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<blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 443077" data-attributes="member: 5328">That hasn't been my experience. My experience is that so long as the game doesn't imply unrealistic things you can use common sense instead of rules, and therefore that a realistic game can have simple rules. The thing that generates irreducible complexity is unrealistic features, because the GM and players can have no common sense about what no-one has experience of, and therefore the whatever-it-is has to be described in detail.For example, it is fairly easy to write workable rules to include guns in a game, because possible players know a lot about what guns and bullets do. High-tech devices and magical spells, on the other hand, require more complex rules: who has any intuition about what Ingel's Awful Withering does? That's why a fantasy game has a big-to-huge section describing exactly what each of hundreds of spells or magical applications does, where a realistic game has a few pages of general rules and a table or two. And that in turn is what makes realistic games easier to run without study than D&amp;D.All of which is not to say that the effort of learning D&amp;D might not be a fair price for what it has to offer. YDWYDWP.Regards,Agback</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Agback, post: 443077, member: 5328"] That hasn't been my experience. My experience is that so long as the game doesn't imply unrealistic things you can use common sense instead of rules, and therefore that a realistic game can have simple rules. The thing that generates irreducible complexity is unrealistic features, because the GM and players can have no common sense about what no-one has experience of, and therefore the whatever-it-is has to be described in detail. For example, it is fairly easy to write workable rules to include guns in a game, because possible players know a lot about what guns and bullets do. High-tech devices and magical spells, on the other hand, require more complex rules: who has any intuition about what Ingel's Awful Withering does? That's why a fantasy game has a big-to-huge section describing exactly what each of hundreds of spells or magical applications does, where a realistic game has a few pages of general rules and a table or two. And that in turn is what makes realistic games easier to run without study than D&D. All of which is not to say that the effort of learning D&D might not be a fair price for what it has to offer. YDWYDWP. Regards, Agback [/QUOTE]

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