How Crunchy is Too Crunchy, For You Personally

[GothmogIV]

I am a Roll20 person, so the DCC character sheet is great. Also...we use this:
The Purple Sorcerer
It's not connected to the VTT, but is has all of the compendium AND you can share your rolls with your players.

 

[MNblockhead]

I am a Roll20 person, so the DCC character sheet is great. Also...we use this:
The Purple Sorcerer
It's not connected to the VTT, but is has all of the compendium AND you can share your rolls with your players.

Yeah, if I was running core DCC, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, or Foundry, and/or Purple Sorcerer would be great. But for DCC Dying Earth, there is a LOT of work I would need to do to get it into the VTT. I might do the data entry, at least for the tables, but making coding changes to the character sheet to work with the new classes was more than I wanted to take on.

This is by no means a knock on DCC. I love playing in the system and hope to run the Dying Lands setting some day. Warhammer on Foundry just scratched my itch and was something my players were interested in.

 

[GothmogIV]

Gotcha. I've never played Warhammer, but I read a bunch of the Gotrek and Felix books and loved them! What is the core mechanic in the game?

 

[DammitVictor]

Modern D&D and PF are too much, in the wrong places. AD&D is... yeah.

I'd say my sweet spot is around B/X clones with expanded, AD&D style, class lists. Or any version of Barbarians of Lemuria with beefier magic/powers options. Or Street Fighter.

 

[thullgrim]

Gotcha. I've never played Warhammer, but I read a bunch of the Gotrek and Felix books and loved them! What is the core mechanic in the game?

D100 roll under. Auto crit on 1-4/96-100. Opposed rolls in combat. Can do damage to an attacked if you win the opposed roll. Escalating/de-escalating advantage as combat ebbs and flows.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Savage Worlds hit my crunch sweetspot. It’s there, but in the right places that make it easy for a GM to improvise and wing it, and the right amount of ruling-not-rules.

As others have said, a high crunch system can be very playable with good VTT support. I also GM WarhammerFRP on Foundry and it’s great, but I wouldn’t touch it without VTT support. And Pf2 on Foundry is a miracle of crunch elimination and transparency, even though I dislike the system for other reasons.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My tolerance is fairly high, but its a little harder to learn new ones of that weight than they once were. Its not distributed symmetrically though; I never managed to engage successfully with Rolemaster, but had no problem with the Hero System for example.

 

[GothmogIV]

My group and I just played DCC, which I love--it has a bit of crunch, but not too much--and it is hysterical. My friend rolled a crit when he, out of frustration, rolled a "kick him in the nads" attack. Talk about crunch!

 

[Celebrim]

There are two distinctive types of crunch - compile time crunch and runtime crunch.

Compile time crunch is what it takes to set up the game. I'm pretty resilient to compile time crunch, but it needs to be less than say GURPS or Hero.

Run time crunch on the other hand is what it takes to arbitrate a proposition in the game and that needs to be pretty light. You need at most and at minimum the difficulty, the player skill, and a situational modifier as input. Less than that doesn't work. More than that doesn't work. Most systems manage that just fine though some of them fail for lack of difficulty as an input or because situational modifiers are too hard to kludge into the system. So if a system fails it's usually because it does too much with situational modifiers making the mental overhead of tracking them too complicated. 5e does too little with both difficulty and situational modifier IMO, whereas 3e does too much with situational modifier. Somewhere in the middle would probably be my sweet spot.

There are rare cases where a system fails drastically though and two that come to mind would be Mouse Guard and FUDGE where the system manages to be both overly crunchy and at the same time has horrible resolution mechanics. FATE Core is also very much in this situation.

 

[Emberashh]

On the other hand, DCC is a game that is not particularly "crunchy" but the need to constantly reference and roll on tables (which includes for every spell) led me to decide not to run it.

For running it physical, you can go to places like purple sorcerer and get spellbook printouts that consolidate and compress spells down into a more easily referenced packet.

Its still a lot of table referencing (kind of unavoidable with how their magic system works), but its a lot more convenient than using the big book. With print out and some familarity turns as a mage aren't that bad at all; for my group if a mages turn takes long its usually because of something wacky that came out of the spell needing to be adjudicated. Its seldom due to trying to just pick a spell and get it resolved.