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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8521026" data-attributes="member: 86653">Sort of. Fewer rules, systems, and subsystems are easier to work with. Focused crunch that's broadly applicable like say the four basic actions of Fate is far easier to handle than the nightmarish tangle of rule after rule after convoluted rule of some of the heavier games. Avoiding naming names to avoid edition warring and pointless arguments. But even something that light leads to issues, like the perennial favorite of sniper rifles and being on fire. The mechanics of the game literally get in the way of emulating the reality of the situation. Gamers have to force themselves to bypass the rules and get to what would reasonably happen in that situation. But instead a lot of people get hung up on the rules themselves and that's the focus of their play.The only aspect of gameplay that need mechanics is conflict resolution. And they don't need to be that complicated. A simple opposed roll (of whatever matching kinds of dice you want in the moment) will suffice. If you want to get really fancy, you can include things like dis/advantage to each side of the opposed roll based on the characters' abilities and the external circumstances, environmental factors, etc.Everything else is extra. But I differentiate between mechanics (STR is a stat that means X, when using STR you add this modifier to your roll, etc) and diegetic rules, that is rules about the world and the things in it. Like how much a horse needs to eat in a day or how much water a person needs to drink. Those aren't quite crunch, as I'd define it. Those are things that are just as true in the real world as they are in the fantasy world of the game. But any fantasy game will have things that don't exist in the real world. Yep. But we can extrapolate from the real world examples. Like how much food a gnome needs in a day or how much water a dragon needs to drink.Crunch almost never enhances realism, quite the opposite. Crunch tends to get in the way of realism and cause bizarre and wild outcomes that are far from what would realistically happen in a given situation. Absurdly high hit points combined with falling damage in D&D, for an example. Realism would be even max-level characters simply dying from a fall over a certain height. Realism would be a dragon simply biting a character in half (mechanically going from full hit point to dead in one hit). The fewer the rules and the more broadly they're applied the better they help with realism. Pushing framing in the fiction gets you almost all the way there. Differentiating between characters is something crunch can do well. But I think we've taken it way, way too far. Something as simple as a 100-word description is enough to make this character unique from that character. Along with how they're roleplayed. Give some kind of mechanical weight (dis/advantage perhaps) and you now have distinct characters with meaningful mechanically differences between them. And the whole system could fit on both sides of a 3x5 card or one side of a sheet of paper.For me, that's not a distinction that makes a difference. Unless the mechanics of the game force that to be meaningful. Like a dice pool system. You only get one die from each category and innate talent is a distinct category from training. Otherwise it doesn't matter.Crunch doesn't provide realism, it prevents realism. Or at least seriously hampers realism. It's almost a reverse correlation. The more crunch, the less realism. If you mean realism here as heavy crunch systems with rules for everything, then I don't agree with that assumption. Fewer rules, systems, and subsystems tends leads to more realism in the sense of the outcome of the mechanics being closer to what would be produced in the real world...or at least if the fantasy world were a real place and the characters were real people living in that real place.</blockquote>

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