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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 2418079" data-attributes="member: 3146">FWIW, in most computer game reviews--especially reviews of role-playing games--replayability is thought of as a bonus. It's considered a virtue of Baldur's Gate II, for instance, that you can play through as a paladin and then go back and play through as an evil wizard and have a different experience while mastering a different set of abilities. The same thing is true of Diablo II. One of its virtues was that you could play through the game with different classes and have a different experience each time. Heck, the expansion added only about 25% as much area as the original game but added 40% of the classes in the original game. So, I'd say there's pretty solid evidence that the gaming community in general (if not the p&p gaming community) does consider increasing complexity a good thing in role-playing games.Of course, all of this assumes that playing multiple campaigns is the only way to master the details of the game and that mastery of a game means knowing all of its details. I'm not sure that's true. I've been playing 3.x for about five years now and while, I'm more proficient than I was when I started, I don't recall having much trouble running games after only about six months. A lot of the things I now know but didn't when I started running games--like the fact that glitterdust has no SR or that sunburst has a huge area of effect--were not strictly necessary for me to know in order to run a fun game. I would say that the vast majority of the complexity in D&D is not the actual rules themselves but rather the ways to apply them. For instance, the rules for Vrocks aren't that hard to understand (well their spores ability could actually use better definition--for instance are paladins immune to them because they're immune to disease and can multiple instances of spores stack?), but actually using them effectively in a given game can take a bit of thought and practice. Similarly, an 18th level sorcerer is a complex character, but making effective use of his spells and abilities to emerge victorious from a dungeon is an order of magnitude more complex than just creating the character. Most of the growth in my understanding of the D&D game has come in the latter tactical section rather than in the mechanical section.</blockquote>

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