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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7355016" data-attributes="member: 4937">GURPS was an eye-opener for me in that respect as well.In particular, I've never met a system I didn't want to house rule and I immediately noticed a few problems with GURPS I wanted to tweak.  'Fortunately' there was this brilliant guy who had written a brilliant expansion of the GURPS rules he called GULLIVER that 'fixed' pretty much every problem I had with the system.  But then I discovered there was a problem.  The system was borderline too complex to run, but it was enormously too complex to prepare.  The problem with something like HERO isn't the burden it puts on the PCs.  As people correctly point out, once you finish a character sheet much of that burden is behind you and you can play the game in a fairly straight forward manner.  The problem with all that front end loading of the complexity is that it makes prepping for a game vastly too difficult.  The same sort of problem can happen in something like 3e D&D if the DM tries to apply adjustments in templates, character levels, and advancement to all or most of the monsters and NPCs he uses.   The game might play out in a mostly straight forward way if you have most of the information at hand, but collecting all that information before hand requires far too much time that might otherwise be spent on preparing story and setting elements.Now, complex systems like that might be worth it if they were fully automated and abstracted out in a video game so that you didn't have to worry about it.  But so far no one has come up with a system for playing on a computer that is actually less burdensome in terms of prep than table top play is, or more specifically has as rich of a payoff in play per hour invested in preparation.</blockquote>

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