Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

[Tanarii]

For me, it's almost all about mental overhead required to run the game. 3-4 hours of running a game, adjudicating on the fly and remembering how the rules work, is like running a mental marathon. At the end of that, I'm shot.

It's not really your point, but let me start off with adventure design: The more I have to make stuff up on the fly, the faster I burn out. Looking stuff up constantly screws up pacing and leads to player boredom, so it's to be avoided as much as possible. That means well known material or winging it. Keeping stuff in memory is tiring. But inventing is far more mentally exhausting. So that means prep work is key, whether that my own design or running a module. Notes need to be as simple and easy to reference as possible, during a session to jolt my memory of the more detailed information I already knew from designing/studying it. Brief, on point, and properly organized. (As a side note, D&D modules have gone from bad under TSR to execrable under WotC on all three fronts. And other system's adventures are often worse, hard as it is to believe.)

So for game rules, same concept applies. They can be a little dense, as long as I've had plenty of time to study them, and I can find what I need easily. But the very nature of highly complex systems is it's generally hard to find the rules for something quickly, and they tend to need to be referenced more often because they're harder to remember. Simple comparison is trying to run Shadowrun/Gurps vs D&D 3e/4e vs D&D 5e/BECMI. The first two are a nightmare all the time. The second two are quite difficult as soon as combat begins, even with good 'notes'. The last two are a cakewalk. On the flip side something where I have to completely wing it and re-invent the rules all the time is exhausting, e.g. most Palladium games. For similar reasons, I've never had any desire to look at Fate.