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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Prime_Evil" data-source="post: 2937515" data-attributes="member: 11984">Agreed. But isn't there a 'sweet spot' on the curve where it is possible to achieve a high  degree of elegance with the minimal additional complexity?  Personally, I think that a truly elegant system is one that makes the inevitable trade-offs between complexity, playability, and flavour in a skillful manner. The best game designers balance these competing demands in a way that can only be described as elegant.    True...but in game design as in software engineering there is always the danger of  unnecessary bloat. Sometimes a computer program needs to be a few million lines long in order to achieve a specific design objective...and sometimes only a dozen lines of code is sufficient. I believe that true elegance is achieved when the rules are no more complex than they absolutely need to be.  Although there is no direct link between complexity and elegance, I suspect that there is a direct link between complexity and robustness. The more complex a rule system is, the greater the risk that different subsytems will interact with one another in ways that the original designer did not anticipate or intend. Complex rule systems often have emergent properties that only arise during actual play and are as much a surprise to the original designer as they are to the players who are discovering them for the first time. The more complex a set of rules become, the more important it is to thoroughly playtest new subsystems before admitting them into the canon of 'official' rules.IMHO, the d20 system has reached a point in its evolution where it will be increasingly difficult to add new features to the official ruleset without breaking existing features.</blockquote>

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