Tunnels and Trolls: What is an Average Character?

The question of, "what is an average character for T&T?" comes up in my mind because I need it to balance encounters. Remember, the formula for monster rating is:

MR Attack Roll = (MR/10)d6 + (MR/2) adds

So a MR of 50 nets a 5d6 + 25 combat roll (at full strength). Now the question is, what is an even fight? The answer is a character with an attack roll of 5d6 + 25. That would be a character with a 5d6 longsword with the following attributes:

STR: 20
CON: 20
DEX: 19
SPD: 16
LK: 18
IQ: 10
WIZ: 10
adds: +25

But wait, if this is an version 8.0 warrior, they will get an extra 2d6 for their warrior bonus (at level 2), but for a rogue this would work. For a level 2 warrior, we would need to knock an average of 7 points off STR, DEX, SPD, and LK to get that magic +25 to adds with that 2d6, so I would say something like this:

STR: 20
CON: 20
DEX: 16
SPD: 16
LK: 14
IQ: 10
WIZ: 10
adds: +18 (+2d6 warrior bonus)

So this is a "good build" for a level 2 character. You may have noticed I kept the warrior's STR and CON the same, and the other attributes that contribute to personal adds are 60-80% of the character's highest score, let's say 75%. Stats that aren't important for the character, in this case WIZ and INT, are left at a value of 10.

Parties

Now for parties, you will be totaling up the entire damage output for the group and pitting that against a monster with a significantly higher MR. Let's say your party was five of the above characters, three warriors, a rogue, and a mage. Even though rogues and mages don't have the warrior's bonus dice, you could use the warrior's numbers because mages and rogues have magic that is a significant adder to damage per turn. So let's say our party comes out to about this:

25d6 + 125 or an average of 213 points of damage

RPG Algebra!

So now what? Algebra, that's what. We need a formula that tells us, given a party's average damage output, what is an MR that gives them an equal challenge?

213 = (MR/10 + 1) * 3.5) + (MR/2)
213 = ((MR * 0.35) + 3.5) + (MR/2)
213 - 3.5 = (MR * 0.35) + (MR * 0.5) - 3.5
209.5 = (MR * 0.85)
209.5 / 0.85 = (MR * 0.85) / 0.85
246.47 = MR

And, a MR of 246 is 25d6 + 123 (average damage 211), so bingo, we have our formula! Let's 1/x this "minus 3.5 and divide by 0.85" thing and get something we can multiply by, okay? Who ever said you wouldn't use algebra in real life? Seriously, you can solve a lot of your life's problems with a little math. So we have this magical formula:

50-50 challenge MR = (average party damage - 3.5) x 1.174

Let's test this! A party that does 15d6 + 25? Average damage is 78, so the MR would be 78 x 1.174 = 88. A MR of 88 does 9d6 + 44 damage, or an average of...76. It comes out very close. Let's try a party that does 30d6 + 400, or 505 points of damage on average. MR is 590, or 60d6 + 295, or an average of 505 points of damage from the monster's side.

This is a formula you can use on the fly while the party is inside the dungeon. Simply throw some easy fights at the group, secretly write down some of the total damage outputs during the combat, and multiply up to get a good 50-50 fight for the next room. You can modify the MR up or down 10-20% to make it a little harder or easier, but remember a 50-50 fight means the players will lose the battle 50% of the time just given straight dice rolls - so this will be a tough fight.

One of the beautiful things about this formula is that no matter what house rules you are using, no matter what level the party is or how many people they have, it adapts as long as the dice and adds formula for MR is not changed. If you give your warriors more or less adds, your party doesn't use a lot of damaging magic, or you have custom spells that do special damages - all you need to know is average party DPS (which you can get in the first few turns of battle) and the formula works.

It is also simpler and more exact than D&D's CR system, since this is real math and hardcore statistics. Subsequently, this system is also a lot more harsh and unforgiving.

Don't Adjust Too Far!

Also remember the bell curve. You don't want to push encounters too far away from the midpoint, because let's say you set MR to 50% of the calculated value for a simple fight. For our example, that is a MR of 46 for 4d6 + 23, or an average of 37 points of damage. If the party is doing 78 points a turn, that is a difference of 78 - 37 = 41 points, and there is no way 4d6 will ever let that monster to roll higher than the party. You might as well forget about this fight unless it is a one-on-one with a single person.

Let's lower the MR by 10% to 83. That is 8d6 + 43 for an average of 71 points of damage. A 71 to 78 fight with 8d6 damage is good, it gives the players an edge while still letting the monsters possibly getting a hit or two in.

If I were to err, I would err on the side of 10 or 20% higher MR, because remember as a monster takes damage, the monster's adds from their MR drops (but not their dice). After a few hits, those adds will drop our critter below the party's average damage and change the tide of battle. You may want the fight to start off with the party taking damage, the party begin clever through a spell or stunt, and then the party gaining the advantage after the monster takes a couple hits.

Have Armor? Increase MR!

If the party has a lot of armor you may want to go 30% or 40% above the rated MR just so the monster's damage output can blow through that armor and get some hits in. Do A 50-50 combat encounter once and then decide if the party took it on the chin or they took it on the helmet, and then decide from there.

The 50-50 number only applies on the first combat turn, and it says who will take damage first. As the battle goes on, one side will fall. But sometimes, the side that gets damage in gets an immediate advantage, and you may want that to be the monsters to put the party back on their heels a step in order to get some crafty play going.

Craftiness is a Player's Right

It is an important point, since this formula does not take into account crafty players who will make stunt SRs, use spells to take foes out of the fight, and use other clever tactics to weaken the enemy. But that is the players' right and part of the fun of the game. In a first-turn 50-50 fight they will need to be clever to win, and this fight may drain a good amount of their resources, so this is a good tool to use to judge encounter difficulty during play.

If a party wins an unfair fight through wits and cool stunts, that is a very good thing, and a memorable moment. If it is too unfair, it is un-fun. If it is too easy, it is also un-fun. So you want to be able to find that middle spot for MR, and know if your players can defeat that with ease, or they have trouble with that battle. Your players may be so good you may multiple party damage by a higher factor, such as 1.3, in order to determine a challenging MR for them.

It depends on the party, the players, the house-rules, the gear, and a lot of other stuff - but it all ends up in a number you can write down and use to build the next challenge for them. If MR 92 was a blow out and these players are good, maybe behind that next door is a MR 122 ogre, and the party finds itself knuckling down and getting clever to push this brute over and grab that sack full of silver coins.

EDIT: Slight math fix to the formula to account for MR 10-19 = 2d6 instead of 1d6 (MR/10+1 = dice).

Tunnels and Trolls: 5/5.5 vs. 7/7.5 vs. 8.0 Deluxe

Five versions of Tunnels and Trolls game and how do you make sense of them all? All of these were created by the same core creative team, with the only difference being publisher for the 7.5 version.

5 and 5.5 - The Classics (Flying Buffalo 1979 and 2005)

Probably the best known versions of the game, the 5th edition was printed in 1979 and the 5.5 edition in 2005 with extra material added (but still mechanically the same in terms of design and balance). Most all the solo adventures printed in the last thirty or so years were written for this version of the game, which for many players is a huge deal. Through D&D glasses, this is the original, old-school, red-box version of the game before AD&D came out. This version is also about the easiest for new players to understand. A PDF is not currently available for this version (at this time), but you can probably pick up a used copy of the rules somewhere since this version has been around a long time.

2020 UPDATE: A PDF of the 5th Edition is now available. There is no current PDF for the 5.5 edition.

7 and 7.5 - 30th Anniversary (Fiery Dragon Games 2005)

2005 is also where more big changes happened, and the game got mechanically tighter. To me, this version feels like it wants to reduce the big numbers of dice being thrown and add lots of individual weapon statistics and modifications to combat, so this feels very crunchy and numerically interlocked and tight in terms of character optimization and creation. 7.5 was a cleaned up version of 7.0, with faster advancement and a couple fixes. The options for character builds are also very broad here, with more than just the basic three character types being viable.

This version feels to me less compatible with the solo adventures than other versions since the math feels like it has changed considerably, but is still very compelling due to a tighter dice range (warriors add their level to personal adds for attacks), crunchiness, and build options. Through D&D glasses, this is more like a Pathfinder where everything changes and becomes crunchy and character-optimized. A lot of simplification went into this version and many of the rules have been streamlined (but are not some of the best presented in terms of editing and presentation). 

2020 UPDATE: A PDF of this version is available, and likely your best option since the boxed copies are now collector's items. This version seems to have not stood the test of time here in 2020, and I do not hear much about it these days. The market seems divided between classic 5th Edition and the newer 8th edition, and many have forgotten about this one.

8.0 Deluxe - Kickstarter (Flying Buffalo 2015)

The latest and greatest with the mechanical improvements of 7/7.5 rolled in with a more classic 5.5 style feeling. The numbers of dice being thrown in this version are higher, especially warriors, and we focus back on the classic three classes for character creation. This one feels more like a streamlined revision of the game, focusing on a higher power level with more super-heroic characters. A PDF version is available, and both hard and soft-cover versions of the book are currently in print. Through D&D glasses, this feels like D&D 5th Edition, a reboot that focuses back on the original source material, but streamlined in terms of play and greater in terms of power level (warriors add +1d6 per level to their personal adds for attacks).

Key mechanical changes from 7.5 were kept and rolled forward, and some of the rulsey-crunchy options were dropped or streamlined. Compatibility with the solo adventures feels like it should be more in line with version 5/5.5, but to me this version feels the most dice-heavy and higher-powered than the other versions of the game.

2020 UPDATE: The hard and soft cover books for this edition are reportedly hard to come by and out of print. The PDF versions are probably your best bet for playing.

What Version Should I Play?

If you are a "latest and greatest" type, play 8.0/Deluxe if you do not mind the high power level and larger number of dice being thrown (especially for warriors). There are still many people impressed enough with the 7.5 revamp that this version remains a popular alternative; and if you like crunch, tighter builds, and a wealth of  options this is a good version to check out. The 7.5 version is closest mechanically with 8.0/Deluxe, so house-rules and material written for 7.5 can be used as options for 8.0/Deluxe easily.

If you are old-school and don't mind the lack of a PDF, play 5/5.5, especially if you are into the solo adventures. A lot of people still play 5/5.5 just out of nostalgia, so there is a huge community of players there.

Me? Torn between the crunchy and content-rich 7.5 and the newer 8.0/Deluxe version. I will probably work up a house-ruled version of 8.0 with house-rules pulled from 7.5 and try the balance of 8.0, but something about the tighter dice range in 7.5 calls to my gamist side. Version 7.5 made some great additions and improvements, and 8.0 seems to refine those and balance those for a higher-level of play. There is a reason why they make you throw a lot more dice in 8.0/Deluxe, and I suspect it has something to do with speeding up combat at high levels, increasing spite damage, and making the 7.5 style game work smoothly when you run into the occasional stalemate.

All of them are worth checking out and great parts of gaming history, so you really can't go wrong with any choice you make.

Mail Room: Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls

Look what came in the mail today: the Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls Rulebook. First impressions? 363 pages of awesomeness, especially if you are a long-time fan. This is the 8th edition, and I have been collecting editions of this game since the early 1980's when I fell in love with the system.

The original creators are at the helm for this one, and it is one of the few RPGs that has maintained the same creative team for over 40 years of print. Liz Danforth takes the editing role this time and contributes art, which is noteworthy since she is also a well-known artist for Magic: The Gathering. Ken St. Andre from the original game is the primary author, and the two of them together deliver some incredible streamlining and game design. There are even notes on design decisions sprinkled throughout the book, and these alone offer a fascinating look into the game's evolution.

Overpowered but Balanced

What strikes me about this game is that it is unafraid to make warriors real masters of war, wizards truly powerful, and rogues masters of trickery. The base classes are almost overpowered in their specializations when compared to each other, and entirely over the top when compared to the "everybody is roughly equal" of the D&D world view. Warriors add 1d6 per level to their attacks. Wizards are second to none at casting destructive spells and repeatedly flinging destruction from their hands. Rogues can both fight and cast magic in the same turn, but do not get the mana-reducing benefits of a mage or the extra dice of a fighter - but are still incredibly fun, flexible, and deadly all the same. Every character class feels like it flagrantly breaks the rules and feels overpowered, but in the grand scheme of things, they feel balanced in power levels between each other, and I want to play them all.

No Ability Score Limits

T&T uses an open-ended attribute system with a point-buy system for raising attributes. You get "adventure points" for defeating foes, saving rolls, spell-casting, and special events, and you use those points to increase your attributes. While they start at the 3d6 norms you may be used to, they can ramp up past 20...30...40...and even up into the hundreds. You want to be Thor with a STR of 100? You can do that here, play that, and still be challenged in fights while playing alongside rogues with a DEX of 100 and wizards with INT scores past the century mark. Everyone is hilariously overpowered, but it all works together well. The monsters are also hilariously overpowered at times. Still, again, you need that Thor to beat back the alien-intelligence-infused dinosaur, wielding a steampunk auto-cannon and a serrated long-sword the size of a telephone pole.

No Level Chart

There is no level chart. Your "level" is calculated by dividing your highest attribute by 10. You have a CON of 33? You are a third-level character now. You get no "hit points per level", since your CON is your hit points. You want more hit points? Raise your CON. You want more mana? Raise your WIZ score. You want to do more damage in combat, so there are a couple of scores that feed into your combat adds, like STR or DEX. I like this system, and it removes the silly and balance-oriented limits other games use because high ability scores break the rules. The rules here handle high ability scores, and in fact, expect them at higher levels for characters to survive.

Make Your Own Monsters

Monsters are DIY, and their abilities are mostly GM fiat. Every monster is rated by a "monster rating," which is a dice-plus-adds calculation, and its attack is a bulk dice total against the party's dice total. If I want laser-eyed floating eye-pods to swarm out of the yawning dungeon chasm, I assign the group an MR and have those "laser eyes" be the attack which the MR represents. I don't need long stat blocks for them, nor do I need carefully provisioned differences between ranged attacks and melee attacks,s and how this all works out on a grid. If I want a monster's damage to weaken instead of kill, I will say the damage goes to STR instead of CON. If the party gets covered by sewage, I will reduce their CHR by 10 or 20 points, fine, but some of them may still look better than the average peasant because they are so damn charismatic. That is this game.

Aggregated Combat is Freedom

It is an aggregated combat system that simplifies, yet gives both characters and the GM incredible freedom from having to follow a strict combat checklist every turn. Back in the day, the system was created as a simplification in comparison to the more structured old D&D rules. While D&D has gotten more structured over the years (only recently moving back towards simplicity), T&T has remained its simple, original, brilliantly aggregated self.

It doesn't matter that off-hand dagger use is at a -4 or whatever, and that the flanking bonus of being here versus there is a +2; none of those little, trivial things matter. You are all fighting together as a team, the monsters are doing the same, and every ounce of magic, sword swing, or ranged fire contributes to the total effort on each side, and helps push over that grand total of power against the opposing side. In a sense, this is more realistic than micro-managing every tiny modifier and situation by some classic war-gaming rule, and it better simulates a cinematic action scene where a group is all using their powers together in a climactic battle, like something out of an Avengers movie.

More Soon...

I also have the PDF from Drive Thru RPG (on sale for $20 right now), and I have the basic rules sections printed out for play - a must for group play since I can staple together the spellbook and character creation parts separately and pass those around the table. I do not like "passing the book around" the table during play, since it slows everything down and can easily waste the first two hours of the game, as everyone likes to read and consider options while the others wait for their turn. Plus, if a printout gets ripped, scribbled on, or destroyed by Cheetos's hands, I can just print out another.

Plus, the PDF can live on my phone, where I will always have it for reference. T&T is simple enough that I could play from my phone with a dice-rolling app and some scrap paper or napkins for character sheets.

It is great to see a classic system return on Kickstarter, and to have the deluxe, definitive version of the game (though the 5th edition is still very popular, with no PDF for this version). There is even a simple free version available, along with a PDF of the 7.5 version for $15). It is worth noting that all the versions are still fully compatible with each other, and all the old single- and multiplayer adventures still "work" well together. The Deluxe version is where it is at, incorporating the best parts of newer versions while simplifying the too-many-options parts of everything since the tent-pole 5.5 version of the game.

This is a game I loved, and it is great to see it back again.

UPDATE: The 5th edition PDF is now available!

Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft, part 2

Let's get back to our Savage Worlds: World of Warcraft conversion, shall we? We last left off with out core source-book, here:

It is a good start, and a dangerous book since it is going to set you up focusing on the MMO as the world. You need to think bigger than that, since the MMO's land mass only covers a 9 mile by 9 mile area - less than a city - so a "real" world of World of Warcraft would cover an Earth-sized planet (or a good part of it), check here for a map and scale comparison. You could easily multiply the entire MMO world map by 100 times in each direction and still have a small area in relation to a full-sized planet. Which is why last time we suggested:

The lore book as a good reference guide as well, because it is less MMO based and more lore-based. We want to expand the land mass and fill it in with hundreds of miles of smaller kingdoms, unexplored areas, and interesting locations - while still keeping the familiar, in-game areas as tent-pole locations that tie your new material back into the world.

That scale problem will be your largest problem in this game. Granted, you could avoid creating anything new and just fill in everything with "unexplored wilderness" and leave the game locations as-is, but you will be missing out on a huge opportunity to make the world your own. Ideally, this will be a world much like a early settlement USA, with huge tracts of unexplored wilderness, cities being built, trade happening, wilderness expeditions being launched, places of mystery being avoided, and all sorts of "kingdom activity" happening in the established cities and smaller places you will fill in. Conquoring that "sense of scale" and making the world larger than the game will ultimately make your game stronger, and keep players from going back to the MMO because there isn't much different between what you are doing and what the game is doing.

The next huge problem you will need to deal with is the power level of the MMO, and frankly, the game world itself. As a veteran MMO and WoW player, I am going to expect a full upgrade path for gear, and be able to deliver a 90,000 damage crit from my high-level mage. This game is not going to be like that at all. This will be a flatter progression, and all the magic items in the game will stay within the Fantasy Companion's suggested guidelines.

This is critical, since you will be doing a lot of "coloring" items presented in the Fantasy Companion as the items, creatures, and spells familiar to the World of Warcraft universe. You could go all-out and write a conversion guide, and I am sure there are some who are trying, but the goal here is to get a simple, WoW-like experience up and running without having to write a conversion guide or spend a lot of time translating everything over, item by item, class by class, and power by power. 90% of what is in the base Savage Worlds game and the Fantasy Companion will cover what you need for this type of a game.

Simply recolor items, apply a trapping to a spell, create classes by picking powers that class would have in the game, and don't try to replicate the videogame perfectly. A paladin can heal, so let them heal with a healing power with a "holy" trapping. Done. Create a druid out of a moonfire like attack spell, a root, some heals, a thorns spell, and some shapeshifting. Done. Maybe you pick powers as you go, and every class isn't so tied to a strict progression chart that says "this power must come at this level, before this one, and after that one." A paladin is a collection of fighting ability and holy powers, and maybe every paladin in the world isn't trained the same way.

Think of the World of Warcraft game as the "videogame adaptation" of a real world. It's obvious the game's creators had to cut a lot of the "real world" out, simplify all of the classes and professions the "real world" actually has, and create an artificially high "power curve" for the magic items in the game. The "real world" that you are playing in is much larger, much more complex, the professions much less clearly defined, and the magic of this world is much more evenly powered and within a normal range of power and capability. Epic items can still feel epic with the best levels of power found in the Fantasy Companion, but not to the point where they are doing an unrealistic ten-thousand times damage of a normal weapon.

There is actually precedent for this in the videogames, if you pull in the original Warcraft RTS games. Those were much flatter power levels, where the "epic heroes" and items of the world could still take damage and be defeated by normal monsters and units in the game. The power level of the Warcraft universe has been blown out of proportion because of the MMO, and in the "real world" it is probably closer to the power level - start to end - of a traditional RPG, such as Savage Worlds.

For our game, this is a good thing, because we don't need to break our role playing game and simulate a 90,000 damage crit with the rules and scale our items all the way up to impossible levels. We are playing on the pen-and-paper "real world" power level, and that is how this world works. Although it looks and acts like the World of Warcraft world in every other way. We are keeping the number ranges down for play-ability, yet still allowing for powerful magic items in the game to capture that "epic feel."

So what do you do about "epic level" items that are better than your last "epic level" item? say you get your hands on a legendary sword, like Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, and you stat that out to the maximum level of power a magic item can have in the Fantasy Companion. Then, you find a new sword that blows that out (like most any green item from an expansion past Cata, or even some gray vendor swords in high-level areas). How do you make something "more epic" without blowing out your rules?

First, those "high level gray items" in the game world do not exist, a shortsword sold in Northrend is the same as a shortsword sold in Elwynn. The power level of all basic items is the same, and there is no "videogame" progression to normal gear - normal gear is normal gear. All "epic items" max out at a certain level, and that Thunderfury is just as epic as a Maul of Tyranny. Seriously, Excalibur is Excalibur, in real-world power level, and those high-level purple items should be just as epic as each other. That makes Thunfderfury desirable again, and flattens out the power curve of all of these expansion items (and any others that may come and destroy your game).

Also, items do not have "levels" or "requirements" - they are all just green, blue, purple and so on (in relative levels of power), and can be used by everyone. There is no such thing in this world as a "level 60 green item blowing out a level 10 green item." Green items are all "low magic" items but still magical, and they are all around the same power level ( a +1 here or there).

I would never in-game refer to an item as a "green Item" so I use this only for rating the items found out here in "real" World of Warcraft - before the videogame designers messed everything up and built this insane power curve for the game.

There is a point where you can go overboard, and too much is too much. You want to limit "real world" item power to the best the pen-and-paper game has, and leave it there. A "green item" at any level may just be a +1 to hit or a +1 to damage, and leave it there. It is good, worthwhile, and is an advantage to have. Scale up the higher-level greens and blues, and all the way to purples and oranges along the power curve you see in the Fantasy Companion and you will save yourself a lot of conversion, power-level headaches, and a lot of wasted time building a World of Warcraft simulator in another game.

Next time I want to focus more on classes and powers, so stay tuned for that.

Savage Worlds Play and Character Tutorials

This is a great tutorial video for playing Savage Worlds:

And a companion one for creating a character is here:

I love how straightforward these videos are, and they are great introductions to the system. There are some concepts here about dice being atomic for skill rolls, where the dice are not added and they "ace" and add up repeatedly. One die is one roll, so your wild die is a second skill roll alongside the primary, not something that adds to your primary die.

There are also some great pointers in here about raises and combat in the play tutorial (only one raise applies for an attack roll, but you can have multiple raises for damage rolls). It is things like that which tripped us up when we tried the system, so the video does a great job of slowing down, explaining, and showing through examples at the end of the video (although the video has a couple mistakes at the end, but those are nicely noted in overlays and corrected nicely).

This is highly worth your time if you are interested in the system, and they also set you up nicely if you find yourself attending a game and want to get up to speed on this game quickly.

I love the combination of talking, writing, and examples here - it is like attending a college class in Savage Worlds 101, and I took a lot away from this video. It also in a way makes me excited to play, so seeing someone interested and working through the system gets me interested and thinking about things in the rules system.

Great Article: Why it took me eight years...

The goal of this new mindset was accessibility, but the result was apathy and entitlement. If the early days in WoW are best summarized as "only the elite deserve medals" then the golden age was most certainly "everyone deserves a chance to earn a medal" — a design edict I will go to my grave vehemently defending. 

But that isn't how things ended. 

By my guild's final days, the message had morphed once more: "everyone deserves a medal." I like to think I did everything I could to keep the guild from hemorrhaging players, but the thrill of competition was gone. My own ideals now worked against me. I'd cultivated a mindset of skill mastery in a game that no longer valued elbow grease. It was no surprise, then, when players simply stopped showing up for medals.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/1/12078500/world-of-warcraft-eight-years-blizzard-raids

A great article on what happens when you take challenge out of a game. Apathy. Entitlement. Infighting. Looking down on skill and achievement.

Your best players leaving.

Great gamer players like challenge, and I feel a lot of people like to call themselves "great players" when all they want to do is spend time with something with no real challenge.

A great player loses more often than he or she wins. There is no "everybody wins" with a Michael Jordan, he had to rise above dozens of other teams, injuries, schedules, and life itself to become a "great player." Nowadays, everybody is told they are a "great player" with little more skill than "show up."

And oh yeah, pay the subscription fee every month. Trust me, you are a great player!

Just keep that credit card info current, your greatness.

The first players of World of Warcraft had that, The best drops were incredibly hard to get. Whole raids sometimes produced nothing. But yet, they tried, and they built great raiding teams, piece by piece, and skill by skill, until they earned the right to say they were the best.

A worthy read, and one worthy of reflecting upon the current state of pen-and-paper games, for sure.

Are 'easy' games, intended to attract casual players, really causing players to leave?

Rules Anthropology and System Mastery

One thing that always amazes me about the d20 rules is how the rules feel stuck in anthropology. D&D 3, D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, D&D 4, and D&D 5 all rely on the theory of system mastery, which requires a set of rules to have a certain level of in-built complexity. This complexity means players need to learn the game, and it creates a class of  'player experts' who are walking encyclopedias of game knowledge and reference.

Following the theory of system mastery, the game in theory cannot be simple. There needs to be built-in exceptions, tricks, little twists and turns of rules, gotchas, and I-don't-know moments of vague presentation that require a college level of mastery of a particular rules set. The more arcane, the better, because this allows the 'player expert' to become more valuable to a particular group or setting.

Anthropology? You feel like a scientist digging through the history of these games to just be able to play them. They are incompatible with each other, have enough small changes between them that one game is realistically all an average person can play, and some of the assumptions you carried over from previous editions will trip you up. It's why I still like Labyrinth Lord or Basic Fantasy as my go-to D&D games, they stick to the core design, there isn't much to learn, and there isn't much to mess you up.

Self-Taught Experts

That "power of knowledge" is an important thing. It both creates a barrier to entry (noobs suck at the game), and it creates a barrier to exit (why would I give up all this knowledge and power). It gives those who invest the time a certain level of importance in communities, power over others, and value. If the game is widely played, the more value that person has in a community, gaming group, or forum. Also, if the books needed are expensive and voluminous, the investment in the game keeps people from leaving as well. No one wants to have wasted all that money.

You can short-circuit all of this and say, "I don't have the time," and walk out. You can go to a simple rules system. Many modern designs cater to people without the time to learn all this complexity, and these keep today's time and interest-strapped people in the hobby. They are also exit-points for people that are tired of the heavy games, as a group can only really maintain interest in one large game at a time.

Some modern non-d20 games follow the system mastery model as well, such as Fantasy Flight's Star Wars RPG. While the basic mechanic is simple (as presented in the starter sets), once you go all-in with the main rulebooks there are enough gotchas where you need an expert to sort things out. This is similar for Shadowrun, GURPS, and other games where the weight of expansions and rulings have turned a once-simple game into something more complex.

Games do not need to be that complex. Complexity is not depth. A simple game can have wonderful depth without complexity, take chess, for example. This is where great design comes into play. Some designers seem to give up on designing elegant, simple, yet very deep in strategy rules, and go for the arcane, complex, and exception-filled almost spaghetti computer-code level of complexity when depth by the base mechanic cannot be achieved. The depth is obfuscated in the complexity of the rules.

Modern Designs

Some games are by-design simple, and this applies to the OGL retro-clones, Savage Worlds, Legend, AGE System, FATE, and many modern designs. These games have simple rules of thumb, unified mechanics, and a simple set of core rules which are extended to handle anything. If you know how to do one thing in these games, you can assume many other things work similarly and you are on your way. Some players love the elegance of unified design simplicity, while others love system mastery and the power of that complex knowledge.

A lot of indie games embrace simplicity, because it is a lot easier to test and balance a small set of rules-of-thumb than it is an encyclopedia of specific and carefully-balanced rules. I feel the age of huge, complex systems is passing us by, as even D&D 5 has recognized the need to simplify to increase "what can get done" at the table during a session. They streamlined and simplified monster stats, character complexity, and the amount of modifiers and conditions you needed to remember, and players reacted positively to the changes. As a result, the games move faster, players can cycle through more encounters during a session, and a game session can end with a feeling of progress and completion in regards to a story.

Savage Worlds goes in a different direction than D&D 5, with combat meaning less and all actions taking on an equal level of importance in regards to story completion and advancement. Conversions of modules from Pathfinder, OGL games, and D&D 5 to Savage Worlds typically eliminate encounters meant to "level up" the party and focus more on tasks, social encounters, and roleplaying. D&D 5, in comparison, is the more 'video game' and 'XP and loot' type experience, where Savage Worlds is the more the story-based experience.

There Comes a Point...

When you don't have the time to invest in heavy games anymore. It is happening to us, and I have this feeling Bestiary 5 and Ultimate Intrigue will be the last Pathfinder books we will buy for a while. I love the world, I love the mod-able-ness, I love the art, and I love the system, but enough is enough. I can't run this much, and I can't manage this much complexity anymore. If I play, it will be with a subset of books, but even then I question if investing myself in a reduced subset of that complexity will be worth the payout. Learning and mastering a simpler game at this point may give us more bang for the gaming buck.

Even the new Star Wars RPG still feels bloated to us, and we've reduced the game to the base three books. It is the problem with everything being a heavy game, you want to play them all, but one person really can't master and maintain interest in this many large games. They makes these games complex with the theory of system mastery so you won't leave for another game, and then when you collect too many of them, everything in your gaming world collapses under the weight of complexity.

OGL games are cool, and they "get there from here" in terms of providing a dungeon experience for the complexity and time spent learning them. Savage Worlds is also cool and simple, and covers so many genres that it is worth learning because the payout in "fun for time" is very high. D&D 5 is interesting, but we haven't had the time or interest to put into it as much as I'd hoped, plus the OGL games do a good job at the dungeon and loot experience anyways so we haven't had much pressure to jump in.

In our group and for our time, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, and the new Star Wars RPG feel like the losers here. We don't have the time to put into and enjoy them as we would like, and something has to give. When you need to make choices, you typically start throwing the heavy systems overboard first (or you stick with one heavy system and throw out everything else). This isn't to say they aren't deep and fun games, it is just the complexity and time needed to put in to enjoy them fully is very high.

I will probably reorganize my shelves to reflect the new order, and focus on what is right for our group. This is also a consideration when you design a game, do you want it to be so complex that is pushes out other systems, or do you want it to be rules-light and easily accessible? I don't think many games nowadays can compete with the big heavy-hitters out there, so writing a large and complicated game will put you at a disadvantage of competing for attention of players and also being pushed off a shelf due to the heavy nature of your rules.

We do have a lot of large, complicated games sitting in boxes because we don't have the time or mental space to run them (Rifts, GURPS, and others). I feel bad about a couple more being on their way to storage, but really, what can we do? It is best to focus on the games you love, and the ones you have time for, rather than so many you are unhappy you don't have the time and mental effort to play them all.