>400+ pages, 3 books of rules upon rules upon rules which

>>49304979
>trying to please every shrieking twelve-year-old on /tg/ who insults your DMing
>many of whom admit they don't even play games and are just trolling you

>>49304979
Roleplaying games tend to be overwritten for a variety of reasons. They're commercial products and there needs to be enough stuff there to validate people paying substantial amounts of money for the books. Game designers can also get caught up in coming up with what are cool ideas in theory, but which, when combined, create a clunky game. There are two parts of this. First, there's a thing like how your college professors assign homework, where, sure, you can easily afford to spend 12 hours of work a week doing the stuff they've assigned, but things start to break down when you combine that with what your other professors are assigning as well. So a super-sophisticated encumbrance system is okay when it's the thing you're focusing on, but when it's just one of a hundred subsystems your game needs to run, all with the same amount of complexity, that's a real problem.

The second part of this is simply the presupposition of a level of system mastery that only long-time veterans and game designers should be assumed to have. So maybe that encumbrance subsystem would work okay with all the other subsystems in the game, if you already instinctively knew your way around everything. But for even people who are aware of all the basic rules, but who might have to look up the exact figures for things, or who have to at least pause and think to remember how things go, shit can be a real clusterfuck.

All of this argues for a set of rules that is fairly short & accessible. (Maybe that set of rules could be expanded with supplements, but those supplements shouldn't be necessary, and the game shouldn't feel limited without them.) In the realm of D&D, Moldvay Basic (B/X) fits this bill. It's two different sets (Basic and Expert, covering levels 1-3 and 4-14, respectively), each of which is a mere 64 pages long and covers everything from character creation, monsters and spells to magical treasure. Outside of D&D, there are even lighter games, like Barbarians of Lemuria.

>>49305071
5e is rules-medium for a highly-sophisticated and intricate genre of games. It's not by any means a quick-and-easy starter game (though if you just use the freebie basic rules, shit is a bit simpler).

>>49305070
/thread

>>49305071
This anon gets it. Basic D&D player perfectly well, the advanced rules and all the nonsense that came after it are completely unnecessary rules bloat serving no-one. Just pick up the dice and play, gosh darn it!

>>49305098
I will say that Basic can seem a bit clunky and ad hoc to folks without prior experience with old school D&D. I would love to see a modernized version of Basic that's no more than 50% more complex than Moldvay Basic. I was hoping that that is what 5e was going to be with its stated emphasis on streamlining and simplifying things. But it was doing that for new school D&D which, at its worst, was way, way, way more involved than something like Moldvay Basic.

>>49304979
My dev-helled project basically states this.

"There will be times when the rules collide with lore, common sense, or logic. I cannot codify every possible situation. Should the rules appear to make no sense when applied to the situation, it's best to temporarily adjust them."

A simple mechanic that leaves room for common sense works far better than one that's overly comprehensive and ends up spawning "Logic" memes.

>>49304979

HAVE you tried NOT playing DnD tho?

>>49305185
This is a problem in just about every system with more crunch than narrative. World of Darkness is REALLY bad about it

>"You know going over all of this, this is all a lot of bullshit. Half of these mechanics don't work as intended and the other half intentionally obfuscate their value to intentionally fuck over people."

Depends on the system. Outside of D&D, the worst I see regularly are rules which sound better than they are because players generally don't understand probability once multiple dice and rerolls get involved.

There are also common blind spots. Things the game designers don't seem to think about. For example, sci-fi games with space travel. They usually include a brief bit about how vacuum hurts unprotected PCs, while failing to say anything about how well the PCs weapons will/won't work in a vacuum.

Sometimes you can work it out. Sometimes the setting doesn't provide enough detail (eg, how well a flamethrower works in a vacuum depends on what fuel it's using). Sometimes you get into an argument because one person didn't think things through, like the time I had one of my players arguing that his characters claws would be usable weapons in a vacuum.

>>49305213
There are plenty that do it a shit tonne better though.

I mean if you want to die, try rolemaster, that's a really good system in my opinion. If you disregard some rules the 40k FFG games are pretty fun. You'll likely have to have someone brief you on the most retarded shit that needs cutting out. FFG's rather talented at oversight. And Age as bland and fucking boring as shit as it is works good.

Pre 5e DnD is fun and all but there's so fucking much turbo retarded stuff in each edition that makes you either wish your weren't playing the system, or wish that this gigantic slice of an otherwise workable system wasn't four shitheaps stacked ontop of eachother.