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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wolv0rine" data-source="post: 3295404" data-attributes="member: 9045">Since when has complexity choked and inhibited anything from gathering new interested people?  New uninterested people, sure.Programming isn’t exactly simple, but people keep getting interested in it.  Even web coding could be a hell of a lot simpler, but web pages keep popping up.  I cannot agree that just because RPGs are a niche product that appeals to a limited sub-set of the population that it must become less complex to continue.  On what are we basing our thoughts that if we make it easier and easier for someone with only a passing glimmer of interest and a 3rd grade reading level to understand that the gamer base will grow?  Hopeful thinkingThe rules may have grown more interconnected and complex in their variance and scope (skills, feats, PrCs, AoO, blah blah) but the books themselves have grown less and less complex.  The verbiage and phrasing, the presentation, the wrting has grown ever-more simplified.  The books are being more and more written to be absorbable with no actual thought required to understand what’s being said.Sure, they don’t need to be written with Gygaxian prose and uncommon word choice that prompts a young’un to pick up a dictionary.  I’m not trying to imply that D&D books should be an IQ test or intentionally difficult to understand, I’m just saying that when the level of writing has become dumbed-down enough that I find my intelligence being insulted when I read it by the text itself presuming that I’m not very bright, I think it’s gone too far.And just as an aside, do you mean that you think a skills system is a waste of time, or that you’d like to see a system that doesn’t make use of skill point spending implemented?Plot out the fun to complexity graph and target the game where fun peaks?  I’m sorry, I know that’s intended to come across as responsibly proactive and well-meaning and all, but that line of text in and of itself just seems to kind of want to suck ‘fun’ into it like a black hole. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />How in the name of all that’s holy is the game too complicated?  What is the standard of ‘too complicated’?  I know some people have grumped that with the rigors of grown-up life (work, family, other hobbies, all that stuff) that they don’t have the kind of time they used to have to devote to the game, but that’s just 2+2 kind of stuff.  Of course you don’t.  But I fail to see the appeal of making the game into some kind of out-of-the-box plug-and-play thing just to make that easier.  That certainly isn’t what we got hooked on as kids that lead us here now.  Why would we want to turn it into that, when that’s not what we got into it for?Just what exactly am I afraid of?  Well, do you recognize the difference between playing a game of D&D and deciding to use minis, and playing a mini game that’s called D&D?  Having tools that I may or may not decide to use I my game is great, having the game change to revolve around tools that were never a part of the game at it’s core is another.If the game requires a board, it has become a board game.If the game requires minis, it has become a mini game.(I had about 5 paragraphs where I went on about suggestions like pda/cellphone driven softwares, online versions, software integration, etc.  In the end I don’t think it was worth the effort to go into them, but I will say that I feel those are much more limiting to your potential playerbase than the complexity of the rules))In the end, what I’m afraid of is D&D no longer being even vaguely recognizable as the game that got me interested in Role-Playing anymore.  I’d suddenly become an Ex-Gamer, and I’d hate for that to happen.Yes, there is an uphill battle in getting new gamers interested in D&D (or RPGs in general) against more visually arresting and instant-gratification providing activities.  But the question remains, at what point do we draw the line and say “I am willing to push the game this far, even though by pushing it this distance it is no longer the game I began pushing?”I’m unnecessarily restricting my market by suggesting that the books not be written for a grammar school level reading ability?  Yeah, I suppose so.  Didn’t the cigarette industry have a similar claim when people got in a big uproar about 5-10 year olds smoking?Some restrictions aren’t that bad.And it’s not like grammar school age kids can’t learn the game.  I know kids in grammar school (or who were in grammar school when they started) who love the game, and play.  Sure they may need an older person to help teach them (or maybe not), but if so…  great, we call that ‘Mentoring’, it’s usually a good thing.</blockquote>

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