would remain fascinated by the possibilities of finding the "perfect" optimised character.

Let's call it what it is, poor balance. I don't think that it was ever intended that toughness was supposed to be a poor option, and I hope it was never intended that power attack was to be so dominating.

Again, Toughness was listed as an example of an intentionally poor feat, both as something for the 'gearheads' to learn to avoid, and also as a "feat tax" for really good Prestige Classes. Power Attack is a somewhat different case - it only really became over-powered with the 3.5e revision, when 2-handed weapons got that massive boost. That one is poor balance.

To claim that 'system mastery' was the root of the problem

It's not the root of the problem, or even really a symptom. What it does, though, is make it very difficult for new players to sit at the same table with old hands. Either the old hands will deliberately nerf their characters (and likely be frustrated at doing so), or they will end up with much more powerful characters than the new players, likely leading to those new players becoming frustrated with the game and leaving. A game that leaves half of a mixed group of players frustrated really isn't a good thing, IMO.

If people really wanted a 'rules light' system, then we'd all be playing True20 or something even more simple. Quite obviously, 80% of us, weren't and aren't.

Three things:

1) None of us are immune to marketing. None of those other games you cited are D&D.

2) There is Ryan Dancey's old argument of "Network Externalities" to consider. If I'm looking for a new group to join a game, I have to play the game they're playing. If 80% of players are playing D&D, there's an 80% chance I'm going to end up playing D&D. If I'm looking to put together a new group, I'm going to want to use a system that the majority are familiar with. If 80% of gamers are playing D&D, that game is going to be D&D. The very dominance of D&D means that it will continue to dominate.

3) 80% of tabletop RPG gamers is still a tiny number. We have no way of knowing how many potential gamers have taken a look in Borders (or equivalent), seen a big row of book after book, seen the core rulebook gift set at 832 pages of text, and immediately decided that they would much rather go play WoW instead.

However, you are absolutely right: sometimes, what people say they want and what they will actually pay for and use are two entirely different things.

In fact, I can't really think of a 'Rules Light' system that was ever anything but a niche market.

Name one RPG other than D&D that was ever anything other than a niche market. The closest is probably Vampire at it's height. And "Vampire: the Masquerade" was considerably much more rules-light than D&D.

Heck, D&D itself is pretty niche.

And if you actually starting taking away subsystems, you'll get strong backlash against it because a plurality will say 'that wasn't the complexity I thought you meant'.

True. As we've seen with 4e and the parsing out of the core, though, you may get a lot of people complaining, but an awful lot of people will keep buying anyway. As you yourself pointed out: what people say and what they do are not always the same.

And while you will lose some people if you lose complexity/options, this may well be worth it if you bring in more new players to compensate. Sure, some of the people here would have a disproportionate effect, being the hardcore who buy all the books... but some of those new people will represent a "new hardcore", and pick up the slack.

A good example of juggling complexity is M&M. M&M's particular take on this is to make character creation require a PhD or a spreadsheet (or both), but to make the game resolution mechanics themselves simple in the vast majority of situations.

That sounds like a good trade-off, but for new players it is exactly backwards. Require a new player to read even one rulebook, use complex math, use complex tools, or make complex choices, all before starting to play, and you won't have a new player: you'll have yet one more person who's decided to play WoW instead. I have literally seen the enthusiasm die in the eyes of potential players when they saw the (3.0e) core rulebooks. "Do we have to read all of that?"

Get people playing quickly, and the games will sell themselves. Even if the systems in play are actually very complex, that's mostly fine - they player can learn those as they go along. And, in fact, character management beyond initial creation can also be quite complex, since by that point they'll have some investment in the game. But RPGs must get people playing as quickly as possible - and if that can be done with their own custom character, and without restricting them to a 'beginner' class, so much the better.

 

[Celebrim]

IIRC, the first time I encountered the term "system mastery" was in a post by Monte Cook saying that they deliberately built it into the game. They did this to try to maintain interest amongst the 'gearhead' players - they would remain fascinated by the possibilities of finding the "perfect" optimised character.

Oh good grief. Then I apologize. Clearly the designers were more influenced by the Magic card team than I had realized. Yeah, that's ridiculous. I've taken MaRo to task for popularizing this notion. I didn't realize how far it had spread about the company. I figured in D&D's case it was post hoc reasoning. Apparantly, it wasn't.

Again, Toughness was listed as an example of an intentionally poor feat, both as something for the 'gearheads' to learn to avoid, and also as a "feat tax" for really good Prestige Classes.

PrCs did more to damage 3e than any other single thing except...

Power Attack is a somewhat different case - it only really became over-powered with the 3.5e revision, when 2-handed weapons got that massive boost.

...the 3.5e revision. For every one thing that they fixed (haste), they broke 10 other things that they shouldn't have meddled with. I avoided so many problems by not converting to the 3.5. Likewise, I'm so glad that I kept PrCs out of my game. All these horror stories I hear about, they just weren't an issue for me.

That sounds like a good trade-off, but for new players it is exactly backwards.

I agree. M&M tries to addess this with prehab hero/archetypes. My preferences would be for the GM to guide a new M&M player through the process using a simple character based off one of the archetypes. You can always later on in a Supers game have the character's powers change as the result of some plot device - happens in the comics all the time. However, I wouldn't consider M&M to be an ideal newbie game simply because a newbie will have such a hard time creating the character that they want. M&M has an enormous amount of unintentional system mastery built into character creation, and a new player is very likely to end up with a character which is decidedly suboptimal compared to what an old hand can come up with.

Require a new player to read even one rulebook, use complex math, use complex tools, or make complex choices, all before starting to play, and you won't have a new player: you'll have yet one more person who's decided to play WoW instead. I have literally seen the enthusiasm die in the eyes of potential players when they saw the (3.0e) core rulebooks. "Do we have to read all of that?"

My preference as a DM teaching D&D has always been to throw the player into the game with absolutely no knowledge of the rules whatsoever. I firmly believe that knowledge of the rules actually gets in the way of a new players ability to learn the most fundamental skills of role-playing, namely things role-playing itself, immersion, being interactive with the mind-space, being creative, etc. If the player learns the rules first, he learns to interact with the rules rather than the mind-space and coaches all of his propositions in terms of rules requests. The result is practically an imagination lobotomized player who develops a skill set that is almost entirely detrimental to the game.

In my experience, people - especially children - are natural role-players. Immersion in the rules prior to immersion in the game is just lethal to their ability to role-play. I'm always amazed at how much better new players with no experience play than many 'old hats' who have been playing for many years. Some of the best sessions I've ever had the pleasure to DM where with players with zero experience and zero knowledge of the rules who drew upon their experience as children playing 'let's pretend' and who were absolutely a joy to DM. Conversely, some of the worst I've ever had was with players who'd been playing for 8 or 10 years and who literally had no idea what role-playing was nonetheless.

And, in fact, character management beyond initial creation can also be quite complex, since by that point they'll have some investment in the game. But RPGs must get people playing as quickly as possible - and if that can be done with their own custom character, and without restricting them to a 'beginner' class, so much the better.

Even 3e gets going very quickly and plays very simply at levels below 6th or so. A 1st level character is not an enormous burden to create compared to most systems. Generally, it's about as hard or slightly easier than most point by systems (that often require calculators and double checking math). I don't feel that a 3e character takes any longer to get 'up and running' than 1e character, as the biggest time sink in both cases is purchasing equipment. Distribution of skill points and feats is no more time consuming than proficiencies and NWPs in early systems. One potential problem though is that its very hard to join midgame compared to other systems, as character creation of a high level character eventually becomes every bit as complex as the most complex systems on the market. But, if you start from the beginning all that complexity creeps up on you comparitively slowly.