The Ideal Iconic Role-Playing Game

[NichG]

Just to put the counter argument.
Situation - enemy is coming and we need to fortify the bridge.
Players Actions - use magic spells to create defenses.
Apart from the Lyre of Building which is a magic item, all the other choices described are just different ways of describing casting vancian magic spells to build the defenses. I don’t know the Lyre of Building, but I assume it operates as a battery that powers standard building spells, either by charges or uses per day so it acts as having an additional spellcaster (?).

This is what I’m getting at when I say that 3.5 gives the appearance of much more complexity than it really has. And at a micro level it is true that there is a huge amount of complexity to 3.5, it’s just that when you zoom out to the macro level a lot of the complexity is breadth (different ways to describe doing the same action) as opposed to depth (choosing between actions that have meaningful difference).

I think we're talking past each-other here. You seem to still be talking about the choice of what character class to play, whereas what I'm talking about is the way in which something like 'I want to become an immortal sentient sandwich' isn't an atomic action in the rules, wasn't designed to be possible with the rules, but it turns out it can still be achieved via the right combinations of atomic actions in the rules. That those all happen to be actions belonging to one class or another isn't really relevant to the point.

Like, you could say 'chess isn't really complex because if you zoom out its all just about the ELO ratings of the players, where the stronger player wins more frequently'. You could zoom out like that, but you're using the wrong level of detail in order to understand the actual point being made, so the counter-point ends up not being relevant.

[Pauly]

I think we're talking past each-other here. You seem to still be talking about the choice of what character class to play, whereas what I'm talking about is the way in which something like 'I want to become an immortal sentient sandwich' isn't an atomic action in the rules, wasn't designed to be possible with the rules, but it turns out it can still be achieved via the right combinations of atomic actions in the rules. That those all happen to be actions belonging to one class or another isn't really relevant to the point.

Like, you could say 'chess isn't really complex because if you zoom out its all just about the ELO ratings of the players, where the stronger player wins more frequently'. You could zoom out like that, but you're using the wrong level of detail in order to understand the actual point being made, so the counter-point ends up not being relevant.

I’m not talking specifically about class or combat or any other single element of 3.5. I’m making the assertion that most of the ‘choices’ in 3.5 boil down to cosmetic choices.
You can play 3.5 with the 4 original D&D classes (fighter, wizard, cleric, thief) and with a bit of multi-classing and with the weapons, items and spells from the core rulebook you’ll end up with the same depth of play as you get as allowing the whole kit and kaboodle of all the bolt-on extras. What all the extras provide is additional breadth. Which I’m not saying is a bad thing and games do need breadth as well as depth.

Chess on the other has much fewer moving pieces snd options for players yet has much greater depth, which is brought about by the engineering of of support snd balance and complex interactions between different pieces

[Vahnavoi]

Again, both arguments apply.

NichG's point is that d20 has rule elements that are like Lego blocks: compare the blocks side by side and they can be near-identical, but the more you have them, the more different ways there are to arrange them, towards ends not seen by just staring at the individual blocks.

Pauly's point is that a lot of this block building, in practical gameplay, boils down to rolling a d20, add modifiers, compare to target value.

It's the difference between being able to build a lot of different bridges from the same set of blocks, versus being able to build the same bridge from a lot of different blocks. Again, the specific system under discussion has lot of both going for it.

And I think it's easy to confuse which games do which. For example, a lot of rules-lite generic games which use the same mechanics for everything seem like they'd belong to the former group, but actually belong to the latter. The ability to attach arbitrary natural language descriptors to die rolls is only a diversion from the fact that regardless of what descriptors you use, you end up rolling a die, and then rolling a die again, and again, to infinity. All the interesting parts happen outside the system, on the level of natural language, and anybody who can do that well can drop die rolling entirely.

[NichG]

I’m not talking specifically about class or combat or any other single element of 3.5. I’m making the assertion that most of the ‘choices’ in 3.5 boil down to cosmetic choices.
You can play 3.5 with the 4 original D&D classes (fighter, wizard, cleric, thief) and with a bit of multi-classing and with the weapons, items and spells from the core rulebook you’ll end up with the same depth of play as you get as allowing the whole kit and kaboodle of all the bolt-on extras. What all the extras provide is additional breadth. Which I’m not saying is a bad thing and games do need breadth as well as depth.

Chess on the other has much fewer moving pieces snd options for players yet has much greater depth, which is brought about by the engineering of of support snd balance and complex interactions between different pieces

Still talking past eachother. The existence of choices which are cosmetic or the fact that you can play in the part of the game in which say all choices are cosmetic, doesn't negate the point I'm making that there are also things whose interactions are so unexpected that we're still discovering new things in the system now. I also suspect that what I'm talking about doesn't map on to what you're calling 'depth of play' here. I'm not sure its exactly breadth either, the way you're using the word.

What I'm getting at is more like a kind of specially limited Turing universality, where eventually you can make the system weigh on things it has no prior concept of by chaining together enough pieces. But the 'specially limited' part is that you indeed have to chain together an unspecified number of pieces to get there which somehow scales with certain conceptual 'distances' from the core system rather than e.g. a system that lets players write down a new skill by name and then just 'do that thing'. But I don't have a single term to cover that particular idea of a feeling. 'Capable of successive emergence' maybe, to be clunky about it.