The phrasing this year is somewhat different (it was ‘most complicated roleplaying game owned’ last time, which prompted a complicated answer). This one is about games played.
That gives me quite a narrow frame to work with if I need to being actively playing (or GMing) the game, or likely too. Until the start of this year, I’d have probably gone for fifth edition D&D; no matter how much they’ve cleaned it up, the game still remains a bastion of complexity which endures because of its first mover and giant in the room status. But I’m not playing that at the moment so I won’t pick it.
At the moment, I think that Conan 2d20 would have the crown of most complicated game (ably run by Graham). It’s taken me a while to grok the 2d20 engine from Modiphius, but now I have, I love it. The meta-game layers over the immediate task resolution engine and encourages you to act. I’m actively considering running Achtung! Cthulhu at the moment. Conan is at the crunchier end of 2d20; the subsequent iterations have become more simple.
The One Ring could also be a contender for the most complicated, but I find it reasonably simple once you’d played it for a couple of sessions and could read the dice.
The most simple game that I’d likely play is Tripod Essence (also powering Gran Meccanisimo); this has a simple dice pool mechanic with a narrative style; it actually worked well when we used it for Conan in the original playtesting for the first edition (when it was known as Wordplay).
GUMSHOE comes a close second to Tripod, but has a higher level of crunch.
24 August 2023
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