Will the complexity pendulum swing back?

[MGibster]

But there are a huge number of exceptions and options, even within just the original 3 core books, and WotC and third parties have spent a decade exploring that design space. There is a ton of 5E crunch out there, even if it is not the crunchiness system out there.

I've been running a 2024 campaign for almost nine months now and I still have players who don't know what their characters can do. Players who will ask me, "Do I get a bonus action?" The basic mechanics of D&D are fairly simple, but there's so many moving parts to keep track of during a combat round. Practically speaking, it's on the high side of medium crunch so far as I'm concerned. If some people want to argue it's a high crunch game they're not going to get a lot of pushback from me.

 

[Parmandur]

I've been running a 2024 campaign for almost nine months now and I still have players who don't know what their characters can do. Players who will ask me, "Do I get a bonus action?" The basic mechanics of D&D are fairly simple, but there's so many moving parts to keep track of during a combat round. Practically speaking, it's on the high side of medium crunch so far as I'm concerned. If some people want to argue it's a high crunch game they're not going to get a lot of pushback from me.

Yeah, exactly, that matches my experience.

There are plenty of eay heavier games, but the design space of lighter games is huuuuuuuuge.

 

[Umbran]

I don't think "crappy explanations and poor organization" are "crunch."

Neither did they, because that isn't what they said.

Willfully restating other people's positions incorrectly is disrespectful. Please don't.

 

[NN]

Seems to me there are two reasons for crunch

1. verisimilitude

2. an opportunity for player rules mastery


My brilliant conclusion from these points is a work in progress.

 

[zarionofarabel]

Seems to me there are two reasons for crunch

1. verisimilitude

2. an opportunity for player rules mastery


My brilliant conclusion from these points is a work in progress.

I'll add two more specifically for games with "skill crunch" for games that have lots of fairly narrowly defined skills. Say having like biology, chemistry, and physics as separate skills as opposed to just having a single science skill.

3. A form of niche protection, as you can only have so many skills at higher levels. It also allows for more granular niche protection within broader archetypes. You could for instance have two "academics" in the party, with wildly different focuses. Great for mystery games like CoC.

4. Players often use the skills on the character sheet as prompts for what they "can do" in a game. So a nice list of skills is essentially a laundry list of potential actions a PC might take.

 

[Retros_x]

I have never been convinced by the argument that rules complexities impacts "roleplaying" at all.

In my experience the more complex the rules, the more players are thinking about rules and less about their role. The game becomes "find the right cell on my excel sheet" and less "what would my character do". But thats just anecdotal and probably heavy depending on player type and experience.

To me, if a VTT does a lot of things on it's own, it removes me from the game. I understand it is convenient, but at some point you hardly interact with the game itself anymore.

I agree and I wonder - if you don't want to interact with the game rules - why choose a complex ruleset anyway if you want to automate it away?

 

[Neonchameleon]

Page counts aren't complexity. Shadowdark is 300 pages.

That said, I am not saying 5E is a "lite" game. I might quibble with your 7, but not by much. Almost all of 5Es complexity is in character ability exceptions. They have flattened or outright deleted most of the rest.

Shadowdark is IIRC 300 pages including its DMG and MM. But I find the size of a "full" character sheet a much better indication and comparator especially on an exception based game. By full character sheet I mean including things you might need to reference in play that are non-standard, like spells.

Numerically a 5e level 5 cleric (and yes I consider a full caster fair given that about half of all characters are full casters; we aren't talking druid here) has as basics:

• Six stats
• Six stat modifiers
• Six saving throws of which at least two won't be the stat modifier
• 17 skills of which at least four won't be the stat modifier
• Two or more languages or tool proficiencies
• Too many hit points to track on a single d20
• An armour class
• Some hit dice
• A spell attack number and Spell Save DC
• Possibly one (maybe even two) weapon attack bonus depending what they attack with
• A feat unless you went full ASI
• A background special ability or feat
• A speed value
• Three or four special abilities from their ancestry

Whew! And we haven't even started on the class yet. The class (Cleric) and subclass (Life cleric) bring:

• Channel Divinity (two options)
• Destroy Undead
• A subclass feature (e.g. Disciple of Life)
• Four cantrips
• About eight or nine prepared non-cantrip spells
• A further six prepared spells from their subclass
• Three levels of spell slots to track

And those spells each contain four lines of basic data plus at least a paragraph of rules.

You can argue that 5e is the lightest mainline D&D since the white box (4e is a credible contender) but it's a pretty heavy game even if it's no 3.X and is more coherent than AD&D.

 

[Flying Toaster]

I'm thinking the same is true of a complicated board game like Star Fleet Battles. The basic SFB game has about 400 pages of rules at this point (I think), filled to the brim with how players handle energy allocation, direct fire weapons, indirect fire weapons, movement, transporters, mines, nuclear space mines, shuttles, fighters, Tholian Webs, boarding parties, etc., etc. As complicated as SFB is, it's actually pretty straight forward in that the decision spaces for players are fairly limited. Can you do X on your movement phase? The answer is no unless the rules explicitly state otherwise. Can you drain batteries to power your shields? I don't know, what does it say under the rules for batteries?

No matter whether we're talking about a crunchy or lite RPG, players have a degree of freedom of choice that simply doesn't exist in any board game I've ever played. The degree of freedom the player has when it comes to determining what their playing piece, their character, does in an RPG is one of the things that differentiate them from a board game. It might be easier to accommodate that freedom of choice in games with lower levels of crunch.

When I played SFB the guy who hosted (because he owned all of the stuff) had at least three house rules designed to reduce complexity, and none of us players saw any reason to dispute them.

(1) No boarding parties or ground troops
(2) No electronic warfare, because ECM & ECCM mostly seemed to just cancel each other out
(3) If a ship took damage and lost warp engines, impulse, etc, we just reduced its movement rather than redo energy allocation, because that would take up time while offering few meaningful decisions

It was still by far the crunchiest game I have ever played. We just played isolated scenarios that seemed interesting, and never even considered doing the full General War campaign.

 

[TheSword]

I see two problems with that idea:

• Gamers will resist needing a VTT, provided by some third party, to play. When a company changes its offerings, oh, look, our three-year campaign that was about to reach its climax is gone. Forever.
• People who play crunchy games usually modify them, at least a bit. The more automation in a VTT, the harder it will be to tweak the rules. That might be fixable by creating software tools specifically for expressing TTRPG rules, but that's definitely a bigger job than just implementing rules inflexibly.

I am so far from being a programmer it isn’t funny but even I can make basic adjustments to the Foundry rules. I can create homebrew stuff by duplicating then altering existing similar items.

For more complicated systemic stuff with systems like Foundry there is a huge amount of modification and adjustment available. If you want a house rule, you can guarantee that someone somewhere has already made a mod or macro for it. Certainly on Foundry anyway. I think folks with house rules will pick a VTT like that and those that want a vanilla play experience will use systems like Roll20 or Maps/Beyond. There will be consumer choice just as there is with pen and paper.

 

[Reynard]

I've been running a 2024 campaign for almost nine months now and I still have players who don't know what their characters can do. Players who will ask me, "Do I get a bonus action?" The basic mechanics of D&D are fairly simple, but there's so many moving parts to keep track of during a combat round. Practically speaking, it's on the high side of medium crunch so far as I'm concerned. If some people want to argue it's a high crunch game they're not going to get a lot of pushback from me.

Are you sure that isn't a function of your players not bothering to learn their abilities?