What Is "Unnecessary Complexity" to You?

[Bagpuss]

Indexes that refer you to look at another part of the index rather than just giving you the page.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Indexes that refer you to look at another part of the index rather than just giving you the page.

Oh my dog, yes. Anytime I find this in a book I'm tempted to throw the thing out the window.

 

[aramis erak]

Indexes that refer you to look at another part of the index rather than just giving you the page.

That's often done when the list is longer than 1 line... it's a method of limiting the length of the index. It's actually standard under several style manuals, even.

 

[Bagpuss]

That's often done when the list is longer than 1 line... it's a method of limiting the length of the index. It's actually standard under several style manuals, even.

The 5th Ed PHB, it's excessive though. In some instances one will refer you to another part of the index which will then refer you to another part.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The problem being that the 'fixed' version also interacts with all those many moving parts, but inevitably has less playtesting than the broken version it is replacing. Which means that it is very likely to cause some other problem elsewhere in the system.

While fair, I've rarely seen it create as many problems as what it was replacing (note "rarely" is not a synonym for "never"). That's still not a reason to keep limping along with a problematic rule construct that has emerged as such.

If they're not really disciplined, the designers risk getting caught up in a quest for an elusive perfection that is always just over the next hill. And they end up accumulating endless revisions that individually fix issues... and yet somehow as a collective they make the overall game worse.

There isn't a particularly good answer to this, I know - just leaving things broken isn't great either. I guess, maybe, the least-worst I can come up with is "fix things that are egregiously broken; try to live with what you can".

Probably the best choice, but there's always the tendency to think once you're going to do errata to fix the big things anyway, you might as well address the small ones too.

 

[dragoner]

I found the power point system in MGT 1E draft 3.2 to be brilliant, along with the ship combat. Actually added uite a bit of realism at minimal expense in play time... especially if using a playmat like FASA STRPG's ship combat systems. Totally abandoned in the actual published game.

Then again, I played Star Fleet Battles for decades.

SFB with the laminated sheets and grease pencils? I remember that, played it some, except played Starfire I-III a lot more.

I made a dton of mgt1 ships, though a player printed out the relevant sections of the 2e playtest docs for ships, we looked over them pre-game at the pub, and I was non-plussed, pretty much the definition of unnecessary complexity. I mean I understand why HG2 did what it did, and it was basically a war game bolted onto the OTU, which is cool, we played that a lot as a war game, because my role playing evolved out of being a chess player, war gamer. Winchell Chung and crew were tweeting about Berg's The Campaign For North Africa, which is another game that takes complexity to the max, I still own SPI's Third World War, and used to play all those games a lot.

Mgt1 spacecraft definitely had issues, any bit of armor making normal lasers and missiles irrelevant, lasers shoot to infinity at -1, particle accelerator turrets became the du jour every weapon, etc.. I still face a lot of that with Cepheus Engine, except it is simple and I know it. Life keeps rolling by, and I don't have the time to learn another rules set if it doesn't have something real to offer.

 

[dragoner]

The 5th Ed PHB, it's excessive though. In some instances one will refer you to another part of the index which will then refer you to another part.

My Solis book at 242 pages has a 12 page index, triple column, 10 point font with around 3,000 entries. I do that a bit, except some would call making any index "excessive". It is definitely time consuming.