What is the most complex TTRPG of all time?

[Rafael Martin]

What is the most complex TTRPG of all time? I am thinking of a game that you would have to be a rocket scientist (or another occupation that needs an extensive education of many different areas of knowledge) to enjoy.

 

[the Jester]

I haven't read it, but from what I have heard, Synnibar is unreasonably complex.

 

[D1Tremere]

I can't think of any that are so complicated as to require an aerospace engineering degree, but both Champions and RIFTS did stand out for how ponderous they were do to the number of basic math operations needed during character creation and gameplay.

 

[dragoner]

At school, there was an aerospace engineer in our group, he went on to command an armorer's section for a flight of F 15 Strike Eagles; we played Traveller, Twilight 2000, and 2300 mostly For classic Traveller he made a spacecraft design and combat system which was the one of the best I saw, too bad I didn't copy it, and he lost it during a move.

 

[Marc_C]

Synnibar

• Synnibar: "Rule Zero of every role-playing game is supposed to be either "The GM is always right" or "The rules shouldn't get in the way of the story", right? Not so in the World of Synnibarr! The GM is required to write his adventure notes down before the game begins, and then show them to the players after the adventure is over — and if the GM deviated from his written notes, the GM is required to award them bonus experience points. Worse still, the rulebook states that the GM "may not, however, deviate from the rules as they are written, for if he or she does and the players find out, then the adventure can be declared null, and the characters must be restored to their original condition, as they were before the game began." As such, rules-lawyering is openly encouraged in this game."
  
  Holy Cow!

 

[Retreater]

• Synnibar: "Rule Zero of every role-playing game is supposed to be either "The GM is always right" or "The rules shouldn't get in the way of the story", right? Not so in the World of Synnibarr! The GM is required to write his adventure notes down before the game begins, and then show them to the players after the adventure is over — and if the GM deviated from his written notes, the GM is required to award them bonus experience points. Worse still, the rulebook states that the GM "may not, however, deviate from the rules as they are written, for if he or she does and the players find out, then the adventure can be declared null, and the characters must be restored to their original condition, as they were before the game began." As such, rules-lawyering is openly encouraged in this game."
  
  Holy Cow!

I'm intrigued. Please continue.

 

[Marc_C]

I'm intrigued. Please continue.

It had the award of the worst RPG ever, until FATAL came out.

More info here: World of Synnibarr (Tabletop Game) - TV Tropes

 

[Doug McCrae]

Phoenix Command, perhaps. According to Wikipedia "Phoenix Command is regularly held up as an example of the extreme end of RPG complexity."

 

[darjr]

What’s the most complex RPG out there?

What’s the most complex RPG out there? I haven’t played Hero System or Rolemaster, but both are known as very high crunch. GURPS has a vast library of material. Pathfinder is pretty complex but from what I hear those others are higher up that scale. What else is there that’s known as super complex?

www.enworld.org

 

[darjr]

From the blog post linked to the wikipedia article about Pheonix Command. I don't say this often, my god!

My odds of putting the burst in the correct location are at 97%. I roll a 37. The burst is at the correct elevation, so I look up my minimum arc. It is .7, so the burst has spread over 1.4 yards. My rate of fire is *7, so I look up on another table the chance of hitting with a ROF of *7 and a MA of .7. The full-page table says I hit with 1 round. Now roll for the hit location. I roll a 292 and look up on the Side Hit table (I hit him in the side) and the bullet passes through the man's liver and stomach. Now I look up on one of the 64+ damage tables (yes, there's a specific table for a side hit to the hip socket) and find the one for a side hit to the stomach-liver.