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I eventually figured out that I really enjoyed creating characters in games with complex rules, but I really enjoyed playing (and DMing) simpler games.
The World of Synnibarr (second edition) has a seven step process for resolving an attack, but the damage step actually has five sub-steps to it, and a lot of the other steps have other checks that need to be made within them.There’s no game that takes twelve steps to resolve an attack.
As you reference spells below, there are a lot of them in vancian systems that are just...pointless. Noone takes them, and even people with no system mastery know they're bad.
In what way?
I thought I did, very concisely:The question you should be asking is, "How much complexity do I want, and why?"
I got the impression, back in the classic game (1e AD&D, rather than 0D&D, from my perspective, having started in 1980), that spells and magic items were very often added to the game because they were inspired by something in a Vance story or Harryhausen movie or Ditko comic or crib notes mythology or whatever. Science fiction as much as fantasy sources, for that matter.Too often though, going all the way back to the 1st edition of the game, spells are considered only from the perspective of their balance on the battle map, and not on their implications for the setting. That's why you find spells like 'Create Water' priced as if they are a trivial feat, and not one of the most extraordinary acts of magic, or spells like Fabricate or Circle of Teleportation with their world shaking implications.
You sound like the expert in this, but it seems to me that I can describe all the what it is by simply identifying where all the constituents are. That is to say, in both universes I could simply say: proton, electron, proton, electron, etc. And as long as I labeled where all the parts where and where they were going (ignoring some known problems with that), I would still have a complete description.
Indeed, does it take more or less information to describe 'bunch of protons and electrons' compared to 'U238'?
I would say most times. I'll be happy to take correction over when my word choice is sloppy and ill-considered. I certainly wasn't thinking of this distinction until you brought it up clearly.
I get where you are going with that, but I suspect that in reality the wrist watch is similar to a three body problem where the pieces are in a stable, regularized orbit
The watch is only easily described in the sense that it is meant to model something and we can easily describe the thing that it models.
I'm not sure that he complicated nature of the rules is for most humans the real problem. Humans are pretty well adapted to complications. What seems to draw complaints is the computational burden of the rules.
Gamers, as with engineers, make a model that reduces the computational burden down to something approachable, where the realism of the model is 'good enough'.
I eventually figured out that I really enjoyed creating characters in games with complex rules, but I really enjoyed playing (and DMing) simpler games.
Except the real universe also has... neutrons (and thus *all* arrangements in atoms other than hydrogen), other baryons with charm and strange and other quarks, mesons, the muon and the tau leptons, a bunch of neutrinos, a bunch of bosons other than the photon...
So, yeah, "everything is hydrogen" leaves lots of things out.
Yep. Hydrogen has one single particle in its nucleus.
U238 has 238 protons and neutrons, and each atom may have a different internal layout of how those particles are arranged.
I think the issue lies in the *number of steps and considerations*, which extends the time required to resolve actions, and to some degree the cognitive distance from the narrative this takes the player (essentially, breaking of immersion).
Um, math/engineer-geek-bias showing. A great number of gamers these days don't come from the STEM background, and don't primarily work/think in terms of mathematical models at all. I've seen at least one interesting RPG that came not out of the math-and-model paradigm of the engineer/wargamer, but instead came out of theater and improv and its exercises. IIRC, this game has little or no computational burden at all - there are no numbers (again, IIRC). I'll see if I can find the reference.
That's the design goal for many complex games. You get to play both games -- the optional solo background tinkering of characters or spaceships or whatever, and the fast front-end group gameplay. I very much enjoy both aspects of the game, and a game which has them both is the perfect game for me.