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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7759062" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think that this is true in general. Like most things about mechanical design, it depends on the details.Moldvay Basic is a reasonably simple game. It can be made more complex by eg bringing in bits and pieces of AD&D, like the separation of race and class, or differential weapon damage for size S-M and size L, or more and more complicated spells, etc.Prince Valiant is a reasonably simple game. I have no idea how you woud go about making it more complex. The advice in the rulebook (at least my version, which is from the recent Kickstarter; I don't know if this was in the original book) is "If you want a more complex Arthurian game, try Pendragon". Which seems the right suggestion to me.Burning Wheel in its full glory is a complex game, but it can be pretty easily simplified (by dropping the detailed combat and magic systems) to be a game of simply "GM sets the DC, player makes a check on the appropriate attribute on his/her sheet" - which is fairly simple in mechanical terms at least (not necessarily in its demands on the GM's ability to adjudicate).Classic Traveller is a moderately complex game (though simpler, I think, than any post-Moldvay edition of D&D) and I can't see how any of that complexity could be stripped out without narrowing the range of play the game allows for (ie unlike Burning Wheel, dropping subsystems equates to dropping that aspect of play, be it starship travel or planetary exploration or whatever).5e could fairly easily be made more complex by eg introducing more intricate rules for setting DCs out of combat, by lengthening the spell lists, by introducing more feats that are more mechanically intricate, etc. But it couldn't be made more complex by eg introducing 4e-style PC gen (ie power-based) - you might write up new classes based on the warlock, but if you look at eg the Champion fighter there's simply not the design space to reconstruct that as a power-based fighter. (Which contrasts, say, with Moldvay Basic which makes it pretty easy to separate race and class and thus take the game closer to its more complex cousins.)</blockquote>

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