Why Customization Kills My Fun: GM-Facing Vs Player-Facing Complexity

Part One: My Trek to the OSR. (Skip to Part Two if you'd rather just talk shop)

When I first joined the RPG hobby, I was enamored by system complexity. I'm not like many in the OSR who come from a background of long nights with D&D in their youth, experiencing the rollercoaster of developments in the system through the years. I grew up on Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Star Wars (not the prequels, mind you), Stargate, and a scant few fantasy novels that I'd sneak in from time to time.

By the time I entered the Tabletop Role-playing scene, customization was all the rage.  My experience growing up with MMORPGs and JRPGs made me a perfect candidate for the build-obsessed WotC era D&D player. I spent hours upon hours engaging in whiteroom theory crafting exercises, trying to eke out the highest maximum benefits for games that hadn't even started yet. Compared to the peak of 3.5e (which I probably would have adored were it my first introduction), Fifth Edition's customization options are relatively meager, and crunch is largely relegated to more fluid mechanics. Even so, learning about the intricacies of the system and creating customized characters was thrilling to me.

It isn't nostalgia that led me to the OSR. It was disappointment. As a player, I'd concocted these wondrous builds: labors of careful consideration, meticulous planning, and some coordination to prevent discordant characters. My goal was to find some very clever way to interface with the system that would make my character so good at something that the other players would say "hey, that dude's character is pretty sick."

This isn't to say that I didn't create deep characters. At that point, I wasn't really DMing and I was just working on cars for a living. I barely had anything else to do but dream up these elaborate characters. I'd give them elaborate backstories that would (I thought) set them leagues apart from everyone else in the group.

When I actually sat at the table, though, I felt the experience was... Hollow. Unfulfilling. It was no fault of the DM. We all had an enjoyable time. The social experience was fulfilling in its own right, the developments in the game were interesting, but once the wonder of "holy shit this is new and cool" wore off, I was left with little to take with me from session to session.

I felt as though we were being guided on a journey, that our choices carried little weight, and that our interfacing with the fictional world was largely superficial. Worse still, when "my moment to shine" came along, it came out less like "here's how I can contribute" and more like "this is what the book promised me, so let me do the cool thing."

You know how cool the cool thing was in those moments? Not very. It was a very detached sort of problem solving that felt an entire order of magnitude removed from the experience. We weren't really playing the game anymore, as I felt it. We were hatching traps that we'd set some several weeks ago.  I know this tangent probably seems very bizarre and irrelevant, but rest assured that it'll only get worse.

So imagine my surprise, after several years of hearing that Old School D&D was a bunch of Wargaming Grognard phooey, that suddenly I heard some very influential individuals (to me, anyway) say: "Well, the OSR puts a lot of focus on player skill. You're urged not to get too attached to your characters because they're probably going to die. But if they survive, it's an earned victory."

I couldn't pick up that goddamn Google quick enough. 

I was instantly drawn to rules light OSR systems that put the focus on intuitive play. By throwing away system complexity, sessions ran smoother, the play was far more enthralling, and much less time was wasted in highly litigious discussions (often on RAW, RAI, and the inevitable invocation of Rule Zero).

By that point, I assumed that it was a law of nature that more rules meant less fun. Then I tried Second Edition. Second Edition was the game everyone warned me about. They said it was incredibly complicated, full of charts and matrices. My findings? It's granular and requires some up-front calculation work when you roll characters, but in spite of its complexity it fosters a very different culture of play than other high-complexity systems like 3.5e. I'm going to lay the blame on this on what I call GM facing vs player facing complexity.

Part Two: GM-Facing Complexity

GM-Facing Complexity is a depth of rules and underlying mechanics that is, as the name implies, aimed at the GM. These are rules that a player does not need to know in order to play their character in an effective manner. Quite obviously, this includes such procedural rules as exploration turns, reaction rolls, morale checks, and anything else that doesn't directly involve player characters interacting with the environment. These are rules that handle general operations of all character types in such a way that a player, in a very intuitive manner, says "I'd like to try to do X" and the GM tells you to make a roll if needed, letting you know the outcome either way. In AD&D, this governs virtually everything.

Contrast this with what I call Player-Facing Complexity. This is best exemplified by feats, lists of customizable class features (even more so with subclasses), and heightened tactical combat benefits. These add layers of complexity that are often unintuitive by nature.

The reason feats are "player facing" is because they provide extra avenues for players to shape what happens by telling players: "because you picked this, you can do this." It then spells out the exact rule so that the player can not only evaluate the merit of making this decision, but also they can ensure that the GM is bound to this outcome. This is markedly different than skill bonuses, more efficient attacks, new spells, and the like. The player is, by virtue of the way the system is devised, encouraged to fully understand the underlying mechanics of the system. Not doing so means that others at the table will manage to cast massive shadows over them, and they simply do not keep up with the pace of others at the table.

As a result, the GM is put in a position where they have to navigate a minefield. While trying to retain some semblance of momentum toward a desired experience as a game, you risk shortchanging players who derive their fun from harvesting the fruits from their crafty character building long before they sat down at the first session. Another risk is that the GM is forced to spend more time adjusting things to remain engaging for the system masters at the expense of the rest of the table, who may either be less inclined to study the mechanical underpinnings, or they may simply be invested for the purposes of playing the character (like me). For those individuals, they'll often feel frustrated that so much time is being spent focused on picking actions from character sheets and interpreting rules rather than intuitively acting as their character. 

I believe that players such as these do not need to avoid systems with complex rules. Instead, I believe they should learn to see which direction the complex rules are going. I believe that ANYONE could play AD&D with only the briefest explanation as to how it works and make great decisions in the game. They'd know you need torches in the dark, that you have advantages being at a higher ground, that pointy weapons aren't that great against thick armor, etc. But they won't know that as a Warlock it's expected to burn your spells if you've got an hour of rest ahead of you, or that the Paladin should save their smites until they crit, or that the Monk should conserve their Ki points for tough enemies because stunning strike can make them trivially easy, or that grappling, disarming, or tripping are almost entirely worthless because they can still attack, they can pick it up with a free action and attack, and they can just get up with half movement respectively.  From an intuitive and narrative perspective, none of that makes any goddamn sense. I believe that things like this often lead people to seek refuge in story games or rules light systems. 

To those of you who just can't give two shits about play that is fuelled by Player-Facing Complexity, I say this: you don't need to retreat to story games to find your home. You don't need minimum rules. You just need a good DM that fosters the kind of atmosphere you like and a system that adds depth without being a crunchfest.

Good gaming, all!

Art by Morano