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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ezekielcroe9" data-source="post: 9765795" data-attributes="member: 7053359">Oh, it's not my intention to mean that it's a bad thing to design and add crunch! My main point was that (i) being drawn to more crunch seems to be a common occurrence for more experienced players and designers, and (ii) the whole space is still evolving in terms of grappling with how we design and add crunch.I was a person who went through the exact thing I described: I designed a very intricate crafting system for my groups because they loved asking whether they can craft potions or weapons if they harvested monster parts or random herbs. I thought the crunch would be well-received especially since it would allow them to craft more powerful stuff and have cool interactions with their loot and equipment, but instead, my groups were quite turned off by it and preferred an approach that was more free-form.Building on that, my hypothesis to the original question is that the whole TTRPG space as a whole is going through what I (on a smaller scale) went through: a) We started with a few hit RPGs, and then us fans and budding designers started to layer more rules and crunch in our own games, so that they would be more complex, more interesting, more fun. b) However, a lot of the crunch designed are heavy, cumbersome, and ultimately not that meaningful to a large proportion of players, so over time we switched to stripping away rules to focus on the core gameplay that we found that would entertain the majority of people.c) With more and more designers coming up with compelling systems and the space as a whole being much more mature in designing rules and systems, we are starting to see more clever designs and rules that are better received, better integrated into the core game, and crunchier to boot.d) And that's why we are seeing the pendulum swing from rules-lite to crunchier games.I am open to being shown that I'm wrong though! Just found the topic very interesting to discuss and share hypotheses.</blockquote>

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