Will the complexity pendulum swing back?

I am open to being shown that I'm wrong though! Just found the topic very interesting to discuss and share hypotheses.
People are rarely "wrong" when it comes to discussing likes/dislikes surrounding RPGs. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.

That said...I don't like crunch. I like fast, easy-to-learn games, and I tend to think that to the degree there is a pendulum, it's just slightly swinging away from crunch.

I will accept some degree of crunch from newer D&D variants because the baseline of experience I already have with D&D underpins them, so they have an unfair advantage in terms of my crunch tolerance.
 

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The OSR started with OSRIC, the retro-clone of AD&D, which is not "rules lite" in anyone's estimation, I don't think. The move toward lite games, including in the OSR, is a recent phenomenon. That's why I called it a pendulum.

Relatedly, OSRIC is getting a new edition.
AD&D had a bunch of tables and some obscure prose (love that Gygaxian syntax), but as someone who came at it after starting with 3E, I'd put AD&D 1E around the same complexity level as 5E.
 

My experience with AD&D 1e was that it was an extremely rules-heavy system, so much so that practically everyone ignored most of those crunchy rules. That made it rules-light in practice, as it was played in most groups. But the rules-as-written were heavyweight ones.

Although my mileage probably varies from yours. I consider the incorporation of skills and feats - especially skills - to be one of the best parts of 3.x.
Compared to what? What are some RPGs that you think are less crunchy than 1e was?

Granted, I preferred B/E and AD&E 2e to 1e. I just don't particularly think of 1e as crunchy by the standards of the past 30 years.
 


I think the communication issue is that rules complexity will, by necessity, conflict with freeform dialogue and thespianism; these are the practices at the table that people often label as "roleplaying". The conflict is that expressing your character through character design and actions taken is just as much "roleplaying" as talking like your character in non-rules mediated dialogue.

Yep. Roleplaying can be fairly broad in practice but most people mean something much more specific and focused when personally using the term. Seems to be the crux of the dilemma.
 


I feel like AD&D is/was rules lite. Everything before 3 was rules lite, IMO. It was with the addition and expansion of skills (went beyond NWPs) and feats that things went off the rails, and D&D has been trying to unwind those decisions ever since.
This seems to be one of those "crunch" assessments that only takes into account PC capabilities, not the mass of the rules. From a character ability perspective, AD&D was lighter than modern versions, but AD&D had a ton of other rules and subsystems.
 

AD&D had a bunch of tables and some obscure prose (love that Gygaxian syntax), but as someone who came at it after starting with 3E, I'd put AD&D 1E around the same complexity level as 5E.
AD&D was chock full of subsystems. My guess would be that you did not use all of those after starting with 3E, so have a "cleaned up" version of AD&D in your mind.
 

@Reynard Would you agree that increased complexity impacts roleplaying by slowing it down? I'm not implying more/worse than that. Just trying to see what we might agree on here. I'm not suggesting that "slow" necessarily equals bad.
If you are specifically talking about "social combat" I suppose so. But having a wide range of combat maneuvers available (just by way of example) wouldn't impact your ability to roleplay negotiations with the Duke, would they?
 

Apropos of complexity, I am not so sure that the pendulum, as it were, has swung away from complexity that much. Mid-to-high-complexity games, from D&D to Pathfinder to Warhammer, still have massive player bases, after all. Shadowdark has been pretty popular - but so have Daggerheart and Draw Steel, which are both more complex.



Apropos of crunch "vs." roleplay, which seems to be an emerging subthread:

Example #1:
I was filling in for my brother in a D&D 5e game, say, two years ago. He had a gnome barbarian, they were playing Storm King's Thunder, and the party had recently triumphed against a pair of fire giants, with the barbarian being instrumental in slaying one of them.

So, when they went to a gambling boat, I made a point of having the character boast to NPCs that he had killed a fire giant. This led to an arm-wrestling challenge from a goliath, which the DM structured as a best-three-out-of-five Strength roll-off - I believe Strength (Athletics), though I don't recall exactly any more.

DM ruled that I could rage for the duration of the arm-wrestling match, giving me advantage on Strength checks. I flubbed the first two rolls despite it, then came back to win the challenge. We were all very excited by the result - me most of all, and I rose up from my seat, arms in the air, shouting "I killed a fire giant!"

(It was also a great way for the barbarian to contribute meaningfully to the social scene.)

To be sure, I would have been entertained by a different result - perhaps buying the goliath a drink with as much good grace as I could muster and then spending the rest of the scene sulking whilst having onlookers politely or not-so-politely laughing at my assertion, only to carry a grudge against the gambling boat and its folks for the rest of the campaign - which would have then paid off when the group returned later and ended up getting it shut down.

Example #2:
I'm playing in a Spelljammer game my brother is running, and one of the other party members is playing a fairy (from Wild Beyond the Witchlight IIRC) who happened to make a deal with archfey belonging to the Gloaming Court, seat of the Queen of Air and Darkness.

His character wanted revenge against the person who wronged their parents (the character is non-binary, the player isn't), although they saw it as justice - having, rightfully, felt that the formal systems of justice, such as they were on the Rock of Bral, had failed.

The fey agreed to enchant two of the character's pistol bullets to inflict unimaginable pain on their targets. The price was that the character had to cause harm someone they loved.

When we finally slew this villain (who had fallen in with a cult of Elemental Evil), she ended up dying instantly, turning to stone, and exploding; the character ended up losing out on the emotional payoff of their revenge, while still being on the hook to the archfey for their own end of the bargain.

As a group of players, we're still riding off the satisfying arc the game mechanics dealt us: a character hell-bent on revenge discovering that it is a bitter fruit of futility is meaty stuff!

Conclusion:
All that is to say that I do not see any conflict between complexity of rules and quality of roleplay - indeed, in both examples I have provided, the mediation of the mechanics actually made for better roleplay than I think we could have achieved otherwise.

I should think, however, that complexity of rules eats up the time available for roleplay, and it's well and good if folks find that bothersome.
 

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