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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7371341" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Even if we are to accept the premise that there are fewer people playing tabletop RPGs now than there were when D&D originally came out (which I still say is dubious, but whatever), there are more playing now than there were 10 years ago. And the game isn’t just for small fanatical following any more. It’s absolutely mainstream again.No true Scotsman fallacy. Because more people are playing D&D online through virtual tabletops and voice and video chat services does not mean those people aren’t playing D&D. Just because you have a bugbear with all this newfangled technology ruining good old fashioned fun doesn’t mean the millions of people playing the game have the same hangup.Seriously? Who buys gaming books at Toys R Us? Even people who insist on buying physical books from physical retailers buy them from game stores and hobby shops, maybe book stores in a pinch. The rest of us use Amazon and DrivethruRPG. Toys R Us was a terrible place to go to get RPG books.Oh, goody, we’re bickering about word choice now? Sorry my vocabulary is too “be beaurocratic” for you. It’s hard to learn. Not just because of the rules, but because tabletop RPGs are so different from other forms of gaming, they can be hard to wrap one’s head around before they’ve seen it in action. This is another barrier that technology is beginning to break down, thanks to live streaming games like Critical Role allowing people to see what this D&D thing is all about without having to be shown by someone who already plays.If everything is better when things are simpler, why did you make the switch to AD&D from original/basic D&D? You want to talk about over complicated rules, AD&D puts all of the WotC editions to shame in terms of complexity. And yet, somehow, it was still popular. Almost as if complexity doesn’t actually ruin the game.Here’s the truth: complexity is the currency with which you buy depth. Simpler is indeed better, but deeper is also better. You want a deeper system of rules, you need more complexity. But you should be economical about your complexity. There needs to be a worthwhile tradeoff in terms of depth.It’s not “because they didn’t know anything else” that the newer gamers liked 4e. We had 3.5 and Pathfinder to compare to, and some of us even went looking at the TSR editions. And D&D wasn’t the only game on the market any more, we had other games to compare to as well. We had plenty of knowledge, what we didn’t have was expectations of what D&D should look like. 4e failed because it didn’t appeal to the experienced gamers that serve as a gateway for new players. It therefore didn’t reach as many new gamers as it could have, and it made it hard for those of us who did discover it to find groups to play it with. And yes, that did happen because of how much it changed.You say that like we don’t do exactly that today. We do.I’m sorry, have you read the AD&D rules? Because they’re far more complicated than any modern edition. And no, the imagination isn’t gone from the game.That is still all you need to play the game.Modern numbers don’t show that at all, and just because more isn’t necessary doesn’t mean more can’t be enjoyable.K.I.S.S. is a good principle for guiding RPG design, but it lacks nuance to be the sole guiding principle. Rather, the goal should be to find the best possible ratio of depth to complexity.</blockquote>

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