| Ultimately a role-playing game comes down to a more organized game of Let's Pretend. Some people like to add on a heavy dose of recreational accounting and/or simulationism. Some people just want a few light rules to give their pretending some structure and an ample supply of narrative prompts to help when invention's running dry. Does spending hours and hours looking for quirks in the complex rules to make a super-powerful character that's optimized for damage output per round sound like fun? Does spending a few minutes picking a set of attributes and getting right down to making up a story with your friends over some beer and pizza sound like fun? Does spending two hours working through highly detailed rules to simulate about five seconds of in-game combat as part of a multi-year-long campaign sound like fun? Does spending two hours with simple rules that boil combat down to a die roll or three and the option to alter the occasional roll with a limited supply of "Wait, That's Not What Happened" tokens to tell a short story with a beginning, middle, and an end sound like fun? Does spending hundreds of dollars on exquisitely detailed rulebooks and supplements, with new editions every few years, sound like fun? There's a new "2024" edition of D&D coming out and it's $180 list for a bundle of the PHB, DMG, and MM in physical and digital copies, maybe plus a subscription to the online service for everyone in the game, maybe plus a couple more physical copies of one book or another provided by the players. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of pretty artwork in there, I have the 5e PHB/DMG and they are gorgeous. Does spending six bucks on a ten-page PDF, plus making a dozen copies on the office laserjet so everyone at the table can have the full rules at hand, including your brokest friends, sound like fun? It's perfectly valid if the expensive, complicated options sound like fun to you. Sometimes complication is fun. But sometimes it gets in the way of fun. |