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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libramarian" data-source="post: 5998075" data-attributes="member: 6688858">This seems to me to be a sort of aesthetic judgement that is only loosely related to usability. You know those people who organize their house until it looks perfectly ordered and clean, which is usually beyond the point of functional cleanliness and sometimes actually makes it harder to find things when you need them? That's what this sounds like to me.Usability is a pretty complex thing. I don't the rule of thumb "does it look messy?" is actually a very accurate way to judge it. There are multiple aspects to consider.E.g. the 1e combat system is:a) Abstruse. It's hard to figure out.b) Unintuitive. It's hard to remember. It takes a lot of practice before you memorize everything.but it's not actually c) Slow.It's actually pretty interesting in the way that it modularizes the rules. It has switches: weapon vs. armor mods, weapon speed factor, spellcasting time. These switches are turned off when you're just womping on some kobolds, and turned on for extra detail when you're facing an NPC adventuring party. And if you want, you can keep the switches off and treat the NPC adventurers like big kobolds without breaking the game. This is why people maintain that 1e combat is simple and fast, despite how "messy" it looks in the abstract.</blockquote>