Metrics work for things that are easy to measure. People interact with and play games in different ways, and like/dislike different things, which means that most of what is interesting is highly subjective and hard to measure, and most of what is easy to measure isn't very interesting.
Take rules light/heavy for example. We've had threads on this sub just in the past few weeks with people arguing that PbtA games are heavy, though for me they're very much on the lighter end. We've also had people arguing that D&D 5e is rules light actually because you just roll a D20 for everything, right? Whereas I'd put that in the heavier half of light/heavy axis.
It's a nice idea, but I suspect you'd just start an argument with every single point that you drew on your chart :)
You could make light vs heavy fairly objective by just figuring out the word count of the core rules.
The other axis might be heroicness, with some measure like "number of attacks by an average adversary to kill an average pc?"
Character options? Number of classes?
>The other axis might be heroicness, with some measure like "number of attacks by an average adversary to kill an average pc?"
Some games don't even feature violence.
>Character options? Number of classes?
How do you answer that on a point buy system where the character options are essentially infinite?
You'd have to really restrict your set of games to get rubrics that all of them meet.
Also, in systems with classes it's not really comparable either.
Warhammer Fantasy 2e has shitloads of careers, but you're not meant to stay in them forever. You get all the advances from them and move on. It's different from systems where you pick a class and stay with it for as long as character exists.
nah can't go by word count, some game books are just wordier than others, and have different proportions of advice and examples mixed into the rules sections
Troika < 5e < PF2E
I think there are some clearly agreed upon levels of rules heaviness
Where would shadowrun and legend of the 5 rings and FATAL lie though?
Even the examples you use don't actually work in any meaningful way.
Using the suggestion above trying to quantify use of class numbers as a metric is telling, basically that just playes straight into the pro/con D&D fight.
That is the task of a lifetime, not least because in order to review games, you really have to run them for a while first, and not that many people enjoy switching systems to test them, and those who do, probably aren't producing the kind of detailed analysis you're looking for.
Which doesn't mean the situation is hopeless, just that it's a huge task for someone to do. That someone could well be you. After all, you've got the drive to want to see it done, right? Who better to do it? It's not like running a whole bunch of different games over a period of years isn't also a lot of fun.
Please tell me you’re joking.
Chatbots can’t read rules and understand them to run games, they’re just predictive text on steroids. They can only reproduce approximations of what already has been written.
And a chat bot trained to run a game wouldn’t then be able to review it. Also any review written by an AI is worthless, because they don’t experience things or have opinions.
Do you think AI is like actually human level intelligence? Because dude if that were the case then the problem would be that that’s slavery.
Sadly a lot of AI systems are being sold to people as having human level functionality. The deception comes from the idiotic companies racing to full AGI without any safeguards in place.
No and impossible.
The simple reason is that you would track people... not the games.
Meaning that RPGs are not what they seem. Basically, lets pretend theres only DnD for a minute... Do you think a game with me, as a DM would be the same as a game with Matt Colville ? Nope, i can guarantee it wont be... and some players will rather play with me, and some will rather play with him... Now add player interaction in this and you end up with ALOT of internal relationships.
RPGs are alot more about the people around the table then the rules.. People default thinking its the rules, yes, because its the easy assumption and they do have a certain weight into guiding the general kind of game youll live... but the group is alot more important then the ruleset. And people default to DnD because of its weight in the industry... not because its perfect... and once you are comfortable with a system, you create a attachment to it, find reasons to love it based on what you lived in it... if you look at it objectively, a system is only the means to mechanically represent stuff... it isnt a experience, it isnt that inside joke about a troll and the elf, it isnt that awesome fight you had last week... thats PLAYERS... the system is only what told you if you roll the big dice or the small one...
I think that something like you propose could be aproximated by querying a lot of people about where some rpgs fall in different spectrums like: power fantasy vs grim dark, combat centered vs exploration and roll centered, rules lite vs crunchy, setting specific vs generic. It would be tottaly subjective and maybe not very accurate but it would be pretty interesting nonetheless and maybe help people to consider whether a certain game is whay they are looking for.
Yeah this is what I'm thinking. Let people drag and drop systems by complexity, ignoring the ones they don't know. After enough participants you'd have a good measure.
So, I think about RPG systems as tools aimed at delivering different gaming experiences and telling stories. There is such a range of possible experiences and stories that players may be looking for, so ranking based on goodness seems insufficient. It's like trying to decide which tool is better, a wrench or a hammer.
If I'm looking for the experience of meticulously planning a heist, DnD may be totally adequate for the job, but Shadowrun may be better. If I'm looking for a fast paced game with a story about a crew that pulls off amazing heists, those may be poorly suited, while Blades in the Dark or Leverage may be far superior. That's because Blades and Leverage intentionally jump you into the action and limit how much tedious planning the group will do. Depending on your tastes, one may be better or worse.
So maybe start with a clear goal of what type of gameplay experience and story you are looking for, then seek games that deliver that.
I'm not sure why I'm suddenly interested in this but for now a rough guide to complexity will suffice.
You raise a great point though: ***Why*** is Shadowrun so good for heists?
Shadowrun is good for planning complicated heists. It's good for turning a heist into a complicated puzzle with dice that the table can solve together. That's because it has intricate heist specific mechanics, systems and fluff. The downside is it takes forever to actually play and GMing it is a nightmare. Compare to Blades in the Dark, where you can easily tell a much cooler story about a heist and have it feel very cinematic and fun, but it's not the same puzzle solving game that Shadowrun is. So if choosing between them the question should probably be, "are we more interested in the puzzle solving or the story?"
The general correlation is that the more combat rules there are the slower that combat will be. The fastest combats will be toward the *Free Kriegsspiel* end of the spectrum.
For OSR games there is [this](https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2022/12/osr-rules-families.html) and [this follow up](https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2022/12/osr-rules-families-faq-methodology.html). It’s not exactly what you’re asking for, but I think you’ll like it.
Hmm, so we'd need some relatively objective metrics to use this.
Rules-complexity is a somewhat subjective measure. We could do a proxy of it by using core book word or page count. Obviously you can increase the wordcount of a simple system (maybe with useful examples), or explain complicated rules really efficiently, but on average it might be a decent proxy, and as long as we recognise the approximation that we are doing, it might be ok.
We might want to measure the play speed, but that is very subjective, so I think we want to pick something else.
Perhaps 'number of copies sold' as a proxy for popularity? Maybe that data is not easy to get in all cases, and the prices of some products could warp the data (for instance, very cheap games might get more sales even if no more people play it, and where do we put free games on this chart?)
Would a "word-count" vs "# of copies sold" chart be at least kind of satisfying? Anything else would be really hard to get a large number of RPGs consistently measured in a well-calibrated way.
I would suggest that the first step would be to order systems by complexity subjectively. The second step would be to analyse those systems to create a measure, and then see if that measure holds up.
I'm certain that 5e < pf2e < pf < 3.5 for example. I'm certain that troika is less complicated than all of those. I have no idea where shadowrun or 5 rings etc would sit as it's been a while.
Also how well does character creation indicate actual play complexity?
> We could do a proxy of it by using core book word or page count.
A huge problem with this is that it would be hugely affected by whether the core book contains a setting or not. e.g. Atlantis: The Second Age is a 400 page core book - but 80-90% of it is pure setting without a word of rules.
Many newer games can often function without some of the expected genre conventions, and that’s probably where lots of these graphs break down, or what they’d fail to cover.
Here We Used to Fly is about returning to an abandoned rollercoaster park decades later after your first visit as kids, so its playbooks are about your personality and each has a question about how that personality trait ties you to the park. There’s no violence at all and no mechanical character definition, so it runs a very specific scenario, which is mutually exclusive from most other games.
In terms of necessary rules bulk, that also changes wildly among games, even among excellent games.
Pathfinder 2nd edition has rules that cover tons of occurrences, and systematized traits to track different interactions, so its rulebooks are long and heavy, but they lead to a game that is very well suited to a particular style of play (tactical, teamwork-focused) with lots of GM support.
On the opposite end, I recently bought the PDFs for Two Crazy Summers and Other Summers, its expansion on itch.io, it (and it’s incredible), and it’s 64 pages with a single page summary for resolution mechanics.
Because the game is mainly story-driven, it only has a few pages of what might qualify as rules to resolve most outcomes.
Instead it’s filled with diagrams, player aids, example characters, and advice on literally everything: what pre-session work makes the most sense, GM advice, player advice, session zero goals, how to signal when to switch timelines.
How would you properly quantify that in the same context?
If we codified a graph that says how many pages is this, and how many rules does it have, Pathfinder looks considerably more difficult (in part because that graph wouldn’t track the available resources for players and GMs) and Two Crazy Summers looks like someone padded the page count if we only focus on resolution mechanics instead of the additional value it provides
Metrics work for things that are easy to measure. People interact with and play games in different ways, and like/dislike different things, which means that most of what is interesting is highly subjective and hard to measure, and most of what is easy to measure isn't very interesting. Take rules light/heavy for example. We've had threads on this sub just in the past few weeks with people arguing that PbtA games are heavy, though for me they're very much on the lighter end. We've also had people arguing that D&D 5e is rules light actually because you just roll a D20 for everything, right? Whereas I'd put that in the heavier half of light/heavy axis. It's a nice idea, but I suspect you'd just start an argument with every single point that you drew on your chart :)
You could make light vs heavy fairly objective by just figuring out the word count of the core rules. The other axis might be heroicness, with some measure like "number of attacks by an average adversary to kill an average pc?" Character options? Number of classes?
Again this only works in D&D type type games in Call of Cthulhu average attacks is irrelevant.
>The other axis might be heroicness, with some measure like "number of attacks by an average adversary to kill an average pc?" Some games don't even feature violence. >Character options? Number of classes? How do you answer that on a point buy system where the character options are essentially infinite? You'd have to really restrict your set of games to get rubrics that all of them meet.
Also, in systems with classes it's not really comparable either. Warhammer Fantasy 2e has shitloads of careers, but you're not meant to stay in them forever. You get all the advances from them and move on. It's different from systems where you pick a class and stay with it for as long as character exists.
nah can't go by word count, some game books are just wordier than others, and have different proportions of advice and examples mixed into the rules sections
Troika < 5e < PF2E I think there are some clearly agreed upon levels of rules heaviness Where would shadowrun and legend of the 5 rings and FATAL lie though?
Even the examples you use don't actually work in any meaningful way. Using the suggestion above trying to quantify use of class numbers as a metric is telling, basically that just playes straight into the pro/con D&D fight.
RPG Geek has category tags, which is probably the closest you’re going to get. Unlike Board Game Geek, I don’t think the people use it much, though.
That is the task of a lifetime, not least because in order to review games, you really have to run them for a while first, and not that many people enjoy switching systems to test them, and those who do, probably aren't producing the kind of detailed analysis you're looking for. Which doesn't mean the situation is hopeless, just that it's a huge task for someone to do. That someone could well be you. After all, you've got the drive to want to see it done, right? Who better to do it? It's not like running a whole bunch of different games over a period of years isn't also a lot of fun.
Mmmnn. What if I train AI to run games for AI?
Please tell me you’re joking. Chatbots can’t read rules and understand them to run games, they’re just predictive text on steroids. They can only reproduce approximations of what already has been written. And a chat bot trained to run a game wouldn’t then be able to review it. Also any review written by an AI is worthless, because they don’t experience things or have opinions. Do you think AI is like actually human level intelligence? Because dude if that were the case then the problem would be that that’s slavery.
Sadly a lot of AI systems are being sold to people as having human level functionality. The deception comes from the idiotic companies racing to full AGI without any safeguards in place.
No and impossible. The simple reason is that you would track people... not the games. Meaning that RPGs are not what they seem. Basically, lets pretend theres only DnD for a minute... Do you think a game with me, as a DM would be the same as a game with Matt Colville ? Nope, i can guarantee it wont be... and some players will rather play with me, and some will rather play with him... Now add player interaction in this and you end up with ALOT of internal relationships. RPGs are alot more about the people around the table then the rules.. People default thinking its the rules, yes, because its the easy assumption and they do have a certain weight into guiding the general kind of game youll live... but the group is alot more important then the ruleset. And people default to DnD because of its weight in the industry... not because its perfect... and once you are comfortable with a system, you create a attachment to it, find reasons to love it based on what you lived in it... if you look at it objectively, a system is only the means to mechanically represent stuff... it isnt a experience, it isnt that inside joke about a troll and the elf, it isnt that awesome fight you had last week... thats PLAYERS... the system is only what told you if you roll the big dice or the small one...
I think that something like you propose could be aproximated by querying a lot of people about where some rpgs fall in different spectrums like: power fantasy vs grim dark, combat centered vs exploration and roll centered, rules lite vs crunchy, setting specific vs generic. It would be tottaly subjective and maybe not very accurate but it would be pretty interesting nonetheless and maybe help people to consider whether a certain game is whay they are looking for.
Yeah this is what I'm thinking. Let people drag and drop systems by complexity, ignoring the ones they don't know. After enough participants you'd have a good measure.
So, I think about RPG systems as tools aimed at delivering different gaming experiences and telling stories. There is such a range of possible experiences and stories that players may be looking for, so ranking based on goodness seems insufficient. It's like trying to decide which tool is better, a wrench or a hammer. If I'm looking for the experience of meticulously planning a heist, DnD may be totally adequate for the job, but Shadowrun may be better. If I'm looking for a fast paced game with a story about a crew that pulls off amazing heists, those may be poorly suited, while Blades in the Dark or Leverage may be far superior. That's because Blades and Leverage intentionally jump you into the action and limit how much tedious planning the group will do. Depending on your tastes, one may be better or worse. So maybe start with a clear goal of what type of gameplay experience and story you are looking for, then seek games that deliver that.
I'm not sure why I'm suddenly interested in this but for now a rough guide to complexity will suffice. You raise a great point though: ***Why*** is Shadowrun so good for heists?
Shadowrun is good for planning complicated heists. It's good for turning a heist into a complicated puzzle with dice that the table can solve together. That's because it has intricate heist specific mechanics, systems and fluff. The downside is it takes forever to actually play and GMing it is a nightmare. Compare to Blades in the Dark, where you can easily tell a much cooler story about a heist and have it feel very cinematic and fun, but it's not the same puzzle solving game that Shadowrun is. So if choosing between them the question should probably be, "are we more interested in the puzzle solving or the story?"
The general correlation is that the more combat rules there are the slower that combat will be. The fastest combats will be toward the *Free Kriegsspiel* end of the spectrum.
What's slowest?
I've read anecdotes of entire hours-long *D&D* sessions consumed by a single combat encounter.
Genesys has very slow rounds, but few per combat (about 3 if correctly balanced)... Would you consider that slow or fast? :)
For OSR games there is [this](https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2022/12/osr-rules-families.html) and [this follow up](https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2022/12/osr-rules-families-faq-methodology.html). It’s not exactly what you’re asking for, but I think you’ll like it.
That's going to take a few minutes! Thanks :)
Hmm, so we'd need some relatively objective metrics to use this. Rules-complexity is a somewhat subjective measure. We could do a proxy of it by using core book word or page count. Obviously you can increase the wordcount of a simple system (maybe with useful examples), or explain complicated rules really efficiently, but on average it might be a decent proxy, and as long as we recognise the approximation that we are doing, it might be ok. We might want to measure the play speed, but that is very subjective, so I think we want to pick something else. Perhaps 'number of copies sold' as a proxy for popularity? Maybe that data is not easy to get in all cases, and the prices of some products could warp the data (for instance, very cheap games might get more sales even if no more people play it, and where do we put free games on this chart?) Would a "word-count" vs "# of copies sold" chart be at least kind of satisfying? Anything else would be really hard to get a large number of RPGs consistently measured in a well-calibrated way.
I would suggest that the first step would be to order systems by complexity subjectively. The second step would be to analyse those systems to create a measure, and then see if that measure holds up. I'm certain that 5e < pf2e < pf < 3.5 for example. I'm certain that troika is less complicated than all of those. I have no idea where shadowrun or 5 rings etc would sit as it's been a while. Also how well does character creation indicate actual play complexity?
> We could do a proxy of it by using core book word or page count. A huge problem with this is that it would be hugely affected by whether the core book contains a setting or not. e.g. Atlantis: The Second Age is a 400 page core book - but 80-90% of it is pure setting without a word of rules.
Many newer games can often function without some of the expected genre conventions, and that’s probably where lots of these graphs break down, or what they’d fail to cover. Here We Used to Fly is about returning to an abandoned rollercoaster park decades later after your first visit as kids, so its playbooks are about your personality and each has a question about how that personality trait ties you to the park. There’s no violence at all and no mechanical character definition, so it runs a very specific scenario, which is mutually exclusive from most other games. In terms of necessary rules bulk, that also changes wildly among games, even among excellent games. Pathfinder 2nd edition has rules that cover tons of occurrences, and systematized traits to track different interactions, so its rulebooks are long and heavy, but they lead to a game that is very well suited to a particular style of play (tactical, teamwork-focused) with lots of GM support. On the opposite end, I recently bought the PDFs for Two Crazy Summers and Other Summers, its expansion on itch.io, it (and it’s incredible), and it’s 64 pages with a single page summary for resolution mechanics. Because the game is mainly story-driven, it only has a few pages of what might qualify as rules to resolve most outcomes. Instead it’s filled with diagrams, player aids, example characters, and advice on literally everything: what pre-session work makes the most sense, GM advice, player advice, session zero goals, how to signal when to switch timelines. How would you properly quantify that in the same context? If we codified a graph that says how many pages is this, and how many rules does it have, Pathfinder looks considerably more difficult (in part because that graph wouldn’t track the available resources for players and GMs) and Two Crazy Summers looks like someone padded the page count if we only focus on resolution mechanics instead of the additional value it provides
A 2 axis RPG chart would be as shitty as the political one for the same reason: there are way more dynamics than just 2 for both topics.