Will the complexity pendulum swing back?

[Micah Sweet]

Oh, damn though. The Arduin Grimoire was so $&#%* fantastic. Those first three books changed my world at the time, opening my eyes to what an outside perspective could bring to D&D.

I've never seen them. Are they still accessible?

 

[Reynard]

I wonder if we can classify the different kinds of complexity and assess their relative popularity.

Player Facing Option Complexity seems to be both the most common and most popular form of complexity. lots of classes, feats, talents, powers, skills, spells, etc. Even games that are otherwise pretty light will sometimes layer these things on top (I put 5E in this category).

Then there is Fiddly Rules Complexity, where you have all the modifiers and subsystems, conditions and special circumstances. 3.x and now PF2E definitely have these. Even SWADE to some degree (although SWADE is definitely lighter than 3.x).

There is also Optional Rules and Dials Complexity -- games that let you define how the game works. Most toolkit games have this kind of complexity, some more overtly than others. 5E 2014 had some optional rules, while as I understand it Cortex is essentially entirely optional rules (like FUDGE).

What other kinds of complexity are there?

 

[Micah Sweet]

We already have that though. It was a game called Pool of Radiance.

I absolutely loved Pool of Radiance, and the rest of the Gold Box games.

 

[Morrus]

On that note (while recognising my own complicity) let’s please avoid turning this into Yet Another AI Thread Where One Person Stans It For Pages While Everyone Argues With Them. We’ve had enough of those and we all know how it will go, word for word. Let’s get back to the actual thread topic please. Thanks!

 

[kermit4karate]

I wonder if we can classify the different kinds of complexity and assess their relative popularity.

Player Facing Option Complexity seems to be both the most common and most popular form of complexity. lots of classes, feats, talents, powers, skills, spells, etc. Even games that are otherwise pretty light will sometimes layer these things on top (I put 5E in this category).

Then there is Fiddly Rules Complexity, where you have all the modifiers and subsystems, conditions and special circumstances. 3.x and now PF2E definitely have these. Even SWADE to some degree (although SWADE is definitely lighter than 3.x).

There is also Optional Rules and Dials Complexity -- games that let you define how the game works. Most toolkit games have this kind of complexity, some more overtly than others. 5E 2014 had some optional rules, while as I understand it Cortex is essentially entirely optional rules (like FUDGE).

What other kinds of complexity are there?

Don't know if it's worthy of a callout, but how about just the complexity introduced by poorly organized rulebooks?

Some books are just so disorganized that I struggle to find almost anything in them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I appreciate the touchy nature of the subject, but I very much disagree. It hasn't been that for months, if not at least a year. It's advancing well beyond the slop stage and is already such an accurate simulation of a real person that I don't believe most people can even tell when they're interacting with an AI.

Ha! How many people are wondering right now, "Hmm..is this frog guy an actual human??"

Give that frog a Turing Test!

 

[Agamon]

That's a gross oversimplification. They do regurgitate info, but LLMs are regurgitating based on many billions of data points.

Their predictive ability isn't like a video game where an NPC pulls from 100 different possible responses to an inquiry. They're pulling the most apt next word in their response from a billion similar inquiries.

At what point is the dataset of possible responses so large that it effectively simulates a human's free choice?

Answer: that point is neeeeear.

Is it still a simulation? Yes. Is the simulation becoming so good that it might as well be considered a pretty good facsimile of a human? It's getting there, like it or not.

Right, facsimile. They can only create an illusion that looks real. Not create a work of art, but instead a xerox of the mona lisa. While it will be an excellent tool to fool people, that's about the extent of the tech. Something different will be needed for the singularity.

 

[Reynard]

Don't know if it's worthy of a callout, but how about just the complexity introduced by poorly organized rulebooks?

Some books are just so disorganized that I struggle to find almost anything in them.

While that can be a problem, I am not sure it adds anything to the discussion. If we go there, we have to then include things like overly "artsy" layout and graphic design, which I don't think qualifies.

 

[Maxperson]

With a couple of notable exceptions, such as Pathfinder 2E, it seems like the TTRPG industry has been trending toward simplicity for years now. But with the recent releases of Daggerheart and Draw Steel -- medium and heavy crunch system respectively -- maybe the pendulum is swing back toward at least some degree of system complexity and crunch.

What do you think? Is crunch coming back? And is that desirable, in your opinion?

I think the game really needed to be simpler than 3e or 4e, but that WotC went too far the other direction and over simplified 5e. Games like Daggerheart which are more complex than 5e, but less so than 3e or 4e are hitting that sweet spot I think.

 

[kermit4karate]

I've never seen them. Are they still accessible?

I haven't seen them in a store for many years. I have seen old copies of them on eBay, and I still have the first three in a box somewhere in my garage.

They were somewhat like the Shadowdark core rulebook in that they contained hundreds of tables for crits, random encounters, magic items, other things -- just massive amounts of resource material in very small type, and astonishingly creative stuff too. To this day, I rarely see D&D-ish resource books with anything near the value that was in those Arduin books 35 years ago.