Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2282249" data-attributes="member: 10201">Huh. If i were ever playing an RPG whose system got in the way of the RPing, i'd just pick a different system. Let me put forth a hypothetical: if a new system would take you a session of actual play to get completely comfortable with, and therefore you know that your group's RPing would suffer for that session (because that's what happens when your group is learning a new system), would that be too big of a cost? What if it would take you an hour of actual play to get comfortable, during which the RPing woudl suffer? What if it was 15min?Now, how many hours/sessions does it take to get completely comfortable with the rules when you add a major new chunk of rules, like the environment books, or Complete ____ ?These are semi-rhetorical questions--feel free to answer them, but my point is simply that the lost time/effort of learning a new system can be less than that incurred on an ongoing basis with a complex system (assuming you make changes to the rules ever, such as by introducing new books). Or, another way to look at it: let's say your RPing suffered for 6 sessions as a result of learning D20 System. Now, let's say you've played it for 3 years. Would you be any worse off if you'd played 3 different systems, each for a year, and spent one session learning each? You'd have "wasted" 3 sessions, instead of 6, and now there'd be 3 systems that you'd already know, and not have to spend any time learning, should you be invited to play, instead of just 1.IME, the familiarization time for something very crunchy like Hero, GURPS, or D20 System can literally be an order of magnitude or more greater than for something rules-lite like Over the Edge or Everway or Dread. I'm not saying this would necessarily be true for you, or any particular reader of this thread, but it is certainly true for some. I've dealt with a fair number of gamers, frex, who still hadn't really grokked D&D3E after 6mo of weekly gaming. Some of those same gamers were comfortable with BESM by the middle of the first session. I can't say for certain that this is an artifact of complexity, rather than style, but it certainly looks that way.</blockquote>

Verification