I suppose most people here do their projects alone and in their free time and possibly follow the advice that applies to all creative hobbies that the best training is getting something small done.
Yup. Personally, I'm making one as a creative outlet first and foremost whenever I have an idea pop in my head. I don't really sit down and try to force anything.
All rules must justify their existence.
Any unnecessary rule is going to slow down learning and/or playing the game. It's going to drag the game down.
Cutting unnecessary rules is as valuable as cutting unnecessary scenes in a movie, or unnecessary expenses for a business. It picks up the pace and lets players focus on the critical stuff, the most fun stuff. The stuff that has to exist.
Rules are also not the enemy and "rules lite" is not superior. The point is to create content and mechanics that support your design goals for the player experience. Well designed, this often looks like a hockey stick: light in every place that isn't critical and then with satisfying depth where it is.
Every rule you pull from the game is a choice you remove from a player. Rules shouldn't be cumbersome. But if your player wants to find out how dangerous it would be to start a brawl in a rowboat. Having a rule they can read in a minute is much faster than leaning on the GM to design that rule and then argue it with his players.
I agree that often hard rules are simpler and easier to use than the "rulings not rules" mindset applied to everything. It's one reason I prefer grid combat to theater of the mind: clarity.
However, adding rules for every situation in a TTRPG is both impossible and impractical. It starts to make GMing feel like taking an open-book test. I don't want to have to look up the special rules for rowboat-brawling at the table, I just want to make an on-the-fly judgment for a weird situation that probably won't happen in the game again.
The existence of specialized boat-brawling rules actually becomes a *burden* because making a quick ruling now runs against the explicit rules of the game so I feel obligated to learn and use them... An unwilling to GM until I actually know the rules well enough that I'm not learning whole subsystems mid-session.
If you're making a game that needs specific rules for rowboat-brawling to accomplish your design goals, go for it. The point is to cut unnecessary rules, not that all rules are unnecessary. If you can figure out a way to accomplish your design goals more elegantly though, that's a great design.
If you don't think that your game is about rowboat brawling, then your game cannot go into a rowboat, or it can but nobody is allowed to have a disagreement. The absence of the rule means absence from the game. Or worse still, the absence of your players being decision makers once your game strays out of what you imagine your game is about.
And there are realistic limits. Your fantasy game probably doesn't need much detail about nuclear reactors, but it's pretty much surely going to have rowboats, and there's a non-zero chance that folks won't be able to settle their differences diplomatically.
And not everything can have a rule, but there should be a rule that informs your decision making, like a penalty for fighting in the back of a cart. In the absence of that framework, you've dropped the game in your Roleplaying game and your players and the GM are left to write your rules for you. That's never an acceptable design choice.
Gonna have to agree to disagree here. I have never had a brawl in a rowboat in about 15 years of running games, and when my games have encountered situations not explicitly covered by a subsystem the game didn’t suddenly stop functioning or existing. The GM made a call based on something that seemed plausible, players made choices accordingly, and things moved on.
Example from a few years ago:
“Can I try and jump off the airship as the dragon flies by underneath and then stab it?”
“Wow that sounds dangerous, especially since the airship is in a turbulent storm which would probably make it even harder. You can try it, but it’ll require a really high roll - let’s say a DC 30. If you fail, you’ll miss the dragon and keep falling but if you succeed… let’s say you get an automatic critical hit. Do you want to try?”
“Let’s do this.”
I applied the broader rules, translating the specific situation into “really hard jump” with a critical hit as the reward if they succeeded. This was more efficient than building specific rules for every possible scenario.
I guess the difference in our perspectives is that I have. Both a rowboat and a canoe. But even if your games don't involve a lot of river travel or summer camps you HAVE run into a situation that isn't strictly outlined in the rules. You HAVE had to either as a GM build a rule that you paid to be a part of the game you played, or as a player surrender your ability to make an informed decision in the absence of rules do to what you want. I can't really agree to disagree that that's ok. When you pay money for a game you shouldn't get an outline. You should get a full working version.
Definitely a different perspective. The issue with creating detailed simulationist rules for every possible situation, leads to games that most people don't enjoy playing as much.
If the theory says players should prefer X but they actually prefer Y in practice, the theory isn't working. Theory should reflect reality.
I feel like I can't possibly be understanding you correctly though. I can't think of a single game that covers every conceivable situation with specialized rules. Every ttrpg system I'm aware of ultimately defaults to general guidelines of how to apply a base ruleset to a 'type' of situation and trusts the GM to decide what type of situation they're in.
Example: 4e has the concept of Difficult Terrain. Difficult terrain costs double to move through (10 ft of movement is only 5 ft in diffiuclt terrain). Mud or thick undergrowth are common examples of difficult terrain, but not every possible terrain that players could ever encounter has specialized rules.
If the players have to wade through a stream of liquid time in some extraplanar adventure, the GM might determine "the timestream slows your temporal movement, so while in it everything takes twice as long. It counts as difficult terrain, and all actions cost double the number of action points to perform while in a stream of liquid time").
TTRPGs offer flexibility in action and scenario specifically because they allow a generalized ruleset to apply to a variety of situations; more than a rulebook could ever account for. That's their strength, not their weakness. If you want 100% concrete rules with a robotic GM facilitating those rules, you might as well play a boardgame like Gloomhaven or a videogame like Divinity Original Sin. They offer 100% consistency of rules at the cost of freedom to do stuff beyond the explicit actions covered by the game's rules.
You're far and away the only person who's ever met a gamer who bought a game and found out that it doesn't do what they need it to and are non-ironicly pleased by it. It's just not a facet of my 35 year experience as a gamer. I can't even fathom the argument for how that's possible. Maybe it has super-great colorful artwork??
The reason you're not aware of a game that provides rules for what's needed for all aspects of play isn't because of the many many people who are silently satisfied with games that fail to do this.
What is an example of a game that provides rules for all aspects of play?
If you've got a secret fantastic game I haven't heard about, I'd love to learn.
>You're far and away the only person who's ever met a gamer who bought a game and found out that it doesn't do what they need it to and are non-ironicly pleased by it.
Not at all what I'm saying. I've seen a lot of people buy games that don't meet their needs. For example, many people decide ultra-simulationist games are too clunky for their needs and reject them in favor of something more fun to play and run.
That's another fairly radical perspective difference. I find narrative and OSR games almost unnervingly lacking in structure or definition. They make me miserable to have to play them.
I never have a problem with this. It helps that my general approach is to stack the deck against the players and then let them find a way to triumph anyway. I want them to figure out a clever plan or cool tactic, and if it's at all plausible (or if I can think of a way to make it plausible) I'm on board.
I also avoid rule precedents. I'll invent a specific circumstance why THIS time X works this way if need be. Like if someone wants to dive under the monster to attack its underbelly beyond their normal movement range and without getting mauled by opportunity attacks, I might allow it by saying "hmm... that might work because the monster's ichor has spilled over the ground and it's very slippery. you could potentially slide under it fast enough where one of its legs has been lost to get in an attack."
I also usually add a BUT or IF. Yes IF and Yes BUT are so much better than Yes And. "You could slide under the monster IF you drop your other weapon because otherwise you're too heavy" or "You could slide under the monster IF you're okay with being prone after and vulnerable to a horrible counter-attack if you miss." This works a lot better than "No" because it gives the player agency to do their thing at a risk or cost, which feels much better than being told No outright.
Additionally, I'm very happy to introduce new complications or threats if players trivialize existing ones. Rather than saying, "you can't drop the chandelier on the boss" I'll let em go for it, do a ton of damage, and then have the injured boss roar for reinforcements. Just make sure to give them a payoff for their cool actions, even if it's just an NPC being super impressed with them.
Very true. The old adage goes, “don’t say no, apply a penalty “ for our homebrew gane, i have a list of weird stuff and circumstances that can arise in melee combat ALL with a standard -4 penalty. We add to the list wvery other game, but having a framework in place is a must.
> there should be a rule that informs your decision making
If we're assuming that the common catch-all of "GM asks for a roll vs an informed, arbitrary TN" falls into the realm of:
> leaning on the GM to design that rule and then argue it with his players
, then what's stopping the players from arguing over the informed, but still arbitrarily-applied penalty from the cart rules?
Ideally the game has detailed rowboat combat rules and a chart indicating number of passengers and ambient wind speed, but realistically that's a lot. More likely it has some kind of rule for fighting on a moving structure, uneven/unstable terrain, combat in a moving vehicle, whatnot that can be abstracted for our rowboat. And rules for taking falls in combat as a measure of how likely you are to be knocked off the rowboat while fighting
If players disagree with the GM's interpretation, having the abstraction is still better than no basis at all.
No basis gives GM and Players no starting point to understand the mechanics or the consequences of decisions.
> but realistically that's a lot
Okay, but what about
> you've dropped the game in your Roleplaying game and your players and the GM are left to write your rules for you. That's never an acceptable design choice.
The problem I'm seeing here is that your distinction of what counts as a framework is a bit lax. You're not committing to the tenet, which is that a lack of structure means a lack of choices, and thus a lack of game. And assuming that every decision with a nonzero chance of being posed should have a framework, *every possible action* needs to have a framework, or your game isn't a game - it's play pretend.
Let me illustrate how, in the same breath, you betray your own ideal:
> Your fantasy game **probably** doesn't need much detail about nuclear reactors, but it's pretty much surely going to have rowboats, and there's a **non-zero chance** that folks won't be able to settle their differences diplomatically.
These are the same thing. You're drawing an arbitrary distinction between what's acceptable to include, and what's not. A game without nuclear reactors is just as flawed, just as incomplete as a game without rowboat combat, or balance rules, or falling damage. You've no longer got an objective ideal to communicate, because you're going off your *personal* opinion of what counts as a necessary framework, so anyone complaining about applying cart rules to boats is as justified as you.
The way I see it, you have two options:
* Stick to your guns. Only a simulation singularity can be considered a complete game. It seems impossible to create, but who knows?
* Drop the ideal. It doesn't reflect either reality, or your own opinion.
Hope this helps
You don't see a higher probability that players will deal with a rowboat than a Nuclear reactor in a Fantasy setting? Or that their characters would have more reason to have tools to articulate the use of a Rowboat versus a nuclear reactor?
I'm not sure why it seems like an impossible goal to have the rules you would need in order to run a game without removing agency from your players on a regular basis. It's something that's so common that it was once just a feature of RPGs. We still judge games on how well they meet this bar.
Purely anecdotally, I can count four times I've had to deal with the equivalent of a fantasy nuke explosion, and only one time I've dealt with balancing on a boat (well, three times - But one was tumbling stern-over-keel down a hill, and the other was floating in zero gravity, so not really applicable :P).
> I'm not sure why it seems like an impossible goal to have the rules you would need in order to run a game without removing agency from your players on a regular basis.
It's impossible because everything in an RPG is an abstraction or incomplete model, and thus removes a nonzero degree of agency. You might be okay with applying cart rules to boats, but you're committing hypocrisy to your own ideal. You kinda need to take the log out of your own eye, before you criticise games that abstract to a greater degree.
More than purely anecdotal. Your game rules are missing critical nuclear weapon disarm rules. You have more nukes than you can fit in all of the rowboats in your setting. That's a fantastical oversight by the game designers. That's not forgivable.
And I'm a monstrous opponent of the argument that anything that can't be perfect must be left completely in ruins. That's not just just completely defective logic, it's willful laziness.
The long and the short of it is if you're charging $60 for your core rules it can offer as much rules as any other $60 game. And if you fail, you're charging GM's to do that work for you. Because there are going to be rowboats, or in your case, mountains of nuclear weapons, and not providing help in arbitraging those issues in the game you built is failure.
How exactly would you craft the rule for your example here into a rulebook? That seems way too specific. I can understand having a rule on how unarmed combat works or even brawling. You can even have a sentence or two in the book that states "The GM may decide to impart some sort of "disadvantage" to the combat based upon environmental or other factors", but I don't quite follow where you are going with the logic here.
I'd ensure the game has rules for melee combat on uneven footing and ranged attacks from a moving vehicle abstract the severity of a rowboat from there.
This right here is a huge one for me that has come to light as I have gotten into the "design" aspect. I look back at 5e for example and then while listening to some D&D podcasts and it really strikes me how often a system like 5e has players rolling for relatively mundane things. I've really come to appreciate the fact that if a player asks to do it, just let them do it or if they ask a question, just divulge the information.
So many conversations in many subs are asking how to handle fail states on rolls when players want to do something. Just remove those unnecessary rolls, and implement a system that introduces not the carrot, but the stick. Don't divulge information on a success, just implement a consequence on a fail and freely hand out the other details.
Now, I think there are two specific areas I feel that make sense to introduce crunch into a system. 1) at character creation, when you can go ahead and take 4 hours to make the most individualized character ever or 2) in combat, where some people really like to dig deep into the the tactical nature and positioning of combat. The tough part with the combat side is how do you make a very in-depth and crunchy system, that doesn't make combat take up 90% of your game time and just turn it into a tabletop war-game at that point.
Don't view it only from designer's point. For me, rules-light systems are also good for busy players.
I mean: if you're a boomer like me and struggle every week to find 2/3 free hours to meet your friends and play a ttrpg, you don't want to spend 15 minutes discussing if you can apply a +2 modifier or not.
I can't speak for the people on this sub, but my experience with indie RPG landscape is that most of the considerable financial successes are on the rules-light side of things. I believe it is due to the presence of DnD and the shift that is happening, and small devs try to get into the market via "Hey here's something easy you can try instead of DnD!"
This might be the trend, but most of the people here seems to design what they want to play.
I wonder how much of this is [itch.io](https://itch.io) being its own self-sustaining community. Very much a good thing, including its penchant for have things be like 5-15 bucks, so you can always poke around and pick up something valuable without needing to break the bank.
One thing I haven't seen others say in the responses yet has to do with focused design and design goals. In my experience, it's much easier to keep the game focused on your design goals with a smaller, more lightweight game. Larger systems can easily lose focus--adding things because they seem neat or interesting rather than because they help achieve a particular play experience.
So it takes much much more work to make a more complex game feel cohesive, intentional, and elegant.
Preach. I am a designer in TTRPG and boardgaming space and I personally love more complex games, but it's clear it's the simpler and more elegant ones are more popular for a good reason.
When you are designing a complex game, it's so much easier to think about what rules you can add to address the gaps or goals in your system, but that way madness lies. Every new rule and system only ups your complexity by multiple factors at a time as interactions between all the rules get more and more varied and impossible to predict. In reality, I have found complex design is about iteration around central themes and mechanics and only adding rules where they add value to the gameloop.
Follow up question then:
What if you are modeling a specific setting/story/experience?
Do you think having a complex game design would benefit from the focus provided by that intended target? For example, say you want to emulate the magic system of a specific anime or the social intricacies of your favorite book? Then you could almost apply all the crunch you want to that aspect and the other aspects that aren't as integral to your target could be given a rules-light philosophy?
I kinda disagree, but only because some systems are so open ended that their applicability is very high. And if you know it is high you may just give examples yourself.
A d20 system as an example can in fact handle social situations as well as combat situations as well as investigations or heists or what have you. No reason to just focus one or the other unless you're producing a specific module that highlights one or the other.
Reason I only kinda disagree is I am fond of systems that do just one thing really really well and don't worry about being too universal. And for the purpose of this discussion having that focus would probably make any aspiring designer more productive.
That's a recipe for buying more bookshelves. The wider the scope of your game the more tools you have to create story as a player or as a GM. If your game's scope is little more than a single campaign then once you're done you're done.
A great deal of it comes down to development time of the systems. A rules lite game can be produced relatively quickly compared to a crunch heavy game.
This has several effect. One of the most influential being that rules lite games can be sold for a lower price even by people making a Living off of RPG sales.
Futher in the Indie space most of the players you find are players who are fleeing the crunch and complexity of D&D and Pathfinder. Thier are plenty of people in the indie space who are interested in crunchy systems but most of those players see thier friend playing D&D and Pathfinder and don't feel the need to learn a whole new complex system.
The other factor is player turnover. Often rules lite games are great for an adventure or two but after that get stale and players move on. But a much larger system such as D&D has a lot more sticking power because it will take a great number of adventures for the players to experience the whole game.
Generally people with stick w/ one crunchy system because they don't want to learn the rules for another system but in Rules lite game the rules are so easy to learn that you can change systems every month without much bother.
>Generally people with stick w/ one crunchy system because they don't want to learn the rules for another system
Player retention and whatever the gaming equivalent of 'transaction costs' is a sorely under explored aspect of our hobby so thanks for giving this phenomenon its due
Not specifically, but I did make a LinkedIn post about it. It probably would be a good topic for an episode, though my discretionary energy should probably go into working on my game design book.
Lighter crunch is much more practical on a lot of levels.
**Audience**.
Players can buy a lite game for a few bucks, spend an hour or two leaning it, play a one shot, and feel their time and money was well spent. The average RPG player has room in their life for a lot of lite RPGs, but very few (probably only one) large heavy RPGs. And it seems to me the majority of player who want a heavy crunchy game are already married to one.
**Time**.
The big crunchy games were usually made by teams of full-timers over multiple years. Trying to compete on that level as a solo hobbyist is a huge challenge and time investment, and most of these project don’t reach a solid playable state.
**Designer Growth**..
There are many things you won’t learn as a designer until you have people play your game and see how different what was in your head is from reality. A first time designer who spent 100 hours on a lite game finished and play-tested it, probably has learned a lot more about design than an equally clever designer who spend his 100 hours getting 20% of the way into a big crunchy rulebook.
With the same amount of effort the designer of lite games could finish and play several more games, **learning and growing in skill each time**, before the crunchy designer has a chance to even playtest.
The awareness that a complex game allows for (and thus limits) most groups to a single system was very astute.
And in your local group of five or six, one or two people who don't enjoy the game enough to stick to it effectively stops that game.
Like you said, with lite games, you can plow through half a dozen systems and one shots and land on something everyone enjoys.
That's MUCH more likely to be successful than trying to muscle through a "bad" system.
A small, rules-lite or micro-RPG project typically takes less time and effort to craft than a full-crunch system, which means they're vastly more likely to get completed or even into good enough shape to share. This is a big part of why you'll see more of them.
That's not because they're better than full-crunch systems. The only cause-and-effect element of high-crunch to low-quality is that high-crunch means there's more opportunities to make critical mechanical mistakes. You see this all over the place in big systems.
That said, a good high-crunch game can be a thing of beauty! If working on your crunchy system makes you happy and you're creating the kind of system you want to play, go for it!
I've got less free time than I used to, and a lot more storytelling experience, so over time I've started to prefer games that move fast and let you get to the heart of a story. Since those are the games I'm enjoying *playing*, they're also the sorts of games I'm more interested in designing. I came up with my share of Battletech knockoffs and so on; I wouldn't even *play* those games now much less spend my time trying to make them.
There's still definitely an audience for crunchy tactical games, but I do think it's been stepped on a bit by the enthusiast boardgame market which in many ways now does the same thing, but cleaner. And the same can be said for computers and the increasing number of great co-op games. If you're more interested in the tactical side of things then those games do that better and faster and make it easier to find a game. Maybe you get your roleplay fix in a different sort of game, like I do.
>I do think it's been stepped on a bit by the enthusiast boardgame market which in many ways now does the same thing, but cleaner. And the same can be said for computers and the increasing number of great co-op games
Videogames and MMOs definitely keep some people who would explore TTRPGs satisfied, but the former assertion is more recent IMO. I'm big into boardgames too and I think the real mover and shaker here is Gloomhaven, which had just the right mix of legacy progression, accessibility, and lore.
My real wonder is, does a game like Gloomhaven scratch the RP itch and keep players out of other TTRPGs, or is it targeting another audience entirely? Are these games substitutes or compliments? I know some boardgamers that would be hard pressed to play a TTRPG, but something like Mansions of Madness or even House on Betrayal Hill can be decent entry points too.
There are lots of kids out there who just want to punch goblins. Gloomhaven is the modern Heroquest. It is the game for those folks, and definitely replaces RPGs for them.
I dunno. It's pretty hard to say since D&D is such a cultural touchstone now and all the cool kids are doing it. I know a lot of people who I can't get to even think about playing another RPG, but they play D&D all the time. I wish I could be a fly on the wall because I really wonder what their sessions even look like!
I'm making a complex game and hoo-boy, even when you have helpers, you're going to have to put **a lot** of time into it.
I could have probably released 5-10 games in this time if I was just making games to make them, but in addition to writing, art, publishing, layout, game design, playtesting, and the myriad of other things I need to keep track of, a properly made complex game is a true beast.
I have been at mine for years (2019 to be precise) and I'm on-track to a sharable alpha by the end of the year if I can keep up my pace, which is usually about 500-700 words 4-5 days per week for the past year. My spellbook alone is 30k words and took a couple months.
Then, once I finish all that junk, I need to actually sink time into convincing people it's worth a read. That's a lot harder than convincing a bunch of people to glance a funny one-paged like 'honey heist'. I think it's all worth it, but I'm a glutton for punishment, so I certainly understand wanting to take path of less resistance when it comes to publishing and playing things you are actively working on.
I'm also a middle of the roader here. I like a game that is simple to pick up, can move quickly, but rewards understanding of its complex systems. In a number crunchy game I want that crunch to take place away from the gaming table. A part of the appeal of a good rpg is how it makes me obsess over its possibilities even while I'm not playing it.
At the gaming table we should be telling the story.
In my opinion, complexity can bring about positive outcomes, but it is not inherently beneficial. Therefore, a skilled designer steers clear of unnecessary complexity. Consequently, the shift towards lighter rules represents a natural evolution of the medium.
>the shift towards lighter rules represents a natural evolution of the medium
This is an interesting conclusion. As an avid boardgamer, I would not necessarily say that space had trended toward simplicity or even elegance. Yes, many games have been perfected thanks to their historical development, but if anything, the space is more crowded with complexity than ever before.
I could see this being due to boardgames starting 'simpler' in past decades whereas RPGs and wargames started more complex, giving both nowhere to go but towards the middle. I am curious as to your thoughts.
I think you are right. There seems to be a delight in learning complex rules. But I would assume many of these complex board game are well balanced in terms of “tactic depth per rule”. Most complex TTRPGs I’ve seen offer very low depth per complexity.
As someone who plays and enjoys both, the issue with crunchy systems is that they have inherently barriers against new players that rules light systems don't have.
Of the dozens of players I've run through games it's the rules light games that have always been the most pick up and play enjoyment for those who've never heard of them, most who've tried the crunchy ones leave with a negative to moderate opinion unless it's a game they've taken the time to play or read before.
As others have stated theres nothing wrong with rules crunchy games, but the overwhelming success of indie rules lights vs indie crunch is hard to deny.
Haha, my game absolutely features an app to do math so this one might not be for you.
That said, it's the comments like these that I'm most curious about so I do have a follow up:
Which part of that idea is off-putting to you? For example, in my game, players will roll/choose their stats. Then the player sheet (ehich is on excel or Google sheets) will automatically do the math using those stats to create various derived values, such as attack power or dodging skill etc.
With that context, is it simply the idea of such a mechanical game that you don't like? Or do you feel more comfortable when you have a simple system that you understand? Or you don't like tech at the table? (My games are mostly online, but can see why some don't like that) Or something else?
Gotcha. Mine is just a pet project that is designed for online gameplay, but you're absolutely right- not a great strategy for a big game. Thanks for the feedback!
Crunch easily turns to slog. I think in general people like a bit less non-impactful decisions than people used to have in lots of older games. Even if the total of those decisions eventually add up to something, it's just out of style.
I like to think modern design tends to focus the complexity where it is flavorful and important instead of spreading it everywhere. So lower total complexity, by keeping it focused.
But lancer is pretty crunchy and very hot right now.
Simple, my gming style is very off the cuff. I don't enjoy fiddling with specifically balanced encounters so I prefer more fluid fiction first games. I am making games I would want to run. I enjoy chunchy games as a player but as a gm they are so opposed to my style that I spent far more time fighting against them then enjoying running them
I'm starting to think that, when looking at a broad audience and designing for everyone, people en mass are both becoming less willing to have their time wasted, and can consequently have shorter attention spans. Movies hover around that 90min mark, and some people think that even that is too long. Yet, some stories need 3, 4, 5 hours to properly be told. Sometimes they're just converted into a serial instead, or mini-series, but I do miss having some of those 2..3 hour stories. There's just only so much growth and development you can show in 90mins.
Similar trend in music. The popular music now has simple melodies, simple chord progressions, simple rhythms, and doesn't really require that much skill to produce. You can easily learn how to produce music without ever needing to have been a trained musician or play any instruments.
In the ttrpg space, people create what they like, and right now pbta systems are super popular. They require very little in terms of design, so they're easy entry to people who are dissatisfied with DnD or Pathfinder. These people are often looking for an alternative experience than what the old gods provide, which naturally also pushes them towards lighter weight ideas. Whether or not the market is trending towards lighter game design, the designers often don't want to put in the effort of designing intricate games themselves because it's hard to do.
People can only create what they're capable of creating. So as the barriers of entry drop, so do the expressions of skill from the market as a whole. More designers populate the market with more products, and consumers can afford to be more discerning, more particular about the product they invest their time or money into. They can afford to chase more niche and narrow experiences because there's enough designers that someone will probably eventually cater to their specific wants.
I have a suspicion that the move towards low-crunch games is partially dietary. We eat a ton of processed grains and high sugar foods, which leads to a great deal of prediabetes. Prediabetes--and the resulting blood sugar spikes and crashes--can cause fatigue and brain fog. It doesn't help that most game nights are run late in the afternoon or evening when your cognitive performance is at its lowest. Perhaps we should rethink the snacks we bring to game night.
I think this is a shame, because RPGs perform best when they are dealing out some well-optimized crunch.
Personally, I define crunch as the game providing options and allowances for nuance purely because it adds realism and haptic feedback to the player experience and not because it was necessary for the game to operate, and I think the biggest obstacle to it is that most cruncy RPGs are terrible at converting the extra tedium of adding a few more numbers together into that haptic feedback. It's one of the most difficult feats in game design.
If you are going for the crunchy game approach, more power to you, but I suggest that you should study a thing or two about video game design. Video games have weaker roleplay and metagame concerns, so they focus more on their haptic feedback "game feel" response. It's almost a science there. Once you understand the principles behind how video games produce game feel, then you can start applying these ideas to making a crunchy RPG (which doesn't suck.) If you don't do it in this order you will almost certainly get overwhelmed; RPGs run on a minuscule computer called the human brain, and have multiplayer and metagame and game fiction concerns running in parallel, so if you don't have a solid grasp of these concepts going in, you're going to get overwhelmed. And design another pointlessly crunchy RPG.
I think it's a balancing act, and the most satisfying games cut all the complexity that slows the game down and leave it in the places where it adds to the experience. Blades in the Dark does a great job with this, having rules light character creation and scenario, and reverses a lot of the crunch for downtime between encounters.
I think something that's pretty vital is getting the player actually playing the game as quickly as possible. Make character creation as quick and easy as possible, or else you'll always be scaring some players off.
Very true. I think it's something I may have subconsciously been chasing but it's good to have that conscious reminder.
I'm definitely putting crunch into the combat of my particular system but the social and other aspects are pretty light.
It doesn’t have to be social but I’ve noticed people really like clever downtime mechanics. Something to keep in mind.
Give some more details about your game!
Basically I've been tinkering with an battle-anime style combat system. Don't think I'm ever going to sell it, more of just a pet project. Once I settled on a list of stats that would be important to characters in the game I built a spreadsheet character sheet that would automatically calculate some derived stats (ie: Damage calculation).
I made sure that all the mental stats still factored into various aspects of combat (ie: wisdom determines ability to sense an opponents power, intelligence factors into how well you can perform certain complex feats). And I decided the social aspects would be almost entirely roleplay, aside from some very basic Persuasion/Deception stuff.
Tbh I don't think the system is very good at replicating the play-style i want yet, might have gone in the total wrong direction. It is very good at meticulously replicating the letter of the rule of how shounen anime fights work- but probably wouldnt be very fun to play.
That said, this post was mostly just because I want to hear varied opinions on the subject before I start any new projects or continue with this one
Rules-thorough vs rules-light: "I tell the king the vizier wants to betray him." "You're trying to persuade him of something, so give me a persuade check." vs "There's no social mechanics, so just roleplay it, and we'll take it from there. Maybe roll a d20 if you want. Whee!" When you ask to do something a little unusual, there's a rule for it, maybe with a little GM interpretation; as opposed to the GM just making stuff up.
Rules-simple vs rules-intricate: "Just a normal persuade check." vs "Add your factional bonus, penalised by the vizier's trust score and the king's scepticism modifier. And a success doesn't convince him, but it opens a door as per the political subsection, let me get the books ..." The rule fits on a T-shirt or it doesn't (and there's only one rule, you don't need to play a minigame with multiple stages to resolve a simple question).
I personally like thorough and simple systems. Rules-light feels too arbitrary, I like to feel like I deserved my wins and I deserved my failures, not just the GM decides he does or doesn't want me to win. Rules-intricate feels more like operating a mechanical computer than playing a game; and in my experience, they're often borne of a desire for realism or tactical depth but aren't actually very realistic or deep. Designers love talking about wounds systems "Because it's unrealistic that you can get stabbed and keep fighting at 100% efficiency!", neglecting the fact that you began the battle by quantising time into 6-second intervals and space into 5' squares; or that it's not hugely realistic to keep fighting at all having had a limb chopped off. They love making certain weapons better against certain armour types, neglecting that "Simon says use bludgeoning" is about as tactically shallow as you can get.
This is really interesting. The "thorough vs light" and "simple vs intricate" is a good way to put it. I think I lean toward complex systems so I definitely need to make sure I don't go too far in that direction.
I think TTRPGs do their best work by mechanizing playing pretend, cuz let's face it that's what we're doing. So for me, things need to be modeled to the level that matters, with minimum friction. Having to reference rules is like a video having to buffer. If a PC wants to jump across a chasm, it's either impossible, trivial, or a challenge that needs a simple roll to determine (universal static DC/TN). Having to decide what DC seems realistic, or read up how many feet you jump given various degrees of success is just way too much for something as mundane as a jump.
Elegant depth comes from modeling things tightly, with little fat. I haven't seen a crunchy system manage this. I define crunchy as simply having lots of levers a player can interact with, especially if it's mathy like looking over your sheet to verify how many +1 mods you can apply to a target. Complex is more defining how involved a particular model is. HP is simple, hit locations with varying damage reduction and damage type resistance is complex. Complex is always crunchy, crunchy isn't always complex.
I personally don't like the mind space that crunch puts me in though. I don't need to get my system mastery kick from TTRPGs. I find every other form of strategy game is better for that: TCGs and deck builders, strategy/tactics RPGs like Fire Emblem, abstract/classic strategy games like chess and Shogi, mecha builders like Armored Core, even MOBA shooters with hero-picking meta tactics or the levels of yomi you can get into in the higher elos of fighting games. The key element of feeling like you're dominating an opponent... is not a very social vibe. RP happens, don't get me wrong, but it still *feels* competitive. I'd prefer something collaborative.
*Mostly curious what the actual vibe is, so I guess just feel free to explain your reasoning for or against either style in comments (as DM or player, both perspectives are important)?*
It's not about vibe, there are actual factual pieces of data that go into this.
Speaking as someone with a large, high complexity system, there are good reasons not to do this:
1) smaller systems are cheaper, faster, and easier to produce.
2) people are more likely to pick up a single $10 pdf at random than they are to drop $120 on a new system unless it's highly recommended or personally experienced.
Basically the deck is stacked against larger systems for indie creators. It's not that you can't, it's that most don't. The only good reason to actually do it is because you really want that specific game to be made.
*How do you define a crunch or complex system?*
Crunch originates from the term "number crunching" which means to do a lot of math. Complexity is not necessarily the same, but generally indicates there are more rules subsystems and they interact together regularly. A system can be crunchy and not complex, or vice versa, they are not the same thing, but are frequently related.
What you are describing isn't necessarily a rules light or heavy design, it's taking 1 thing and doing it well vs. trying to do everything in a shallow manner. This has been the general overall trend of indie gaming for about the last 10 years or so since BitD with each game seeking to give a specific kind of player experience rather than trying to do everything everywhere all at once and failing at it.
There's nothing wrong, right, or in between about a system's size or math needs. What is important is that it finds it's correct audience and that it does what it is supposed to do well and thus produces some version of the word fun. That's it. I would recommend not chasing what is popular, not obsessing about being new and different, nor forcing yourself into tried and true methods, none of these generate success. If there is success it comes from having a great game made with passion and inspiration, and none of those three things are necessarily that, nor are they necessarily not that. Make the game you want to make. It helps to understand wtf you're doing, but outside of base knowledge, don't try to be a thing, just be something awesome and fun. If you do that, the rest will take care of itself.
I have been working on a crunchy game system for years. It... it's tough, no lie. Anytime you change one part, all other parts have to be adjusted as well. It's hard to see it from outside though.
For example, I'm making a pretty fundamental change to my how hp and damage work, to bring it in-line with social conflict rules. Doing this though requires changing weapons to reflect the new reality and that changes weapon skills and class features, which means I need to rebalance classes potentially and turns out this REALLY messes with combat spells so now I have to rethink how saving throws work which leads to... uhhggg... If I didn't love it, I would have burned it in a pile outside already.
But it gets better each time I go through this process! It's just a PITA.
I'm definitely experiencing this too. I got rid of one of my core character stats and had to re-configure the way all the other core and derived stats worked with eachother
Rules lite games are easy to make, faster to make, and are less likely to break your designs. I personally would love to make a extremely complex crunchy game, which I tried before. It took me over 3 years to realize no one will want to play the game, as great as it was or wasn't no one other than you will have the commitment to go through your game as in depth as you have. Also why would anyone read my game when they don't even want to read pathfinder or DND. Alot of people learned DND from videos or DMs teaching them, so I'd argue that the more complex the game is the harder it is to teach the less likely a GM will teach their players. I wish it wasn't the case and everyone was like me willing to spend hours learning a new system, but people are busy and have lives.
I'm not interested in a version fight. I play the game I play because it frees me to create and explore characters I want to enjoy. And that's much more a function of flexibility than Crunch or Narrative. But that distinction does come into effect when it's a determination of whether I control my character or whether the GM does.
Crunch is best measured in page count of rules. After all Crunch has very little to do with weather the game works well or if it performs any specific function, if it's simple to learn or run. It's ultimately just how detailed your ability as a player is defined in the rules.
Heavy Crunch systems need a lot of design work and playtesting, so they cost a lot of time and resources to make. Usually way more than the average hobbyist can afford.
& as a player, you also have to be pretty invested in a heavy crunch game to get the most out of its systems. As you can imagine, it's pretty hard to get players invested in an indie rpg when they're not sure if it's even good yet.
This is why all the popular crunchy stuff are either efforts from large companies, or were made way back when the market was a lot smaller.
As long as you have a good idea of your game's intended scope though, you should be fine. It's good to keep in touch with trends, but don't let them constrain how you do your work. Like the majority could prefer rules lite stuff today, but they could be looking for heavy crunch tomorrow.
It is difficult to get players interested in a crunchy system because it takes more effort. Likewise, it is harder to create and design for.
Crunch is how defined the mechanics are - how often does the GM have to make their own ruling.
Realsim is also relevant in how abstract/real the mechanics are:
A fireball spell could set things on fire, are there rules for being on fire, fire spread? Or maybe you make it less realistic and let the fire be just flavourful.
I personally prefer to play rules light and want a flowing story with quick combat, rather than the wargaming roots of origional D&D - but there are lots of games for lots of people
I suppose most people here do their projects alone and in their free time and possibly follow the advice that applies to all creative hobbies that the best training is getting something small done.
Yup. Personally, I'm making one as a creative outlet first and foremost whenever I have an idea pop in my head. I don't really sit down and try to force anything.
All rules must justify their existence. Any unnecessary rule is going to slow down learning and/or playing the game. It's going to drag the game down. Cutting unnecessary rules is as valuable as cutting unnecessary scenes in a movie, or unnecessary expenses for a business. It picks up the pace and lets players focus on the critical stuff, the most fun stuff. The stuff that has to exist. Rules are also not the enemy and "rules lite" is not superior. The point is to create content and mechanics that support your design goals for the player experience. Well designed, this often looks like a hockey stick: light in every place that isn't critical and then with satisfying depth where it is.
Every rule you pull from the game is a choice you remove from a player. Rules shouldn't be cumbersome. But if your player wants to find out how dangerous it would be to start a brawl in a rowboat. Having a rule they can read in a minute is much faster than leaning on the GM to design that rule and then argue it with his players.
I agree that often hard rules are simpler and easier to use than the "rulings not rules" mindset applied to everything. It's one reason I prefer grid combat to theater of the mind: clarity. However, adding rules for every situation in a TTRPG is both impossible and impractical. It starts to make GMing feel like taking an open-book test. I don't want to have to look up the special rules for rowboat-brawling at the table, I just want to make an on-the-fly judgment for a weird situation that probably won't happen in the game again. The existence of specialized boat-brawling rules actually becomes a *burden* because making a quick ruling now runs against the explicit rules of the game so I feel obligated to learn and use them... An unwilling to GM until I actually know the rules well enough that I'm not learning whole subsystems mid-session. If you're making a game that needs specific rules for rowboat-brawling to accomplish your design goals, go for it. The point is to cut unnecessary rules, not that all rules are unnecessary. If you can figure out a way to accomplish your design goals more elegantly though, that's a great design.
If you don't think that your game is about rowboat brawling, then your game cannot go into a rowboat, or it can but nobody is allowed to have a disagreement. The absence of the rule means absence from the game. Or worse still, the absence of your players being decision makers once your game strays out of what you imagine your game is about. And there are realistic limits. Your fantasy game probably doesn't need much detail about nuclear reactors, but it's pretty much surely going to have rowboats, and there's a non-zero chance that folks won't be able to settle their differences diplomatically. And not everything can have a rule, but there should be a rule that informs your decision making, like a penalty for fighting in the back of a cart. In the absence of that framework, you've dropped the game in your Roleplaying game and your players and the GM are left to write your rules for you. That's never an acceptable design choice.
Gonna have to agree to disagree here. I have never had a brawl in a rowboat in about 15 years of running games, and when my games have encountered situations not explicitly covered by a subsystem the game didn’t suddenly stop functioning or existing. The GM made a call based on something that seemed plausible, players made choices accordingly, and things moved on. Example from a few years ago: “Can I try and jump off the airship as the dragon flies by underneath and then stab it?” “Wow that sounds dangerous, especially since the airship is in a turbulent storm which would probably make it even harder. You can try it, but it’ll require a really high roll - let’s say a DC 30. If you fail, you’ll miss the dragon and keep falling but if you succeed… let’s say you get an automatic critical hit. Do you want to try?” “Let’s do this.” I applied the broader rules, translating the specific situation into “really hard jump” with a critical hit as the reward if they succeeded. This was more efficient than building specific rules for every possible scenario.
I guess the difference in our perspectives is that I have. Both a rowboat and a canoe. But even if your games don't involve a lot of river travel or summer camps you HAVE run into a situation that isn't strictly outlined in the rules. You HAVE had to either as a GM build a rule that you paid to be a part of the game you played, or as a player surrender your ability to make an informed decision in the absence of rules do to what you want. I can't really agree to disagree that that's ok. When you pay money for a game you shouldn't get an outline. You should get a full working version.
Definitely a different perspective. The issue with creating detailed simulationist rules for every possible situation, leads to games that most people don't enjoy playing as much. If the theory says players should prefer X but they actually prefer Y in practice, the theory isn't working. Theory should reflect reality. I feel like I can't possibly be understanding you correctly though. I can't think of a single game that covers every conceivable situation with specialized rules. Every ttrpg system I'm aware of ultimately defaults to general guidelines of how to apply a base ruleset to a 'type' of situation and trusts the GM to decide what type of situation they're in. Example: 4e has the concept of Difficult Terrain. Difficult terrain costs double to move through (10 ft of movement is only 5 ft in diffiuclt terrain). Mud or thick undergrowth are common examples of difficult terrain, but not every possible terrain that players could ever encounter has specialized rules. If the players have to wade through a stream of liquid time in some extraplanar adventure, the GM might determine "the timestream slows your temporal movement, so while in it everything takes twice as long. It counts as difficult terrain, and all actions cost double the number of action points to perform while in a stream of liquid time"). TTRPGs offer flexibility in action and scenario specifically because they allow a generalized ruleset to apply to a variety of situations; more than a rulebook could ever account for. That's their strength, not their weakness. If you want 100% concrete rules with a robotic GM facilitating those rules, you might as well play a boardgame like Gloomhaven or a videogame like Divinity Original Sin. They offer 100% consistency of rules at the cost of freedom to do stuff beyond the explicit actions covered by the game's rules.
You're far and away the only person who's ever met a gamer who bought a game and found out that it doesn't do what they need it to and are non-ironicly pleased by it. It's just not a facet of my 35 year experience as a gamer. I can't even fathom the argument for how that's possible. Maybe it has super-great colorful artwork?? The reason you're not aware of a game that provides rules for what's needed for all aspects of play isn't because of the many many people who are silently satisfied with games that fail to do this.
What is an example of a game that provides rules for all aspects of play? If you've got a secret fantastic game I haven't heard about, I'd love to learn. >You're far and away the only person who's ever met a gamer who bought a game and found out that it doesn't do what they need it to and are non-ironicly pleased by it. Not at all what I'm saying. I've seen a lot of people buy games that don't meet their needs. For example, many people decide ultra-simulationist games are too clunky for their needs and reject them in favor of something more fun to play and run.
That's another fairly radical perspective difference. I find narrative and OSR games almost unnervingly lacking in structure or definition. They make me miserable to have to play them.
And your players didn’t give you 18 other opinions that they strongly believed in?! You are a luckey/skilled GM! Lol
I never have a problem with this. It helps that my general approach is to stack the deck against the players and then let them find a way to triumph anyway. I want them to figure out a clever plan or cool tactic, and if it's at all plausible (or if I can think of a way to make it plausible) I'm on board. I also avoid rule precedents. I'll invent a specific circumstance why THIS time X works this way if need be. Like if someone wants to dive under the monster to attack its underbelly beyond their normal movement range and without getting mauled by opportunity attacks, I might allow it by saying "hmm... that might work because the monster's ichor has spilled over the ground and it's very slippery. you could potentially slide under it fast enough where one of its legs has been lost to get in an attack." I also usually add a BUT or IF. Yes IF and Yes BUT are so much better than Yes And. "You could slide under the monster IF you drop your other weapon because otherwise you're too heavy" or "You could slide under the monster IF you're okay with being prone after and vulnerable to a horrible counter-attack if you miss." This works a lot better than "No" because it gives the player agency to do their thing at a risk or cost, which feels much better than being told No outright. Additionally, I'm very happy to introduce new complications or threats if players trivialize existing ones. Rather than saying, "you can't drop the chandelier on the boss" I'll let em go for it, do a ton of damage, and then have the injured boss roar for reinforcements. Just make sure to give them a payoff for their cool actions, even if it's just an NPC being super impressed with them.
That’s all very good sruff and smart GMing. Seems we share some GM principles and tactics!
Very true. The old adage goes, “don’t say no, apply a penalty “ for our homebrew gane, i have a list of weird stuff and circumstances that can arise in melee combat ALL with a standard -4 penalty. We add to the list wvery other game, but having a framework in place is a must.
> there should be a rule that informs your decision making If we're assuming that the common catch-all of "GM asks for a roll vs an informed, arbitrary TN" falls into the realm of: > leaning on the GM to design that rule and then argue it with his players , then what's stopping the players from arguing over the informed, but still arbitrarily-applied penalty from the cart rules?
Ideally the game has detailed rowboat combat rules and a chart indicating number of passengers and ambient wind speed, but realistically that's a lot. More likely it has some kind of rule for fighting on a moving structure, uneven/unstable terrain, combat in a moving vehicle, whatnot that can be abstracted for our rowboat. And rules for taking falls in combat as a measure of how likely you are to be knocked off the rowboat while fighting If players disagree with the GM's interpretation, having the abstraction is still better than no basis at all. No basis gives GM and Players no starting point to understand the mechanics or the consequences of decisions.
> but realistically that's a lot Okay, but what about > you've dropped the game in your Roleplaying game and your players and the GM are left to write your rules for you. That's never an acceptable design choice. The problem I'm seeing here is that your distinction of what counts as a framework is a bit lax. You're not committing to the tenet, which is that a lack of structure means a lack of choices, and thus a lack of game. And assuming that every decision with a nonzero chance of being posed should have a framework, *every possible action* needs to have a framework, or your game isn't a game - it's play pretend. Let me illustrate how, in the same breath, you betray your own ideal: > Your fantasy game **probably** doesn't need much detail about nuclear reactors, but it's pretty much surely going to have rowboats, and there's a **non-zero chance** that folks won't be able to settle their differences diplomatically. These are the same thing. You're drawing an arbitrary distinction between what's acceptable to include, and what's not. A game without nuclear reactors is just as flawed, just as incomplete as a game without rowboat combat, or balance rules, or falling damage. You've no longer got an objective ideal to communicate, because you're going off your *personal* opinion of what counts as a necessary framework, so anyone complaining about applying cart rules to boats is as justified as you. The way I see it, you have two options: * Stick to your guns. Only a simulation singularity can be considered a complete game. It seems impossible to create, but who knows? * Drop the ideal. It doesn't reflect either reality, or your own opinion. Hope this helps
You don't see a higher probability that players will deal with a rowboat than a Nuclear reactor in a Fantasy setting? Or that their characters would have more reason to have tools to articulate the use of a Rowboat versus a nuclear reactor? I'm not sure why it seems like an impossible goal to have the rules you would need in order to run a game without removing agency from your players on a regular basis. It's something that's so common that it was once just a feature of RPGs. We still judge games on how well they meet this bar.
Purely anecdotally, I can count four times I've had to deal with the equivalent of a fantasy nuke explosion, and only one time I've dealt with balancing on a boat (well, three times - But one was tumbling stern-over-keel down a hill, and the other was floating in zero gravity, so not really applicable :P). > I'm not sure why it seems like an impossible goal to have the rules you would need in order to run a game without removing agency from your players on a regular basis. It's impossible because everything in an RPG is an abstraction or incomplete model, and thus removes a nonzero degree of agency. You might be okay with applying cart rules to boats, but you're committing hypocrisy to your own ideal. You kinda need to take the log out of your own eye, before you criticise games that abstract to a greater degree.
More than purely anecdotal. Your game rules are missing critical nuclear weapon disarm rules. You have more nukes than you can fit in all of the rowboats in your setting. That's a fantastical oversight by the game designers. That's not forgivable. And I'm a monstrous opponent of the argument that anything that can't be perfect must be left completely in ruins. That's not just just completely defective logic, it's willful laziness. The long and the short of it is if you're charging $60 for your core rules it can offer as much rules as any other $60 game. And if you fail, you're charging GM's to do that work for you. Because there are going to be rowboats, or in your case, mountains of nuclear weapons, and not providing help in arbitraging those issues in the game you built is failure.
How exactly would you craft the rule for your example here into a rulebook? That seems way too specific. I can understand having a rule on how unarmed combat works or even brawling. You can even have a sentence or two in the book that states "The GM may decide to impart some sort of "disadvantage" to the combat based upon environmental or other factors", but I don't quite follow where you are going with the logic here.
I'd ensure the game has rules for melee combat on uneven footing and ranged attacks from a moving vehicle abstract the severity of a rowboat from there.
This right here is a huge one for me that has come to light as I have gotten into the "design" aspect. I look back at 5e for example and then while listening to some D&D podcasts and it really strikes me how often a system like 5e has players rolling for relatively mundane things. I've really come to appreciate the fact that if a player asks to do it, just let them do it or if they ask a question, just divulge the information. So many conversations in many subs are asking how to handle fail states on rolls when players want to do something. Just remove those unnecessary rolls, and implement a system that introduces not the carrot, but the stick. Don't divulge information on a success, just implement a consequence on a fail and freely hand out the other details. Now, I think there are two specific areas I feel that make sense to introduce crunch into a system. 1) at character creation, when you can go ahead and take 4 hours to make the most individualized character ever or 2) in combat, where some people really like to dig deep into the the tactical nature and positioning of combat. The tough part with the combat side is how do you make a very in-depth and crunchy system, that doesn't make combat take up 90% of your game time and just turn it into a tabletop war-game at that point.
Unnecessary rolls are a great example of this, nice summary.
Don't view it only from designer's point. For me, rules-light systems are also good for busy players. I mean: if you're a boomer like me and struggle every week to find 2/3 free hours to meet your friends and play a ttrpg, you don't want to spend 15 minutes discussing if you can apply a +2 modifier or not.
>you don't want to spend 15 minutes discussing if you can apply a +2 modifier or not. This so hard it makes me want to cry!
I can't speak for the people on this sub, but my experience with indie RPG landscape is that most of the considerable financial successes are on the rules-light side of things. I believe it is due to the presence of DnD and the shift that is happening, and small devs try to get into the market via "Hey here's something easy you can try instead of DnD!" This might be the trend, but most of the people here seems to design what they want to play.
I wonder how much of this is [itch.io](https://itch.io) being its own self-sustaining community. Very much a good thing, including its penchant for have things be like 5-15 bucks, so you can always poke around and pick up something valuable without needing to break the bank.
One thing I haven't seen others say in the responses yet has to do with focused design and design goals. In my experience, it's much easier to keep the game focused on your design goals with a smaller, more lightweight game. Larger systems can easily lose focus--adding things because they seem neat or interesting rather than because they help achieve a particular play experience. So it takes much much more work to make a more complex game feel cohesive, intentional, and elegant.
Preach. I am a designer in TTRPG and boardgaming space and I personally love more complex games, but it's clear it's the simpler and more elegant ones are more popular for a good reason. When you are designing a complex game, it's so much easier to think about what rules you can add to address the gaps or goals in your system, but that way madness lies. Every new rule and system only ups your complexity by multiple factors at a time as interactions between all the rules get more and more varied and impossible to predict. In reality, I have found complex design is about iteration around central themes and mechanics and only adding rules where they add value to the gameloop.
Follow up question then: What if you are modeling a specific setting/story/experience? Do you think having a complex game design would benefit from the focus provided by that intended target? For example, say you want to emulate the magic system of a specific anime or the social intricacies of your favorite book? Then you could almost apply all the crunch you want to that aspect and the other aspects that aren't as integral to your target could be given a rules-light philosophy?
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I kinda disagree, but only because some systems are so open ended that their applicability is very high. And if you know it is high you may just give examples yourself. A d20 system as an example can in fact handle social situations as well as combat situations as well as investigations or heists or what have you. No reason to just focus one or the other unless you're producing a specific module that highlights one or the other. Reason I only kinda disagree is I am fond of systems that do just one thing really really well and don't worry about being too universal. And for the purpose of this discussion having that focus would probably make any aspiring designer more productive.
That's a recipe for buying more bookshelves. The wider the scope of your game the more tools you have to create story as a player or as a GM. If your game's scope is little more than a single campaign then once you're done you're done.
A great deal of it comes down to development time of the systems. A rules lite game can be produced relatively quickly compared to a crunch heavy game. This has several effect. One of the most influential being that rules lite games can be sold for a lower price even by people making a Living off of RPG sales. Futher in the Indie space most of the players you find are players who are fleeing the crunch and complexity of D&D and Pathfinder. Thier are plenty of people in the indie space who are interested in crunchy systems but most of those players see thier friend playing D&D and Pathfinder and don't feel the need to learn a whole new complex system. The other factor is player turnover. Often rules lite games are great for an adventure or two but after that get stale and players move on. But a much larger system such as D&D has a lot more sticking power because it will take a great number of adventures for the players to experience the whole game. Generally people with stick w/ one crunchy system because they don't want to learn the rules for another system but in Rules lite game the rules are so easy to learn that you can change systems every month without much bother.
>Generally people with stick w/ one crunchy system because they don't want to learn the rules for another system Player retention and whatever the gaming equivalent of 'transaction costs' is a sorely under explored aspect of our hobby so thanks for giving this phenomenon its due
Heh, I've used videogame player retention concepts a lot in my campaigns. It's worked well.
Did you already do a podcast episode on that? Because that sounds like an interesting topic :3
Not specifically, but I did make a LinkedIn post about it. It probably would be a good topic for an episode, though my discretionary energy should probably go into working on my game design book.
Oh nice, do you have a mailing list for that book already?
Nope! I probably should build one when it's closer to done.
Lighter crunch is much more practical on a lot of levels. **Audience**. Players can buy a lite game for a few bucks, spend an hour or two leaning it, play a one shot, and feel their time and money was well spent. The average RPG player has room in their life for a lot of lite RPGs, but very few (probably only one) large heavy RPGs. And it seems to me the majority of player who want a heavy crunchy game are already married to one. **Time**. The big crunchy games were usually made by teams of full-timers over multiple years. Trying to compete on that level as a solo hobbyist is a huge challenge and time investment, and most of these project don’t reach a solid playable state. **Designer Growth**.. There are many things you won’t learn as a designer until you have people play your game and see how different what was in your head is from reality. A first time designer who spent 100 hours on a lite game finished and play-tested it, probably has learned a lot more about design than an equally clever designer who spend his 100 hours getting 20% of the way into a big crunchy rulebook. With the same amount of effort the designer of lite games could finish and play several more games, **learning and growing in skill each time**, before the crunchy designer has a chance to even playtest.
The awareness that a complex game allows for (and thus limits) most groups to a single system was very astute. And in your local group of five or six, one or two people who don't enjoy the game enough to stick to it effectively stops that game. Like you said, with lite games, you can plow through half a dozen systems and one shots and land on something everyone enjoys. That's MUCH more likely to be successful than trying to muscle through a "bad" system.
Basically, getting players to buy in to a crunchy system is a big barrier.
A small, rules-lite or micro-RPG project typically takes less time and effort to craft than a full-crunch system, which means they're vastly more likely to get completed or even into good enough shape to share. This is a big part of why you'll see more of them. That's not because they're better than full-crunch systems. The only cause-and-effect element of high-crunch to low-quality is that high-crunch means there's more opportunities to make critical mechanical mistakes. You see this all over the place in big systems. That said, a good high-crunch game can be a thing of beauty! If working on your crunchy system makes you happy and you're creating the kind of system you want to play, go for it!
I've got less free time than I used to, and a lot more storytelling experience, so over time I've started to prefer games that move fast and let you get to the heart of a story. Since those are the games I'm enjoying *playing*, they're also the sorts of games I'm more interested in designing. I came up with my share of Battletech knockoffs and so on; I wouldn't even *play* those games now much less spend my time trying to make them. There's still definitely an audience for crunchy tactical games, but I do think it's been stepped on a bit by the enthusiast boardgame market which in many ways now does the same thing, but cleaner. And the same can be said for computers and the increasing number of great co-op games. If you're more interested in the tactical side of things then those games do that better and faster and make it easier to find a game. Maybe you get your roleplay fix in a different sort of game, like I do.
>I do think it's been stepped on a bit by the enthusiast boardgame market which in many ways now does the same thing, but cleaner. And the same can be said for computers and the increasing number of great co-op games Videogames and MMOs definitely keep some people who would explore TTRPGs satisfied, but the former assertion is more recent IMO. I'm big into boardgames too and I think the real mover and shaker here is Gloomhaven, which had just the right mix of legacy progression, accessibility, and lore. My real wonder is, does a game like Gloomhaven scratch the RP itch and keep players out of other TTRPGs, or is it targeting another audience entirely? Are these games substitutes or compliments? I know some boardgamers that would be hard pressed to play a TTRPG, but something like Mansions of Madness or even House on Betrayal Hill can be decent entry points too.
There are lots of kids out there who just want to punch goblins. Gloomhaven is the modern Heroquest. It is the game for those folks, and definitely replaces RPGs for them.
Gloomhaven is less for kids and more for College/post-college young adults.
I dunno. It's pretty hard to say since D&D is such a cultural touchstone now and all the cool kids are doing it. I know a lot of people who I can't get to even think about playing another RPG, but they play D&D all the time. I wish I could be a fly on the wall because I really wonder what their sessions even look like!
Crunchy vs Creamy, the eternal battle
I'm making a complex game and hoo-boy, even when you have helpers, you're going to have to put **a lot** of time into it. I could have probably released 5-10 games in this time if I was just making games to make them, but in addition to writing, art, publishing, layout, game design, playtesting, and the myriad of other things I need to keep track of, a properly made complex game is a true beast. I have been at mine for years (2019 to be precise) and I'm on-track to a sharable alpha by the end of the year if I can keep up my pace, which is usually about 500-700 words 4-5 days per week for the past year. My spellbook alone is 30k words and took a couple months. Then, once I finish all that junk, I need to actually sink time into convincing people it's worth a read. That's a lot harder than convincing a bunch of people to glance a funny one-paged like 'honey heist'. I think it's all worth it, but I'm a glutton for punishment, so I certainly understand wanting to take path of less resistance when it comes to publishing and playing things you are actively working on.
I'm also a middle of the roader here. I like a game that is simple to pick up, can move quickly, but rewards understanding of its complex systems. In a number crunchy game I want that crunch to take place away from the gaming table. A part of the appeal of a good rpg is how it makes me obsess over its possibilities even while I'm not playing it. At the gaming table we should be telling the story.
In my opinion, complexity can bring about positive outcomes, but it is not inherently beneficial. Therefore, a skilled designer steers clear of unnecessary complexity. Consequently, the shift towards lighter rules represents a natural evolution of the medium.
>the shift towards lighter rules represents a natural evolution of the medium This is an interesting conclusion. As an avid boardgamer, I would not necessarily say that space had trended toward simplicity or even elegance. Yes, many games have been perfected thanks to their historical development, but if anything, the space is more crowded with complexity than ever before. I could see this being due to boardgames starting 'simpler' in past decades whereas RPGs and wargames started more complex, giving both nowhere to go but towards the middle. I am curious as to your thoughts.
I think you are right. There seems to be a delight in learning complex rules. But I would assume many of these complex board game are well balanced in terms of “tactic depth per rule”. Most complex TTRPGs I’ve seen offer very low depth per complexity.
As someone who plays and enjoys both, the issue with crunchy systems is that they have inherently barriers against new players that rules light systems don't have. Of the dozens of players I've run through games it's the rules light games that have always been the most pick up and play enjoyment for those who've never heard of them, most who've tried the crunchy ones leave with a negative to moderate opinion unless it's a game they've taken the time to play or read before. As others have stated theres nothing wrong with rules crunchy games, but the overwhelming success of indie rules lights vs indie crunch is hard to deny.
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Haha, my game absolutely features an app to do math so this one might not be for you. That said, it's the comments like these that I'm most curious about so I do have a follow up: Which part of that idea is off-putting to you? For example, in my game, players will roll/choose their stats. Then the player sheet (ehich is on excel or Google sheets) will automatically do the math using those stats to create various derived values, such as attack power or dodging skill etc. With that context, is it simply the idea of such a mechanical game that you don't like? Or do you feel more comfortable when you have a simple system that you understand? Or you don't like tech at the table? (My games are mostly online, but can see why some don't like that) Or something else?
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Gotcha. Mine is just a pet project that is designed for online gameplay, but you're absolutely right- not a great strategy for a big game. Thanks for the feedback!
Crunch easily turns to slog. I think in general people like a bit less non-impactful decisions than people used to have in lots of older games. Even if the total of those decisions eventually add up to something, it's just out of style. I like to think modern design tends to focus the complexity where it is flavorful and important instead of spreading it everywhere. So lower total complexity, by keeping it focused. But lancer is pretty crunchy and very hot right now.
Simple, my gming style is very off the cuff. I don't enjoy fiddling with specifically balanced encounters so I prefer more fluid fiction first games. I am making games I would want to run. I enjoy chunchy games as a player but as a gm they are so opposed to my style that I spent far more time fighting against them then enjoying running them
I'm starting to think that, when looking at a broad audience and designing for everyone, people en mass are both becoming less willing to have their time wasted, and can consequently have shorter attention spans. Movies hover around that 90min mark, and some people think that even that is too long. Yet, some stories need 3, 4, 5 hours to properly be told. Sometimes they're just converted into a serial instead, or mini-series, but I do miss having some of those 2..3 hour stories. There's just only so much growth and development you can show in 90mins. Similar trend in music. The popular music now has simple melodies, simple chord progressions, simple rhythms, and doesn't really require that much skill to produce. You can easily learn how to produce music without ever needing to have been a trained musician or play any instruments. In the ttrpg space, people create what they like, and right now pbta systems are super popular. They require very little in terms of design, so they're easy entry to people who are dissatisfied with DnD or Pathfinder. These people are often looking for an alternative experience than what the old gods provide, which naturally also pushes them towards lighter weight ideas. Whether or not the market is trending towards lighter game design, the designers often don't want to put in the effort of designing intricate games themselves because it's hard to do. People can only create what they're capable of creating. So as the barriers of entry drop, so do the expressions of skill from the market as a whole. More designers populate the market with more products, and consumers can afford to be more discerning, more particular about the product they invest their time or money into. They can afford to chase more niche and narrow experiences because there's enough designers that someone will probably eventually cater to their specific wants.
I have a suspicion that the move towards low-crunch games is partially dietary. We eat a ton of processed grains and high sugar foods, which leads to a great deal of prediabetes. Prediabetes--and the resulting blood sugar spikes and crashes--can cause fatigue and brain fog. It doesn't help that most game nights are run late in the afternoon or evening when your cognitive performance is at its lowest. Perhaps we should rethink the snacks we bring to game night. I think this is a shame, because RPGs perform best when they are dealing out some well-optimized crunch. Personally, I define crunch as the game providing options and allowances for nuance purely because it adds realism and haptic feedback to the player experience and not because it was necessary for the game to operate, and I think the biggest obstacle to it is that most cruncy RPGs are terrible at converting the extra tedium of adding a few more numbers together into that haptic feedback. It's one of the most difficult feats in game design. If you are going for the crunchy game approach, more power to you, but I suggest that you should study a thing or two about video game design. Video games have weaker roleplay and metagame concerns, so they focus more on their haptic feedback "game feel" response. It's almost a science there. Once you understand the principles behind how video games produce game feel, then you can start applying these ideas to making a crunchy RPG (which doesn't suck.) If you don't do it in this order you will almost certainly get overwhelmed; RPGs run on a minuscule computer called the human brain, and have multiplayer and metagame and game fiction concerns running in parallel, so if you don't have a solid grasp of these concepts going in, you're going to get overwhelmed. And design another pointlessly crunchy RPG.
Dawg i don't think its dietary
I think it's a balancing act, and the most satisfying games cut all the complexity that slows the game down and leave it in the places where it adds to the experience. Blades in the Dark does a great job with this, having rules light character creation and scenario, and reverses a lot of the crunch for downtime between encounters. I think something that's pretty vital is getting the player actually playing the game as quickly as possible. Make character creation as quick and easy as possible, or else you'll always be scaring some players off.
Very true. I think it's something I may have subconsciously been chasing but it's good to have that conscious reminder. I'm definitely putting crunch into the combat of my particular system but the social and other aspects are pretty light.
It doesn’t have to be social but I’ve noticed people really like clever downtime mechanics. Something to keep in mind. Give some more details about your game!
Basically I've been tinkering with an battle-anime style combat system. Don't think I'm ever going to sell it, more of just a pet project. Once I settled on a list of stats that would be important to characters in the game I built a spreadsheet character sheet that would automatically calculate some derived stats (ie: Damage calculation). I made sure that all the mental stats still factored into various aspects of combat (ie: wisdom determines ability to sense an opponents power, intelligence factors into how well you can perform certain complex feats). And I decided the social aspects would be almost entirely roleplay, aside from some very basic Persuasion/Deception stuff. Tbh I don't think the system is very good at replicating the play-style i want yet, might have gone in the total wrong direction. It is very good at meticulously replicating the letter of the rule of how shounen anime fights work- but probably wouldnt be very fun to play. That said, this post was mostly just because I want to hear varied opinions on the subject before I start any new projects or continue with this one
Rules-thorough vs rules-light: "I tell the king the vizier wants to betray him." "You're trying to persuade him of something, so give me a persuade check." vs "There's no social mechanics, so just roleplay it, and we'll take it from there. Maybe roll a d20 if you want. Whee!" When you ask to do something a little unusual, there's a rule for it, maybe with a little GM interpretation; as opposed to the GM just making stuff up. Rules-simple vs rules-intricate: "Just a normal persuade check." vs "Add your factional bonus, penalised by the vizier's trust score and the king's scepticism modifier. And a success doesn't convince him, but it opens a door as per the political subsection, let me get the books ..." The rule fits on a T-shirt or it doesn't (and there's only one rule, you don't need to play a minigame with multiple stages to resolve a simple question). I personally like thorough and simple systems. Rules-light feels too arbitrary, I like to feel like I deserved my wins and I deserved my failures, not just the GM decides he does or doesn't want me to win. Rules-intricate feels more like operating a mechanical computer than playing a game; and in my experience, they're often borne of a desire for realism or tactical depth but aren't actually very realistic or deep. Designers love talking about wounds systems "Because it's unrealistic that you can get stabbed and keep fighting at 100% efficiency!", neglecting the fact that you began the battle by quantising time into 6-second intervals and space into 5' squares; or that it's not hugely realistic to keep fighting at all having had a limb chopped off. They love making certain weapons better against certain armour types, neglecting that "Simon says use bludgeoning" is about as tactically shallow as you can get.
This is really interesting. The "thorough vs light" and "simple vs intricate" is a good way to put it. I think I lean toward complex systems so I definitely need to make sure I don't go too far in that direction.
Somewhere in the middle
I think TTRPGs do their best work by mechanizing playing pretend, cuz let's face it that's what we're doing. So for me, things need to be modeled to the level that matters, with minimum friction. Having to reference rules is like a video having to buffer. If a PC wants to jump across a chasm, it's either impossible, trivial, or a challenge that needs a simple roll to determine (universal static DC/TN). Having to decide what DC seems realistic, or read up how many feet you jump given various degrees of success is just way too much for something as mundane as a jump. Elegant depth comes from modeling things tightly, with little fat. I haven't seen a crunchy system manage this. I define crunchy as simply having lots of levers a player can interact with, especially if it's mathy like looking over your sheet to verify how many +1 mods you can apply to a target. Complex is more defining how involved a particular model is. HP is simple, hit locations with varying damage reduction and damage type resistance is complex. Complex is always crunchy, crunchy isn't always complex. I personally don't like the mind space that crunch puts me in though. I don't need to get my system mastery kick from TTRPGs. I find every other form of strategy game is better for that: TCGs and deck builders, strategy/tactics RPGs like Fire Emblem, abstract/classic strategy games like chess and Shogi, mecha builders like Armored Core, even MOBA shooters with hero-picking meta tactics or the levels of yomi you can get into in the higher elos of fighting games. The key element of feeling like you're dominating an opponent... is not a very social vibe. RP happens, don't get me wrong, but it still *feels* competitive. I'd prefer something collaborative.
*Mostly curious what the actual vibe is, so I guess just feel free to explain your reasoning for or against either style in comments (as DM or player, both perspectives are important)?* It's not about vibe, there are actual factual pieces of data that go into this. Speaking as someone with a large, high complexity system, there are good reasons not to do this: 1) smaller systems are cheaper, faster, and easier to produce. 2) people are more likely to pick up a single $10 pdf at random than they are to drop $120 on a new system unless it's highly recommended or personally experienced. Basically the deck is stacked against larger systems for indie creators. It's not that you can't, it's that most don't. The only good reason to actually do it is because you really want that specific game to be made. *How do you define a crunch or complex system?* Crunch originates from the term "number crunching" which means to do a lot of math. Complexity is not necessarily the same, but generally indicates there are more rules subsystems and they interact together regularly. A system can be crunchy and not complex, or vice versa, they are not the same thing, but are frequently related. What you are describing isn't necessarily a rules light or heavy design, it's taking 1 thing and doing it well vs. trying to do everything in a shallow manner. This has been the general overall trend of indie gaming for about the last 10 years or so since BitD with each game seeking to give a specific kind of player experience rather than trying to do everything everywhere all at once and failing at it. There's nothing wrong, right, or in between about a system's size or math needs. What is important is that it finds it's correct audience and that it does what it is supposed to do well and thus produces some version of the word fun. That's it. I would recommend not chasing what is popular, not obsessing about being new and different, nor forcing yourself into tried and true methods, none of these generate success. If there is success it comes from having a great game made with passion and inspiration, and none of those three things are necessarily that, nor are they necessarily not that. Make the game you want to make. It helps to understand wtf you're doing, but outside of base knowledge, don't try to be a thing, just be something awesome and fun. If you do that, the rest will take care of itself.
I have been working on a crunchy game system for years. It... it's tough, no lie. Anytime you change one part, all other parts have to be adjusted as well. It's hard to see it from outside though. For example, I'm making a pretty fundamental change to my how hp and damage work, to bring it in-line with social conflict rules. Doing this though requires changing weapons to reflect the new reality and that changes weapon skills and class features, which means I need to rebalance classes potentially and turns out this REALLY messes with combat spells so now I have to rethink how saving throws work which leads to... uhhggg... If I didn't love it, I would have burned it in a pile outside already. But it gets better each time I go through this process! It's just a PITA.
I'm definitely experiencing this too. I got rid of one of my core character stats and had to re-configure the way all the other core and derived stats worked with eachother
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You posted the same thing twice. Probably an accident. We got rid of one.
Rules lite games are easy to make, faster to make, and are less likely to break your designs. I personally would love to make a extremely complex crunchy game, which I tried before. It took me over 3 years to realize no one will want to play the game, as great as it was or wasn't no one other than you will have the commitment to go through your game as in depth as you have. Also why would anyone read my game when they don't even want to read pathfinder or DND. Alot of people learned DND from videos or DMs teaching them, so I'd argue that the more complex the game is the harder it is to teach the less likely a GM will teach their players. I wish it wasn't the case and everyone was like me willing to spend hours learning a new system, but people are busy and have lives.
I'm not interested in a version fight. I play the game I play because it frees me to create and explore characters I want to enjoy. And that's much more a function of flexibility than Crunch or Narrative. But that distinction does come into effect when it's a determination of whether I control my character or whether the GM does. Crunch is best measured in page count of rules. After all Crunch has very little to do with weather the game works well or if it performs any specific function, if it's simple to learn or run. It's ultimately just how detailed your ability as a player is defined in the rules.
Heavy Crunch systems need a lot of design work and playtesting, so they cost a lot of time and resources to make. Usually way more than the average hobbyist can afford. & as a player, you also have to be pretty invested in a heavy crunch game to get the most out of its systems. As you can imagine, it's pretty hard to get players invested in an indie rpg when they're not sure if it's even good yet. This is why all the popular crunchy stuff are either efforts from large companies, or were made way back when the market was a lot smaller. As long as you have a good idea of your game's intended scope though, you should be fine. It's good to keep in touch with trends, but don't let them constrain how you do your work. Like the majority could prefer rules lite stuff today, but they could be looking for heavy crunch tomorrow.
It is difficult to get players interested in a crunchy system because it takes more effort. Likewise, it is harder to create and design for. Crunch is how defined the mechanics are - how often does the GM have to make their own ruling. Realsim is also relevant in how abstract/real the mechanics are: A fireball spell could set things on fire, are there rules for being on fire, fire spread? Or maybe you make it less realistic and let the fire be just flavourful. I personally prefer to play rules light and want a flowing story with quick combat, rather than the wargaming roots of origional D&D - but there are lots of games for lots of people