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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8559287" data-attributes="member: 6801252">There's multiple kinds for me, the big obvious one is actually if a system functions off a lot of very 'different' things, like if it uses multiple distinct systems that have to be learned because they aren't necessarily derived from each other, so each thing has to be explained directly rather than hanging off something else. The more 'centralized' a system is, referring back to a basic set of mechanics, the less complex it is, even if its actually really expansive. From what I recall, the 3.5 grapple system is like this, and I felt it when we moved on from 4e and learned about Saving Throws instead of just having multiple defenses. Meanwhile pf2e is a chonky system, but its all permutations of the same handful of ideas, so once you have the basics of it, its rare to find something thats hard to understand.Then there's density of calculation, my buddy had to make a spreadsheet in excel to track their 4e unity avenger because the math changed based on how many people were standing next to them, but the game had another conditional numbers from feats or conditions that were normally in play. Meanwhile Lancer is a similarly tactical game, but I can see that the calculations remain very simple due to the way its dice rolls work, and how accuracy and difficulty work, as I'm currently learning the game to run it at some point. Just today I found the brutal talent and was admiring how it was stacking "Accuracy" per miss, but ultimately can only ever be as valuable as +6 to the roll, since it was just rolling a d6 per accuracy point and adding the highest d6 result to the roll-- that's never actually going to result in a whole bunch of calculations, just a fistful of dice and a glance to see which comes up highest.The next is when something is designed in a way that corners me when I try to modify it, I felt like 5e could be this way, in reality, due to things like the anti-granularity of advantage making it hard to add things, or the way classes are designed around rests per day, changing one thing always feels like it breaks something else. My collection of power gamers were always notifying me of how a proposed alteration would likely change our meta, obviously its quite a bit easier if your players don't place your alterations under pressure but that's just part of how we all game, even me.Sometimes games can be so abstract with their rules, that its hard to wrap your head around when a mechanic should be used and that can be a form of complexity, I think this ties into the recent dialogue on twitter about how some rule sets require 'media literacy' to pull a lot of the weight in how they should be played. Similarly, there are games that leave the pacing and structure of something like a fight scene up to the GM, and those can be kind of painful because I'm right back to freeform roleplaying and deciding how imapctful it makes sense for something to be-- I'm actually looking forward to trying Avatar Legends now that I got my pdf because I feel like Masks needed something along the lines of its exchange system to help GMs structure something as pacing centric as a fight scene. Finally, things that require GM rulings can be annoying for me, because my table values game balance enough to necessitate me understanding the consequences of how I rule, so a system that spells out how I should rule somewhere is less complex than a system that doesn't, and a system that lets me see the consequences of my actions (or tells me what they'll be for certain courses of action) feel less complex as well.</blockquote>

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