Complexity Pitfalls: The Weight of Learning
The RPG community has this recurring debate that crops up every few years: why do so many groups favor Dungeons & Dragons and its derivatives, even when d20-based mechanics aren't necessarily a good fit for the story or themes that group wants to explore? There are tons of great concept-based RPGs out there, all easily available on sites like DriveThruRPG and Itch.io, the question goes, so why pick a game that needs tons of homebrew to deliver the same experience?
The answer to that question is really simple, and it's the same reason I'm typing this on a QWERTY keyboard: continuing to use a tool you already understand is almost always less complicated than the process of learning to use something unfamiliar. Let’s get into why, and what it means for a designer.
Unlearning is Unfun!
Mavis Beacon’s lessons did not prepare me for the eventual realization that QWERTY is optimized for non-optimization. The betrayal still stings…
I first ran into this phenomenon as a designer when working on the mechanics for Legend of the Five Rings 5th Edition. When testing the core mechanics early on, one piece of feedback I frequently received from L5R RPG veterans was that the new dice system was too complex. But interestingly, groups of newcomers to the game rarely reported this problem, instead responding very positively to the dice system’s flexibility and speed of resolution. At the time, I was kind of perplexed by this conflict in the reports. So I put both the new dice system and the prior edition’s dice system in front of people who had seen neither. Generally, those people reported finding them about equally complex to learn, slightly favoring the new system.
To understand the feedback from the L5R veterans, I was looking at the problem all wrong. The issue wasn’t that the new system was too complex in a vacuum, but rather that the actual act of unlearning and then relearning the core mechanic was daunting and unpleasant. When designing, I thought of how complex each system was to a user approaching the game with no preconceptions – how many choice points there are, how difficult each of those choice points is, etc. Comparing the two, it seemed like the two games were about equally complex. But this model of comparison leaves out one important fact: the user who already knows how to use one system efficiently will have a different experience. It’s actually more complex for a returning user than a totally new one. The returning user has to actively fight against the way they they’ve learned to use the system; the new user just has to learn it. It’s like how if I picked up a Dvorak keyboard, I’d be struggling against years of muscle memory to hit the right keys. It doesn’t matter if the Dvorak keyboard is more optimized to a new user, because I am optimized to function in terms of QWERTY. My past experience raises the barrier for me to learn.
This is not to say that you should never ask your players to unlearn things. We decided to go ahead with the new dice system in L5R 5th Edition, and it was the right choice. The new dice system provided things the old system couldn’t that were important to the vision Katrina Ostrander and I had for the game, namely emphasizing the role of a key story theme, choice and consequence, directly into the core mechanics. The game’s strategic vision was to create a different L5R experience than had existed prior, and this meant fundamental changes. Even if we hadn’t needed to change which dice were used, we’d have needed to change the mechanics behind the dice to achieve that design goal, which would have had much the same effect. So we deemed this worth the additional complexity that would be created for a portion of the users.
Budget Your Complexity
For a professional pilot, this level of information is probably necessary to do the job. Trying to model all these factors wouldn’t be a good fit for a lighter game like X-Wing, though.
I like to think about game design in terms of budgets. Maybe it’s because I started my career in games as a producer (essentially, a project manager), for which managing the budget for each game is a key task. So I think about complexity in terms of a budget, too. Of course, a complexity budget isn’t as clean as a monetary budget – complexity is something that different people experience in a variety of ways, and can’t easily be quantified. Still, if a mechanic is being reported as complex, it’s both important to understand why and consider whether that complexity is actually justified by an offsetting benefit. As a producer, I wouldn’t put money toward a really cool art piece that had nothing to do with an adventure I was commissioning. As a designer, I try not to include complexity that doesn’t make the game better. And if I add complexity somewhere, I try to cut it somewhere else. Of course, not every game has the same complexity budget, and the desired overall complexity impacts this.
This connects to the matter of unlearning things in an important way: if a design element requires the user to unlearn a prior system to use it properly, you should think of the “complexity cost” for that element as being about two times what you’d consider it to be in a vacuum.
For a concrete example of a time when the complexity cost was deemed “not worth it,” I turn to X-Wing 2nd Edition. Over the years, many people have asked me why we didn’t change the dice during this reboot. There are so many things that could be added to the dice system, after all. Commonly cited examples are accuracy results on the dice (like the ones in Armada), or different types of dice for different damage probabilities (also like Armada). These are all cool ideas that could work really well (they work really well in Armada, after all).
But when we sat down to design X-Wing 2nd Edition, it was a really easy decision to say “We’re not changing the dice.” And the reason for this was simple: we had a ton of other things we knew we needed to change to create a version of X-Wing with the real longevity we wanted. The action system needed to be revised. The card base needed to be turned over completely. Pilot skill needed to be compressed into initiative. There needed to be dynamic points and upgrade slots. By contrast, the dice were working pretty well for the game as we envisioned it. The burden unlearning the previous set of probabilities to learn a new set of dice would place on the existing player base just didn’t justify itself to the mission of the project this time.
This is a short article, so I’ll keep the takeaway pithy, too:
When evaluating a game element, remember that deviating from expected convention is neither good nor bad intrinsically, but it does carry additional weight for any user familiar with that convention.
When balancing your game’s complexity budget, remember that its total complexity isn’t assessed in a vacuum, and is experienced differently by different people. A “simple game” might not be so simple if many of its users are unprepared for its conventions.