Periodically I read threads here at The Forge in which people argue against more complex systems, and particularly more complex combat systems. I take these with some bit of salt; but I hadn't really thought much about them. I think of Multiverser's system as being relatively simple at the core with plenty of room for what might be termed "voluntary complexity"--that is, if the players want to make it more complicated, it is within their power to do so.

Perhaps I was recently looking (elsewhere) at someone's relatively simple combat system, and thinking that it had this factor of the obvious--that is, provide any two opponents, and in a moment of reflection I could tell you which would most likely win under the system. But I can't do that quite so easily with a more complex game. For example, D&D has a certain amount of complexity in combat because it is an interaction between 1) chance to hit (including defensive values); 2) ratio of attacks (how many swings each side gets relative to the other); 3) range of damage; and 4) durability (hit points). Yet even at this level of complexity, given two opponents, five minutes, and some scrap paper, I can work out who will win in an ordinary melee combat with some certainty.

But throw in a few tweaks, and the complexity rises--and with it the unpredictability of the situation. If one of my combatants has a dodging skill that enables him to avoid many of the attacks of the other when it works, probability of a successful attack for his opponent drops precipitously. If there is the possibility of a stun or knockout blow, durability suddenly becomes a less important factor. If my combat style allows me to trade attacks for damage or damage for attacks, I may be thus able to tweak my performance on the fly--that is, whether one attack for d10 points is better or worse than two attacks for d6 points each may well depend on whether rolling twice to attack gives me a better chance to connect at all or if my attacks are all pretty likely to hit, and the ability to make that choice round-by-round becomes an important tactical consideration. Suddenly it is not so obvious who will win; my scratch pad must give way to a computer program.

Thus complexity in the system in itself may be a way to inhibit min/maxing. The player can't easily evaluate what choices will make his the "most powerful" character in play, because there are more variables than he can easily process. In D&D, we can wonder whether the character with better armor class or more hit points is more survivable; but it's something that can be fairly easily calculated. The more complicated the system is, the less likely it is that a player can read it well enough to beat it.

I like simple systems; I like complex ones also. Handling time is a negative of complexity; predictability is a negative of simplicity. In the end, there is balance--each is a defensible choice, depending on what you want the system to do.

Most of you design; I'm interested in your thoughts on this.

--M. J. Young

Hey M.J.,

Thus complexity in the system in itself may be a way to inhibit min/maxing. The player can't easily evaluate what choices will make his the "most powerful" character in play, because there are more variables than he can easily process.

This presumes the player is working toward advantage in isolation. As with Magic: the Gathering, killer combinations become known throughout the player network, and the whole player network ultimately benefits from the separate efforts of all on behalf of advantage.

Paul

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here.

Sure each pole, and the points on the continuum, are defensible choices.

I think that there is an important, and valuable, negative perception against making complex systems without choosing to. That's a genuine error, IMO.

You might want to take a look at this thread - Anti-Combat Bias - and see if it addresses the points you're thinking about.

M. J. Young wrote: .... predictability is a negative of simplicity

I'd agree with Jack, a simple system could be as highly unpredictable as the dice system in Sorcerer. What is more of an issue, I think, is the strategizing and tactics factor, associated with Gamism.

A complex game(be it combat, politics, whatever), has several elements which interact in potentially complex manners, requiring a higher level a strategizing. To give an example, a simple system is more like checkers, with a fairly simple strategy, while chess has several different factors(the different pieces move in different manners), which leads to more complicated strategies. OF course, a simple game such as Go/Wei Chi has incredibly intricate strategies, but I think few people actually design rpgs hoping to make something as deep as that.

As someone who enjoys gamist elements, I find that any game that has a very limited "success" strategy usually leaves me unsatisfied, while one that has a lot of room to learn and explore, a perviness to it, can keep me occupied for a long time. I enjoy the elements of strategy and counterstrategy, a need to adapt in game to overcome whatever obstacles may appear.

Chris

There's four degrees of "complexity" in a game:


• Simplistic;
• Complex;
• Overly Complex and
• Simple.



A Simplistic game requires simplistic strategies to win, for example, charge straight ahead, or always choose All Out Attack (in Usagi Yojimbo RPG).

A Complex game has a straight forward strategy to win, like, all PCs concentrate on the biggest monster first (AD&D), break off if all weapons bounce, fireball first when facing massed encounters, don't bother with shields unless they're highly magical, jump off cliffs to escape encounters. :)

A Overly Complex game has one or more "game breaking" ways of winning the game which munchkins, power gamers and rules lawyers usually find in short order once they get hold of the rules. Examples are things like in RoleMaster (with all the expansions) choosing to play an archmage with a special spell list which allows enormous amounts of spell power to be built up. Or playing the noble warrior class, which allows enormous numbers of attacks per round. In WW's Exalted, there's a combination of two stones which allows PCs to become immune to damage in combat forever; a fellow munchkin found it the first time he generated his character.

A Simple game has a range of strategies, from simplistic, through complex, to simple. The end result is like looking at a fractal; it's basic description is simple, but the expression is complex. Chess and Go have this property, as does real combat (just read descriptions of it in martial arts books, comics and in history books!). My S combat system has this behaviour as well, allowing players to model the behaviour of real combatants. That's because I used a fencing model which is like a four way paper, scissors, rock game.

M. J. Young wrote: The player can't easily evaluate what choices will make his the "most powerful" character in play, because there are more variables than he can easily process.

Bankuei wrote: I'd agree with Jack, a simple system could be as highly unpredictable as the dice system in Sorcerer. What is more of an issue, I think, is the strategizing and tactics factor, associated with Gamism.

Here's a question: What makes a system complex or simple, really? I think this is a slippery slope since it is only in the eye of the beholder and a matter of comparason that any game is simple or complex. I mean, Checkers is pretty simple. Chess is a bit more complicated in comparason, but is is a "complex game?" I don't believe so. I think it's a line subjectively drawn in the sand. and we all put it somewhere else (and I suspect we'd put it in different places at different times of the day)

In fact, I daresay it is more useful to look at Andrew's categories as lines that can be crossed from good design perspective. You don't want to go into simplistic or overly complex in your designs, because the design would be lacking in some way. Or such is my view.

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: In fact, I daresay it is more useful to look at Andrew's categories as lines that can be crossed from good design perspective. You don't want to go into simplistic or overly complex in your designs, because the design would be lacking in some way. Or such is my view.

Jack wrote:
Here's a question: What makes a system complex or simple, really? I think this is a slippery slope since it is only in the eye of the beholder and a matter of comparason that any game is simple or complex. I mean, Checkers is pretty simple. Chess is a bit more complicated in comparason, but is is a "complex game?" I don't believe so. I think it's a line subjectively drawn in the sand. and we all put it somewhere else (and I suspect we'd put it in different places at different times of the day)

cruciel wrote: ...Andrew's terms...

M. J. Young wrote:
that is, provide any two opponents, and in a moment of reflection I could tell you which would most likely win under the system.

Y'know, you can't really just jump in assuming a game is either predictable or not. It's just not that simple; some games are predictable in one area and not in others, some are so-so predictable, some are more predictable than others.

And I simply refute the idea that there is any correlation between predictable and reliable; these two ideas are not so connected.

Simply put, this side of the argument is sliding quickly into "I don't like that system because it's too unpredictable (unreliable) [to me]." Personal preferences are fine, but not in a discussion about complexity.

Let's take a moment and think here. We all pretty much agree that it probably isn't any fun to play a game which you know, in detail, what the outcome is from the very beginning; that's one extreme, let's call it 'preordained.' On the other hand, it probably isn't any fun if the game renders completely unexpected results at every turn; that's the other extreme, let's call that 'dada.' The problem is this is such a wide range that it not only becomes totally subjective, but pointless to try and define what is 'complex' and what isn't. People have different tastes (and if that's the point of this thread, let's call it done).

What attracted me to posting is that, hidden amongst all this rhetoric, we are actually talking about tension. There's that moment, when the dice roll across the table, when nobody, not even the gamemaster, knows what's going to happen next; I call that tension. I find it highly engaging. Too often or for too long and it dissolves into chaos. To me, it is the primary reason for including dice in a game in the first place.

The ultimate problem I see in many designs of games it how tension is handled. Or rather isn't. How many games can you count that talk about the subtle social situation that requires or bars a certain level of tension? Too much, or too little, at the wrong time will wreck any game, but how many designs talk about how you handle this? So many games give you the option of using dice, 'should you roll or not,' but no instruction as to what is too often or not often enough.

That's why any discussion of complexity in game design is clouded by the fact that there are no 'handling instructions' for tension. Because it becomes quite crucial to different people's experiences with different games, how badly burned they are by misplayed (and this is both highly subjective and completely relative) tension.

Until you separate complexity from predictability, predictability from reliability, and complexity from 'handling instructions' for tension, I can't really see much value in continuing this thread.

Fang Langford

p. s. Sorry I didn't edit, I gotta run.

"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."--Damon Runyon

Ozymandias wrote:

M. J. Young wrote: that is, provide any two opponents, and in a moment of reflection I could tell you which would most likely win under the system.

But is that really a bad thing? Shouldn't a better combatant generally win? As an overall overall argument I think saying that unpredictable=good and predictable=bad is a highly debatable proposition. In fact, what you seem to term predictable and unpredictable , I would call reliable and unreliable.

I think that's a good question:

[...]how do you design a simple combat system that still has sufficient tension for the player who can see through the simplicity, and yet is still reliable?


In general I don't know that you can design a completely transparent system, but you can work on making it as transluscent as possible. The factors that matter are often /really/ diverse and complex, and often way too huge to factor into a simple combat---essentially why we often reduce them to a die roll: Could the arrow be pushed aside by a freak gust of wind? Yes? Is it important enough factor to put into every game system? No. Thus we often just default to a die roll and let it fall out as it may.

But it depends on what you want from combat system, in some games (Hearts and Souls) I care more about the hero and his actions than any random factors so I rely on a fairly morphable result. While in my FRPG I do care somewhat about the heroes actions, but also on the mechanical feel--that wounds can kill you and are terrible, that some creatures are /tough/ and not simply fodder for your attacks. (One player commented on the difficulty of fighting Myrk, my goblin analog, I pointed out that--indeed that was the point, these are things they build huge walls around cities to /keep out/ because the average person can't fight one, let alone many.)

I think one important factor that we need to look at is what degree of Karma, and where it applies, goes into a resolution system.

Take for instance, character creation, where you apply character effectiveness in certain areas. This Karma is chosen before play, and usually isn't available to be manipulated in play.

Second, you'd have in game Karma, which is the options and strategies you could apply during play to decide the outcome.

Third, we have Fortune, which affects the previous two(if they're part of the system at all), to varying degrees.

Amber focuses primarily on pre-play decisions for Karma, and then in play, trying to make sure you're in your field of expertise or politically manipulating others into handling your opposition. In games such as Otherkind, Dust Devils, & TROS, a lot more emphasis is placed on the in-game decisions and strategy.

When you emphasize preplay decisions more in your design, the combat becomes more predictable, and more obvious to anyone who has the information(Amber-style Karma). When you emphasize in play decisions, you have more gamist strategic play(Dust Devils). When you emphasize fortune more, both Karma type decisions are reduced in effectiveness.

If you're talking about games that have simple resolution, but enough strategy to make a difference, try looking at Zenobia, TROS(without any manuevers), Hero Wars, Otherkind, and Draconic. All of these focuse primarily on in game strategic choices, although pre-play choices can also make a big(but not overwhelming) factor.

Chris

M. J. Young wrote:
I don't mean that I want a system to be unreliable. I mean that I want a system that affords the seeming underdog a chance to overcome the obstacles because he knows or does something that the seemingly superior opponent can't or doesn't counter. If all our two fighters can do is swing away at each other, we've got a rather predictable outcome; but if one of them has the ability to sweep the legs of the other and so render him helpless, and the other has a dodging ability which allows him to avoid most blows, we've got a much more interesting and unpredictable--but still completely reliable--system.

Le Joueur wrote:
What attracted me to posting is that, hidden amongst all this rhetoric, we are actually talking about tension. There's that moment, when the dice roll across the table, when nobody, not even the gamemaster, knows what's going to happen next; I call that tension. I find it highly engaging. Too often or for too long and it dissolves into chaos. To me, it is the primary reason for including dice in a game in the first place.

M. J. Young wrote:

Ozymandias wrote:

M. J. Young wrote: ...That is, provide any two opponents, and in a moment of reflection I could tell you which would most likely win under the system.

...As an overall argument I think saying that unpredictable=good and predictable=bad is a highly debatable proposition. In fact, what you seem to term predictable and unpredictable, I would call reliable and unreliable.

[About more karma based systems]...The answer is a foregone conclusion.

I don't mean that I want a system to be unreliable. I mean that I want a system that affords the seeming underdog a chance to overcome the obstacles because he knows or does something that the seemingly superior opponent can't or doesn't counter....

Thank you, Fang, for bringing out the aspect of tension. That's probably where the secret lies--how do you design a simple combat system that still has sufficient tension for the player who can see through the simplicity, and yet is still reliable?

Ozymandias wrote:

Le Joueur wrote: What attracted me to posting is that, hidden amongst all this rhetoric, we are actually talking about tension. There's that moment, when the dice roll across the table, when nobody, not even the gamemaster, knows what's going to happen next; I call that tension. I find it highly engaging. Too often or for too long and it dissolves into chaos. To me, it is the primary reason for including dice in a game in the first place.

My question on this would be - "Is Fortune therefore the only or even the best source of tension in every game?"

Ozymandias wrote: If tension derives from not knowing what's going to happen next, I'd argue that it occurs all the time without rolling any dice at all.

In every mode of play, exploration plays an important role ergo players should be regularly be faced with the unknown and thereby not know what's going to happen next, is this tension?

On the flipside for the GM, every time he faces his players with a difficult moral quandary or a tough tactical situation, he doesn't know what's going to happen next, is this therefore also tension?

I would argue that both of those can result in as much if not more tension than simply rolling the dice, and for certain types of games they would provide a much more satisfying sort of tension.

Ozymandias wrote: I would advocate that tension derived from Fortune is primarily tension based on the possibility of incompetence, and that the more competent a game assumes the characters to be, the less Fortune that really needs to be involved. Perhaps this why on the really high-end of the PC competence scale (ie: Amber and Nobilis) it tends to disappear completely. Tension can certainly exist in these games, it just has to come from somewhere else than the possibility of outright failure.

Le Joueur wrote: So, Mark, is your leading article on this thread actually a suggestion that complexity is a good thing if it makes a system less obvious? Or that you prefer systems that are more unobvious and that that usually comes not in a simple package?

when he wrote: What you're talking about here could be done with a completely Karma based system, assuming that it includes some type of abilities/feats/etc that can be utilized to adjust the effectiveness of the attacker/defender up or down. This results in characters being conistently good at the things they're supposed to be good at without every result being pre-ordained.

M. J. Young wrote: I'm saying that people are dismissive of complex systems and supportive of simple ones without considering whether complexity has value; and that it often does have value in making outcomes reliable but not obvious.

Is that the answer to the question?

Le Joueur wrote: My turn for a question; is the 'obviousness' term what everyone else is talking about? Or tension? Or are we confusing reliability/complexity/predictability unnecessarily? (And I suppose finally, are we just talking personaly preferences then?)

Hi all,

Can we make a distinction between complexity of rules verses complexity of the resulting interactions? Current science is researching how complex phenomena result from a simple set of rules. Wouldn't that be an game-system ideal to aim for?

Alan wrote: Can we make a distinction between complexity of rules verses complexity of the resulting interactions? Current science is researching how complex phenomena result from a simple set of rules. Wouldn't that be an game-system ideal to aim for?

Can I agree with Alan and Andrew here (this might be going off topic)?

From my experience it's a battle-upstreams to create a game which has high complexity directly in the core rules. The overhead to avoid conflicts and exploits grow ever bigger as you try to make it more detailed.

Starting from high complexity one tends to lean towards simplification, right? For example figuring out optimal strategies and combinations just like Andrew already said in his post about 4 levels of complexity.

Since high complexity usually is motivated because it allows the player to do a wide range of things in high detail (that's why I did it anyway), it falls because the player tends to go for a few (optimal) actions.

With simple rules that can generate complex results this problem simply falls away.

Or in short I agree because these are my observations as well.

OK, missed a lot here so far, but here's how I weigh in.

First, there is no anti-complexity bias here at the Forge. There may be single individuals who dislike complexity, but there are just as many, myself included, who like complexity. In case anyone is interpereting my Combat Systems rant as an argument against complex combat systems, it is not. And never has been. If anyone reads it, and thinks that's the intent, they ought to re-read it again, along with the thread that Shreyas linked to above (thanks, S.).

Ok, that bit of self-centered comentary out of the way, on to the main point. A game needs exactly as much complexity as it needs to accompolish it's goals, and no more. OK, that's tautological, but I'm trying to make a point. Which is that any level of complexity can be suitable for a particular design. The questions that everybody raises above about Tension, Predictability, whatever, can all be seen from different viewpoints. I actually expect that out there, somewhere, is a gamer, Fang, who wants no tension at all in his RPG. And someone ought to design a game for him.

So we can have opinions as to which of these are particularly important to our particular designs, but I doubt that there is some Sumum Bonum that we are going to find by discussing this in further detail.

>>>Huge Tangent<<<
Especially since it's beeen discussed to death by minds much better than ours. What we've delved into here is classic Game Theory. Read your Von Neumann, et al (I'm always amazed that people don't realize that the term Min-Max is from a paper of his from the earlier half of the last century). They talk about "True Games" and "Perfect Games" with much more clarity and precision that I think we could hope to.

For example, one thing I remember from the meager amount of Game Theory that I've retained, is that the most important part of such games, is that the outcome be based, not solely on the outcome of the decisions of one player, and not just on that of multiple players, but on the interaction of those decisions.

Take, for example, D&D. You have the player decision, opposed by the Game's decision (selected by the GM as theoretically neutral interpreter). To a small extent, these things interact over time in terms of strategy. But rarely is the decision of one side to attack affected by any decision of the other side. I like to use bowling as an analogy (as game theorists often use it as an example of something that's not a game). D&D is most often simply a bowling match with each player trying to get a score equal to the opponent's HP before the other does the same. Or, IOW, it's not a "good game" (in the Game Theory sense) on the tactical scale.

As opposed to, say, TROS (or football, for a sporting comparison), where almost all outcomes are affected by both side's decisions. The Game Theorists would say this is a better game.

Note that this is true mostly because it then resembles an economic model, Game Theory is used to model economics as it's practical outcome. And as such, one can see that in something as complex as a market that there is a necessity to have models that involve these sorts of relativvely complex interactions.

So, the question of applicability of Game Theory here is valid. However, we can skip a lot of the bullshit of the discussion, and get right down to the heart of the matter if we were to all just get a little more up to date on our reading of Game Theory. From that basis, one can discuss such matters a bit more clearly and athoratatively, IMO.
>>>End Tangent<<<

Anyhow, it seems to me, again, that a game needs just as much complexity as it needs to accomplish it's goals. If one of those goals is a lack of easy predictability, that's fine. But that still doesn't require too much complexity neccessarily. The sorts of interactive complexity that's discussed in Game Theory can be brought about by a set of rules as simple as Chess.

So it sounds to me like a good rule of thumb is to try to create a game with that sort of dynamic where the classic phrase can be used to describe it. "Easy to learn, difficult to master". Often said of Chess, but applies even moreso to a game like Go, which has even fewer rules.

But that all assumes that this is even a goal. Again, I can see someone wanting a "game" for which it is easy to see the outcomes. For example, a Narativist game, in which the conflict resolution was not the central source of Tension. Indeed, I'd venture to say that the conflict resolution system is not even close to the central part of Tension in most Narrativist games. Take Sorcerer, for instance. Do we hang on the outcome of the die-rolls? No, they are almost an afterthought, IMO. The important parts come well before and after the dierolls, and take the form of the decisions that the characters make. As such, in that case, you want a system like Sorcerer which heightens the Tension by making repercussions for choices. A system that sought to emulate that could easily forget about the whole question of predictability vs uncertainty in resolution systems.

All just seems like style preference to me.

Mike