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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TreChriron" data-source="post: 7571216" data-attributes="member: 5046">At face value, in casual conversation, I believe people see "complexity" in a negative light for the very real-world reasons you (the OP) pointed out. People are busy. Systems with more "things" to stat out, or interact with, or calculate can add more time to making adventures, or creating a new recently lost character, etc. It takes more time to wrap your head around an RPG with distinct sub-systems that handle various activities differently. Where it suggests how much time it takes a person to dig a ditch based on their characteristics; or the different procedures a character must embark to gather energy, control it, shape it, successfully cast a spell and THEN make successful targeting roll. For a busy group with a busy GM, this is all going to sound less fun than just playing.From the Troll with a Bone to Pick files; it's obviously a curse word. Like go Complexity Yourself you horrible simpleton. In either case I would take the term with a grain of salt. With a tequila chaser. Just to be sure.Digging deep into the weeds of RPG theory regarding complexity;I was a regular lurker on The Forge and studied the essays like a hungry young scholar freshly ordained in a monastery might devour "the sacred works". I jumped into the punch bowl and drank deeply whilst swimming in it. The conversations were intriguing. It was easy to get sucked in. It was all so academic, making you feel like "finally, this hobby my peers are so quick to dismiss has come into its own! soon we will have degrees and orders!".It was glorious! It was also mentally damaging.We could probably dig through the internet archives, create a beautiful glossary of Forge terms, and then try to hash out a real RPG definition of complexity. We would also likely have to save vs. The Forge or lose 1d20 sanity. DC50.As the several pages of this thread have aptly proven, complexity is a weighted term. We are prone in Western culture to pick sides and play a spiritual game of Hungry Hungry Hippos where everyone at the edges reaches out with arms widely-stretched trying to pull anything from the middle to the chosen side. Greedily. We don't like scale, or granularity or subtlety. It forces us to ponder too many possibilities and worse, those possibilities are often far too reasonable. It is after all difficult to prosecute a war against people who are trying to see things from your perspective. This is no fun.The reality of complexity is no fun either. To one GM having to even THINK about the AC of an enemy is too much work while another finds brainstorming 12 different stats with associated derived calculations a simple 5 minute math exercise necessary to get on with the greater fun. One player may shriek with excitement at choosing just the right weapon with just that right stats from a list of 1000 possibilities to defeat the lovingly detailed ogre's armor while another picks up their phone to get lost in twitter because #boringThisTakesTooLong. Some games have 17 (apparently...) points of handling in every combat interaction while others have just one. Like just one roll for the whole thing.It's a scale. It has hundreds of granular points on it from no-complexity to "OMG is this really a game?" and everything in between. What's worse - we don't use "complexity" as a description of any reliable consistent term about what a game is. Instead, we use it as a pejorative. Like, WOW that was the worse restaurant I've ever been too, the food was so COMPLEX!The REAL answer to the OP's question came up several times on the thread, from "what do you mean by complexity?" to "why do you even care?" which (unfortunately) are more apropos than debating complexity as a curse word.Here's my suggestion - don't judge a game by complexity or simplicity. Don't buy into labels like light and medium. Just judge the game by how it makes you feel. Do all those dials and switches turn you on? Does the thought of making a character excite you? Do you smile when you imagine GM/Playing it? Do you WANT it?These criteria will always be more meaningful than the terrible new pejoratives we invent to piss on other people's fun.Love,Trentin C Bergeron. He/Him. Gamer.</blockquote>

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