Worlds of Design: The Simplicity Solution

Designers tend to add something to a game in order to fix a problem. This often leads to clunky games. It’s much better to simplify it to fix it.
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“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” --Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Frenchman, airmail pioneer, World War II pilot, and author of The Little Prince.

Simplify, Don’t Add​

When I'm referencing "simple games" I'm specifically discussing games that are simple, but have some depth to them. I prefer to design simple games - games that are fundamentally simple in rules, though not in strategies.

That said, simple doesn't meant the rules are transparent; that is, games that are easy to see how to play well. A simple game can be deep, and gameplay depth is what I want in most games. Simplification of rules also makes it easier for players to deal with the mechanics, and is usually desirable. But here I’m focused on simplification to solve design problems.

The Complexity Problem​

It's common for designers to start with something simple but keep adding things to it, until (we hope) they realize that they have weighed the game down too much and need to go back to being simpler. When I see a problem in my design, I try to find a simple solution rather than add something to the game, but too many designers end up adding more and more to "fix" a problem. Those additions can eventually make a system rules heavy. You've often heard of the acronym KISS (“Keep it Simple, Stupid!”) and that applies here, though I prefer not to imply designers are stupid for not making things simple.

In role-playing games, a game master has to know the rules often better than the players, and thus complexity means more cognitive load for the GM. The more rules there are, the more the GM has to learn and remember, the more room for “rules lawyers” and squabbles over rules. Mastery of the game becomes much more challenging.

Consider combat in Dungeons & Dragons. What started out as combat highly complicated by weapon modifiers (there was an entire chart dedicated to Speed Factor for each weapon, potentially changing turn order), was gradually changed to a much simpler system: hit points, a to hit roll, and a damage roll. Other systems had even more complicated combat, including hit locations, armor absorption, even defenders rolling to block an attack.

This is not to say that D&D combats are necessarily simple. But the game has streamlined the core mechanics to allow complexity during the game itself, both on behalf of the GM and players with their multitude of options. This spreads out decision-making so a player's proficiency in the game is not solely reliant on understanding the rules; a fighter can just swing to hit, while a wizard can use a mechanically complex spell, and both players hopefully have fun in the same game despite their different understanding of the rules. Core simplicity allows layers of gameplay for players with levels of experience with the rules.

How to Simplify​

So how do you simplify a game? I discuss this at length in my book Game Design.

First you must prioritize the elements of the game in order to decide what’s least important. Make a list of the prominent elements of the game, say about 20 things. By the time you’ve done that, you may realize that there are elements you can leave out, thus simplifying the game. If not, then you need to break them into four priority groups, from top to bottom.

If you have active playtesters you can ask them to do this, or even to make the list of elements in the first place, so that you can see what they think is important. When you finish, you’ll know that the fourth group of rules are the targets for elimination, while the other groups can be considered for simplification less urgently.

If there’s a specific problem to fix, the groupings can help you decide how much or how little you want to change a particular element of the game. Presumably the most important elements are the ones you should be wary about changing, if the game is otherwise in good shape. In any case, harmony should to be one of your guides.

In the next article we’ll discuss some ways of achieving simplicity.

Your Turn: How simple do you prefer your role-playing game systems?
 

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Lewis Pulsipher

Lewis Pulsipher

Dragon, White Dwarf, Fiend Folio
I also think we need more nuance in the conversation when we describe a game as "crunchy" or "light". When people say "crunch" they often conflate two very different things: rules complexity, and options. If the core book has 300+ pages, people are quick to say the game is "crunchy", but is it really complex? What if it contains a bestiary that takes up 100 pages? What if the spells take up another 100 pages? That's 200 pages of options, but it doesn't add to the cognitive load needed to play the game if everything works off the same simple mechanics. In fact, having these options actually makes people's job easier if it means you don't have to make them up from scratch.

In my experience, most gamers shy away from complexity, but they want options..players especially. It seems to me that a lot of "light" games are designed with only GMs in mind, because in the quest for simplicity everywhere, they fail to provide players with meaningful character building and advancement options. Yet, most players like to have options that have a meaningful impact on game play (not just flavor...and no "trap" options!). That's why my taste tends towards "rules-light, options-rich" games, and it's a sweet spot I've tried to chase in my own designs.
Can you provide an example of such a game?
 

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I also think we need more nuance in the conversation when we describe a game as "crunchy" or "light". When people say "crunch" they often conflate two very different things: rules complexity, and options. If the core book has 300+ pages, people are quick to say the game is "crunchy", but is it really complex? What if it contains a bestiary that takes up 100 pages? What if the spells take up another 100 pages? That's 200 pages of options, but it doesn't add to the cognitive load needed to play the game if everything works off the same simple mechanics. In fact, having these options actually makes people's job easier if it means you don't have to make them up from scratch.

Though even within that, there are issues of what lifting the complexity is doing, and if it had to be that way to get the job done in an interesting way.

One of the things you rarely see in parts of the hobby is assembly component design. Part of the reason for that is doing it even halfway right requires doing more work than doing ad-hoc exception based design. Part of it is that at least at the GM end, you have to learn the rules the components work under mostly as a set; the constructions with them will be abbreviated enough they won't necessarily mean much to you otherwise (though this can be avoided, but it ends up at that point taking up even more space, since you're duplicating effort). But once you do, you can look at a talent or power and go "Oh, its A+B+X+Y, I see how that interacts with everything" and while its still possible for undesirable side effects to happen, you can easily see them coming.

But you're almost never entirely blindsided by how pieces fit together, since they were designed with an understanding that people were going to plug them in together from the get-go. It also tends to mean there's less overall bloat in time, because entirely new constructs don't need to be prepared to exist.

At the other end, if you want things to mechanically have weight, and not be limited to only people who've heavily invested in them (a lot of times this involves combat for reasons that are another discussion) you have to spell out how they work, and try to make sure the design doesn't make some of them obvious winning ways. Doing that and conveying it is going to require some up-front work, and that isn't something that isn't going to take up space.

(And of course, as you say, even in such system quality-of-life things like lists of opponents are going to eat some space and there's no avoiding that except to throw it into the GMs lap).
 

Can you provide an example of such a game?

I'd say the simpler versions of BRP (e.g. Openquest) meet this criteria somewhat: options granularity via skills, combined with an interesting and granular advancement system, yet the percentile system is intuitive. But honestly, the dearth of such games is one reason I think Elemental (which I co-created) found its niche. Here's an interview I gave here on EN World, and a review:
 

Some of this is just how 3.X implemented old skool "you need to do your research and be prepared for your foes", something that in games like D&D have existed since way back. I think 3.X just took it to its logical extreme point.


A lot of RPGs also make running essentially impossible due to the locked action economy, monsters frequently having higher movement rates, etc. At one level this might be realistic for someone to have to take one for the team but it's not super likely to happen. Agreed that this is a Session 0 point and putting in mechanics that actually allow for coordinated flight would help a ton.
One solution for the 'hard to retreat due to action economy' is to grant the retreating party a special retreat surprise action where once the decision is made to pull back, the retreating party gets to act now. Not that unrealistic as the sudden change in tactics could well cause a brief bit of surprise in the other side.
 

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