Maybe it's me and this is simply a case of yelling at clouds, but I started noticing a curious trend in recent years: younger players seem to be heavily averse to everything that requires mechanics/game principles slightly more complex than a couple of (single) dice rolls and single digit sums.
In the more extreme cases, even that is regarded as "too much"; just to make a couple of memorable examples from r/rpg: one guy lamenting that Savage Worlds is "an extremely math heavy system" (roll two dice, keep the highest and if it's 4 or more you're good, with modifiers rarely going over a single digit is apparently the new defition of "math heavy") and another proclaiming that the Witcher TTRPG crafting system is "extremely crunchy" (the system being find or buy a recipe, find the correct materials and then roll one d10 plus one number against a fixed difficulty).

Anyone else noticed the trend or am I imagining things ?

Maybe regarding the math, but my impression is that a lot of players now demand huge amounts of complexity regarding character options and rules for action resolution. Just look at how many people find something like 5e too loosey-goosey (despite being way more complicated than your average OSR game) and recommend Pathfinder 2e as an alternative. I always see people complaining about being forced to make a ruling instead of having a meticulously outlined procedure to follow. I know that's not the same as number crunching, but to my mind is far more complex.

A little bit of column A, same with column B.

People are generally aware of what they do and do not like.  They are much less capable of understanding why, and the exact particulars.  It's easy to blame things that aren't really the root of the problem.  Complexity diminishes somewhat with use, and that in turn relates to what complexity you've dealt with in other areas.  Those of us old enough to have spent most of our math classes not being allowed to use a calculator, or only use it for limited things, have had far more opportunities to make some math rote--almost reflex.  Then we played games that used those same skills, and honed them accordingly. 

Then there's a learning curve associated with understanding those whys and particulars of what makes a game hum and what doesn't.  It's not a straight line, either.  It's easy to forget all the dead ends we went down learning this stuff.  There's always been people that had a bad understanding of complexity in general.  When you've been through that discussion N times, N+1 starts to look a little stupid, and you might want to yell at clouds.

Also, people who complain about THAC0 because subtraction is *hard*.

My general experience is that:

(1) My younger players like the complexity of character creation (e.g. 5E over 1E D&D)

(2) My younger players equate rules mastery with game mastery. (They feel like they are supposed to know the rules and knowing better than each other becomes a thing of which they are proud.)

Quote from: cavalier973 on April 14, 2023, 07:47:14 AM
Also, people who complain about THAC0 because subtraction is *hard*.

THAC0 just sucked balls and calculating the number needed to hit someone in HERO/Champions was not far behind.

Those designers just loved making combat matrices because of reasons. The only resolution matrix that I've seen as absolutely necessary and actually followed logarithmic logic is the CHART in Ascendant (and even then, I had to have multiple people, including the author, explain the math behind the numbers.)

You might be right about the trend.

I'm not exactly a "young" player, but I used to play GURPS and all kinda of games and now I only play simpler stuff (well, my own B/X neoclone, which is slightly fiddlier than B/X itself).

All my players have jobs and families and we are not into fiddly rules anymore, nobody got time for that.

We tried 5e and everybody forgot half their features by level 10.

OTOH... 5e and PF2 are still very popular.

Also, I agree that most of the old school charts are completely useless and made obsolete by Target 20, etc.

I complain about THAC0 because I dislike descending AC and do like consistency. Bigger bonus is better bonus not do I want high or low this time. Not hard, but an unnecessary extra.

I do find players abstinent to learning new systems and insisting on mastering their favored rule system while struggling to answer "what do you do" unless looking for the biggest bonus on the character sheet.

And no, I do not consider d20 +1 scavenger hunt, recalculating anything Mekton, or resolving a turn in Car Wars to be fun. Roleplaying is about making decisions not computing the same calculation over and over again. I have a machinery design textbook for that,

When the old game systems were king, with all of them being the first to define the hobby or try new mechanics, people were willing to embrace byzantine subsystems, multitude of charts, and complicated mechanisms. Over time, the evolution of game design has shown us that all those fiddly bits don't make for a better game and aren't necessary to produce satisfying results. So a newer player, much later to the hobby, reasonably sees no need to put up with having a different chart and a different mechanic for each of six Thief skills or across various game situations. We older gamers, who grew up on AD&D and loved the options of ICE's chart-o-rama supplements when they were new, have enough familiarity to not be bothered by it.

I have gamed since about 1980, and picked up OSE the other day and flipped through the character classes and saw the various different ways that different skills/powers/features work, and said "Hell, no," and put it back down. I am not incapable of playing these games, I just see no reason to do so. I know from 40 years of gaming experience that AD&D's hit matrices and elaborate Thief skills charts are unnecessary crunch that add little to nothing to a d20 task resolution system.

Young people aren't dumb, just less tolerant. And with so many games and so many other gaming options, why should they be willing to be otherwise? And my players and I, all of whom are busy professionals with careers and families, don't want to spend the time in-game looking up rules and charts and relearning some of this stuff. Neither do young people.

Games like DCC are sort of the exception-that-proves-the-rule, because while it is chart heavy, those charts add most of the game's flavor and are a brilliant exercise in creativity. Absent that, why should I want charts for everything my character wants to do?

Quote from: GamerforHire on April 14, 2023, 09:18:05 AM
When the old game systems were king, with all of them being the first to define the hobby or try new mechanics, people were willing to embrace byzantine subsystems, multitude of charts, and complicated mechanisms. Over time, the evolution of game design has shown us that all those fiddly bits don't make for a better game and aren't necessary to produce satisfying results. So a newer player, much later to the hobby, reasonably sees no need to put up with having a different chart and a different mechanic for each of six Thief skills or across various game situations. We older gamers, who grew up on AD&D and loved the options of ICE's chart-o-rama supplements when they were new, have enough familiarity to not be bothered by it.

I have gamed since about 1980, and picked up OSE the other day and flipped through the character classes and saw the various different ways that different skills/powers/features work, and said "Hell, no," and put it back down. I am not incapable of playing these games, I just see no reason to do so. I know from 40 years of gaming experience that AD&D's hit matrices and elaborate Thief skills charts are unnecessary crunch that add little to nothing to a d20 task resolution system.

Young people aren't dumb, just less tolerant. And with so many games and so many other gaming options, why should they be willing to be otherwise? And my players and I, all of whom are busy professionals with careers and families, don't want to spend the time in-game looking up rules and charts and relearning some of this stuff. Neither do young people.

I think this is a sound theory.

I'd add that games have evolved by simplifying or dropping mechanics that are unnecessarily complicated. This is a slow process because you needs lots of people play testing the system to figure out what's unnecessary.

I like crunch where it matters, but I also have enough experience to tell when a game is being crunchy for the sake of being crunchy. Do I really need to roll 3 skill checks to cook a pot of stew, The Dark Eye? Was there really no simpler way to do this?

A lot of system complexity is a case of "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." It takes years of play testing in the wild to figure it out.

Younger players won't know this from experience, but perhaps they bring fresh eyes and "We've always done it this way" does not resonate with them.

Quote from: Palmer Eldritch on April 14, 2023, 05:56:29 AM
Maybe regarding the math, but my impression is that a lot of players now demand huge amounts of complexity regarding character options and rules for action resolution. Just look at how many people find something like 5e too loosey-goosey (despite being way more complicated than your average OSR game) and recommend Pathfinder 2e as an alternative. I always see people complaining about being forced to make a ruling instead of having a meticulously outlined procedure to follow. I know that's not the same as number crunching, but to my mind is far more complex.

Could not have said it better. The general trend in mainstream RPG design has been towards less math, but more rules and options. The history of the 5 AD&D Editions would be a great illustration of that, but there are other examples, as well.

Funny thing is I do think there are demographic trends in RPG preference, but I think the determining factor is not patience or mathematical ability. It's free time.

Young gamers (highschool through late 20s, roughly) tend to have a lot of free time (and disposable income) to devote to their hobbies, so they're happy to spend hours pouring over supplements and splat books, picking their build out of all the hundreds of options. D&D 3rd, 4th and 5th, Pathfinder, WFRP 4th, etc. are all great for them.

Gamers in their "prime" (30s and 40s) tend to be much busier. They have full-time jobs, mortgages, kids etc. They don't want complex math or lots of options to account for, they just want to get the most out of their play time. A lot of them seem to favor very rules light games, whether it's the PBTA/Blades-in-the-Dark school, or the Black Hack/ICRPG/BoL school.

Older gamers (say 50s and up) are back to having free time. Their kids are probably grown, they're more comfortable in their jobs, a lot of them are even retired. So, they're ready to go back to complex games, and they're more likely to go for things like AD&D or Hackmaster. 

Obviously this is just trends, and I might be projecting (since I'm right in that middle category), but that's my theory.

Quote from: Vestragor on April 14, 2023, 05:42:38 AM
Maybe it's me and this is simply a case of yelling at clouds, but I started noticing a curious trend in recent years: younger players seem to be heavily averse to everything that requires mechanics/game principles slightly more complex than a couple of (single) dice rolls and single digit sums.
In the more extreme cases, even that is regarded as "too much"; just to make a couple of memorable examples from r/rpg: one guy lamenting that Savage Worlds is "an extremely math heavy system" (roll two dice, keep the highest and if it's 4 or more you're good, with modifiers rarely going over a single digit is apparently the new defition of "math heavy") and another proclaiming that the Witcher TTRPG crafting system is "extremely crunchy" (the system being find or buy a recipe, find the correct materials and then roll one d10 plus one number against a fixed difficulty).

Anyone else noticed the trend or am I imagining things ?

I'm an older gamer (over 50) and I'm against "math heavy" systems. A lot depends on the group. The people I play with all tend to really, really like the role-playing aspect. They like the roll-playing part too, but don't want them to get in the way of each other.

It isn't that the math is too difficult - it is that it slows everything down and/or it is too much like work. Playing VTT helps a lot to keep it from slowing stuff down. But everyone role-plays in combat too. And if the mechanics require too much attention, they get in the way of that.

All of us can do the math. My wife is a bioinformatician. I'm a software developer with bioinformatics/statistics training. We have a logistics person, a scientific publisher, and similar in the group. We do math for a living.

We don't want to do math for fun.

Sounds like I need to get our homebrew polished and published. Everything is single die opposed rolls, using the 4 though 20 sided dice. Sizes go up and down depending on things. (We use percentiles for random stuff - I'm collecting XXX. Are there any XXX in the room? GM rolls percentile. You try to meet or beat the roll.)

Quote from: finarvyn on April 14, 2023, 08:27:32 AM
My general experience is that:
(1) My younger players like the complexity of character creation (e.g. 5E over 1E D&D)

Do they like the complexity or the ability to create exactly the character they want?

Generally, I've seen people like the extremes. I have a concept, and I want to play that concept. Or, I have a concept I'm going to try for, but I'm playing Traveller, so who knows what I'll end up with?

I like both. The middle is sometimes restrictive, unless you house rule or buy one of the bazillion splat books for whatever system that adds some extra class setup that is closer to what you want.

As I've said elsewhere, the longer I play, the more I demand a payoff for the complexity.  I'm picky about it.  Since I'm usually a GM, that demand extends to what makes my life easier when working with the players, too--a big part of which is when they manage their characters.  If X is a thing that takes the typical player in my games 2 minutes to navigate, then I'm not only comparing it to some simple scale but also what else that player could be doing with that 2 minutes that would better serve the game. 

Then consider that some complexity is providing a great payoff--in ways that my particular group doesn't value.  So nothing wrong with it, per se, it's just not a good choice for us.  Other options might flip that.  The majority of my players want certain types of customization for their characters in the mechanics, and they are willing to invest some attention into that.  Note that it has to be the kind of customization that they value, not just any old thing.  5E was a moderately inadequate fit in that regard.  Lots of choices complicating the thing for which they had no interest. 

Quote from: Vestragor on April 14, 2023, 05:42:38 AM
Maybe it's me and this is simply a case of yelling at clouds, but I started noticing a curious trend in recent years: younger players seem to be heavily averse to everything that requires mechanics/game principles slightly more complex than a couple of (single) dice rolls and single digit sums.
In the more extreme cases, even that is regarded as "too much"; just to make a couple of memorable examples from r/rpg: one guy lamenting that Savage Worlds is "an extremely math heavy system" (roll two dice, keep the highest and if it's 4 or more you're good, with modifiers rarely going over a single digit is apparently the new defition of "math heavy") and another proclaiming that the Witcher TTRPG crafting system is "extremely crunchy" (the system being find or buy a recipe, find the correct materials and then roll one d10 plus one number against a fixed difficulty).

Anyone else noticed the trend or am I imagining things ?

Yes I am seeing the trend as well.   

It's crazy to say that Savage Worlds is too much.  It's the easiest to learn and easiest system to teach people.   I have taught tons of people who have never used the system how to use it.