Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[Corn Flakes]

The problem with "Skirmishes" is how tanky 4e characters are if you give them 5 minutes to catch their breath.

In one campaign, the party had to cross a dangerous area regularly. So I reduced the complexity to "Roll Nature/Streetwise/Dungeoneering, pull some things off the RET, and then have them roll and just peel off healing surges" and someone in the party could sacrifice a daily to just auto-win a random encounter. The issue was dinging them for healing surges wasn't a great deterrent because one long rest and they were back to full. So it was mostly just pointless and slightly frustrating for players.

The only real solution there is up the urgency and make it so they can't take a long rest, but that tends to just make everyone feel rushed and frazzled and stresses the players in the bad way, not the fun way.

That's a problem with resting in general, and it's why earlier editions focused so heavily on random encounters and wandering monsters. Eight hours is a long-ass time, and any disruption from even a relatively weak group of enemies or a small threat is going to cancel the rest.

My GM only allows for long rests as chapter breaks. If we're in hostile territory, even short rests roll for patrols/wandering monsters. And if the enemy we're going up against is commander by an intelligent entity, even short rests are hard to get because we'll be getting harassed every time we stopped for five minutes.

 

[The Ugly One]

What

my group does is closer to house-rules-as-system but we'll adjust it or use something completely different based on tone, setting, & genre.
One thing that's made our model shine for us is player crafted feats.
Each build is tailored to the character so we get to have builds without worrying about viability in game.

If you're having fun with it, games are supposed to be fun, so don't let me throw a monkey wrench into the works.

Reason I frame it the way I do is I've been asked to help develop homebrew RPGs before, and inevitably, I end up saying, "It sounds like what you really want is to play Traveller/Call of Cthulhu/etc." and we end up playing that.

 

[Adamska]

If you're having fun with it, games are supposed to be fun, so don't let me throw a monkey wrench into the works.

Reason I frame it the way I do is I've been asked to help develop homebrew RPGs before, and inevitably, I end up saying, "It sounds like what you really want is to play Traveller/Call of Cthulhu/etc." and we end up playing that.

That's usually the biggest thing in my experience. Hell, CoC has a d20 variant too so if you're still too scared of changing game systems that's not even an excuse anymore. Same with Traveller tbh.

 

[IridiumDragon06]

That's a problem with resting in general, and it's why earlier editions focused so heavily on random encounters and wandering monsters. Eight hours is a long-ass time, and any disruption from even a relatively weak group of enemies or a small threat is going to cancel the rest.

My GM only allows for long rests as chapter breaks. If we're in hostile territory, even short rests roll for patrols/wandering monsters. And if the enemy we're going up against is commander by an intelligent entity, even short rests are hard to get because we'll be getting harassed every time we stopped for five minutes.

My own experience is that turned into wars of attrition pretty fast. If you're facing an enemy that follows normal humanoid constraints (orcs, goblins, etc.) and there's a huge tactical reward for forcing a 5-minute delay in between encounters, then the logical pattern for invading PC parties is to lurk on the utter outskirts of the controlled territory, murder some patrols, then withdraw, and repeat going deeper as the defending force loses more and more ability to project those patrols farther and farther out.

There's also the issue of morale; if you're being sent off in a warband which you know should be good enough to survive the lands around you, only literally half your tribe has gone out in bands like this and never returned, at what point do you abandon your patrol and just hide out and report back that yup, didn't see anything, or just run for the horizon and hope to become a smaller tribe somewhere with less-effective adventurers?

In my own experience, playing the logistics game as opposed to just assuming that the PCs will be at full when they get to the dramatic encounters and balancing the encounters accordingly ends up both making the game much easier and much less fun for the PCs.

 

[Corn Flakes]

In my own experience, playing the logistics game as opposed to just assuming that the PCs will be at full when they get to the dramatic encounters and balancing the encounters accordingly ends up both making the game much easier and much less fun for the PCs.

Different experiences for different groups. In my main group we generally like balancing our resource consumption and stretching it with consumables. Potions, spell scrolls, magical items with limited uses, etc. That and we found out that our GM has a habit of making final encounters too hard when they're balanced around everybody having full resources.

Because if the GM knows the fighter will have full HP, action surge, second wind and all his tactics dice, the wizard has top-level spells to cast for eight turns in a row, and the cleric and heal everybody nearly to full and/or wipe out entire clusters of mooks with a single spell for 4 turns in a row and balances the encounter around that... well, the encounter is going to have to hit like a fucking truck in order to be any kind of challenge. And the harder the enemies hit, the more swingy the combat becomes and the more likely it is someone gets taken to 0HP without having a chance to react. Meanwhile, an encounter balanced around a party at half- or quarter-health/resources can have something that hits for "only" 2d8+8 twice per turn (plus whatever minions or extra actions the boss has) still be a real threat.

That's how it works for us, though. I know my second group is more a fan of being able to unload everything at the final encounter. It's fun, but I do feel disappointed when the boss simply melts after two or three rounds because a fully-equipped, fully-stocked and freshly-rested party at level 10+ can unload a lot of damage really quickly. And when the boss doesn't die immediately because we got unlucky with the damage rolls or saves... it turns into a slog.

 

[JJLiautaud]

One of the things that really annoyed me about the fan response to 4e was whining that "the books look like reference manuals and aren't a pleasure to read." 4e is hand-down the absolute winner among D&D editions for organization and layout, because when I am referencing a book in a game, I want it to be a reference manual. But WotC needs to also cater to the crowd that has no friends and can't play D&D, so all they can do is read the books, I guess.

I feel attacked.

Anyways I want to run a Cyberpunk 1-shot for my group, is RED any good or should i just use 2020?

 

[The Ugly One]

My own experience is that turned into wars of attrition pretty fast. If you're facing an enemy that follows normal humanoid constraints (orcs, goblins, etc.) and there's a huge tactical reward for forcing a 5-minute delay in between encounters, then the logical pattern for invading PC parties is to lurk on the utter outskirts of the controlled territory, murder some patrols, then withdraw, and repeat going deeper as the defending force loses more and more ability to project those patrols farther and farther out.

There's also the issue of morale; if you're being sent off in a warband which you know should be good enough to survive the lands around you, only literally half your tribe has gone out in bands like this and never returned, at what point do you abandon your patrol and just hide out and report back that yup, didn't see anything, or just run for the horizon and hope to become a smaller tribe somewhere with less-effective adventurers?

In my own experience, playing the logistics game as opposed to just assuming that the PCs will be at full when they get to the dramatic encounters and balancing the encounters accordingly ends up both making the game much easier and much less fun for the PCs.

I have intelligent monsters behave logically. A tribe of 200 orcs is not going to let 4 humans whittle them down, 3 orcs at a time, over a period of months.

 

[Ghostse]

My GM only allows for long rests as chapter breaks. If we're in hostile territory, even short rests roll for patrols/wandering monsters. And if the enemy we're going up against is commander by an intelligent entity, even short rests are hard to get because we'll be getting harassed every time we stopped for five minutes.

You're right about the reality of that, however

1) For most of my campaigns I use "official" encounters, so this is what the designers intended.
2) The natural solution is, yes, just reduce the ability to rest. If you try to fuck with rests too much, it makes combat slow down even more as players start getting stingy with even encounters incase there is an ambush. And while 4e lets everyone have more to do than just "I attack", when they get down to at-wills its basically "which one of these two things do I do?" (or three things if human) which is not too much different.
And while saving resources for getting smacked unexpectedly is a good attitude for players to have, but very much against the 4e spirit where its expected you clear a room and get at least 5 minutes (with rare exceptions where the mechanism is to take a risk or blow resources to stop something that will summon more enemies).
I've messed around with things like having a real time clock that when it reaches 0, bad things happen in game (and then the clock starts again) and resting makes the clock run down faster. But again, that tends to make my players the bad kind of stressed.
I've also messed with "Rejuvenating Potions" that recharge encounters and a "super" version that recharges dailies that had promise, but was having trouble getting the 'drop levels' right.
During a megadungeon, I reskinned the Keep on the Shadowfell to be about a Bane worshipper and put Bane shrines throughout - the party could pray at the shrines to get boons (recharge powers, healing surges, combat bonuses for the next encounter, etc) but every time they did, it made the Bane presence stronger which made the big bad tougher.
It was a good idea, but needed balanced (and a party who wasn't as cowardly about risk/reward)

As @IridiumDragon06 said the usual logistics presented in your usual fantasy fall apart very quick if you poke them too hard, and - again, love 4e - but they fall apart super fast in 4e.

 

[Corn Flakes]

You're right about the reality of that, however

1) For most of my campaigns I use "official" encounters, so this is what the designers intended.
2) The natural solution is, yes, just reduce the ability to rest. If you try to fuck with rests too much, it makes combat slow down even more as players start getting stingy with even encounters incase there is an ambush. And while 4e lets everyone have more to do than just "I attack", when they get down to at-wills its basically "which one of these two things do I do?" (or three things if human) which is not too much different.
And while saving resources for getting smacked unexpectedly is a good attitude for players to have, but very much against the 4e spirit where its expected you clear a room and get at least 5 minutes (with rare exceptions where the mechanism is to take a risk or blow resources to stop something that will summon more enemies).
I've messed around with things like having a real time clock that when it reaches 0, bad things happen in game (and then the clock starts again) and resting makes the clock run down faster. But again, that tends to make my players the bad kind of stressed.
I've also messed with "Rejuvenating Potions" that recharge encounters and a "super" version that recharges dailies that had promise, but was having trouble getting the 'drop levels' right.
During a megadungeon, I reskinned the Keep on the Shadowfell to be about a Bane worshipper and put Bane shrines throughout - the party could pray at the shrines to get boons (recharge powers, healing surges, combat bonuses for the next encounter, etc) but every time they did, it made the Bane presence stronger which made the big bad tougher.
It was a good idea, but needed balanced (and a party who wasn't as cowardly about risk/reward)

As @IridiumDragon06 said the usual logistics presented in your usual fantasy fall apart very quick if you poke them too hard, and - again, love 4e - but they fall apart super fast in 4e.

The part where I was talking about my groups was entirely based on 5e. I don't remember enough 4e to be able to suggest tweaks there. Doesn't help 90% of my 4e playtime was at levels 10 and below because that's what we were into at the time.

Mostly because we felt the monster selection got a bit silly past level 10. We just liked killing orcs and goblins and dire wolves and whatnot, and our GM at the time didn't much feel like tweaking/homebrewing his monsters.

 

[IridiumDragon06]

I have intelligent monsters behave logically. A tribe of 200 orcs is not going to let 4 humans whittle them down, 3 orcs at a time, over a period of months.

How do you stop them, exactly? You can double- or triple-up on your patrols, or launch an all-out attack on the nearest settlement and hope that you haven't been attrited too much already, or go full siege mode and hunker down in your cavern and hope like hell your attackers leave, and don't take advantage of the change in tempo to set up their own fortifications outside the entrances to your caves and hunker down to starve you all out and massacre you when you make a push to escape your home-turned-deathtrap.

The problem is that if 200 orcs are a problem that can reasonably happen to a 4E party, then the party needs to be playing the attrition game (or else there needs to be a very specific objective, on the lines of "The orcs have kidnapped my uncle and are demanding gold, weapons, and land rights for their safe return, which I cannot give without breaking my own oaths to the crown, and they demand an answer within a week. We think they will be prepared for a large-scale army movement, so I'm going to order my troops to mass at my watchtowers to cover you and hopefully draw out the bulk of the tribe's forces while you infiltrate the orcish lands, free my uncle, and escape."

Ideally, you want to make the logical-but-borning-and-degenerate strategy simply not apply at all; by emphasizing the specific objective of getting in, fighting enough to capture an objective but not stopping to massacre every orc you see, and getting out, you as GM can leave yourself room for orcs milling around in confusion going from room to room and just missing the PCs. However, if the mission objective is to secure the orcish caves and reclaim the treasure the orcs have been stealing from nearby human villages, then you don't have a lot of good ways of doing that without killing most or all of the orc combatants. So, if there exists the possibility of a 200-on-4 fight, you're kind of requiring the PCs to engage in guerilla tactics to whittle them down first, because there's the possibility that they were misreading your signals as GM and they could be walking into an unwinnable fight if they get to the cave and every orc hunting party happens to be home at that exact time.

 

[The Ugly One]

How do you stop them, exactly? You can double- or triple-up on your patrols, or launch an all-out attack on the nearest settlement and hope that you haven't been attrited too much already, or go full siege mode and hunker down in your cavern and hope like hell your attackers leave, and don't take advantage of the change in tempo to set up their own fortifications outside the entrances to your caves and hunker down to starve you all out and massacre you when you make a push to escape your home-turned-deathtrap.

The problem is that if 200 orcs are a problem that can reasonably happen to a 4E party, then the party needs to be playing the attrition game (or else there needs to be a very specific objective, on the lines of "The orcs have kidnapped my uncle and are demanding gold, weapons, and land rights for their safe return, which I cannot give without breaking my own oaths to the crown, and they demand an answer within a week. We think they will be prepared for a large-scale army movement, so I'm going to order my troops to mass at my watchtowers to cover you and hopefully draw out the bulk of the tribe's forces while you infiltrate the orcish lands, free my uncle, and escape."

Ideally, you want to make the logical-but-borning-and-degenerate strategy simply not apply at all; by emphasizing the specific objective of getting in, fighting enough to capture an objective but not stopping to massacre every orc you see, and getting out, you as GM can leave yourself room for orcs milling around in confusion going from room to room and just missing the PCs. However, if the mission objective is to secure the orcish caves and reclaim the treasure the orcs have been stealing from nearby human villages, then you don't have a lot of good ways of doing that without killing most or all of the orc combatants. So, if there exists the possibility of a 200-on-4 fight, you're kind of requiring the PCs to engage in guerilla tactics to whittle them down first, because there's the possibility that they were misreading your signals as GM and they could be walking into an unwinnable fight if they get to the cave and every orc hunting party happens to be home at that exact time.

If you have the party on a mission to destroy an entire tribe of orcs, but they're not high-level enough to actually do this, you haven't provided any means to raise an army to do it, and essentially there is no way for them to do it except by killing small numbers every day for weeks on end, you're a bad GM and need to rethink how you set people about doing things and design quests.

Because actually, attrition isn't a logical strategy. Logically, once the orcs notice a couple patrols never came back, they're gonna take steps to either not encounter the party or kill them all. Ideally, you should establish that stupidity = TPK early in a campaign, don't wait until the party is level 8 to bring down the hammer.

 

[Corn Flakes]

If you have the party on a mission to destroy an entire tribe of orcs, but they're not high-level enough to actually do this, you haven't provided any means to raise an army to do it, and essentially there is no way for them to do it except by killing small numbers every day for weeks on end, you're a bad GM and need to rethink how you set people about doing things and design quests.

Because actually, attrition isn't a logical strategy. Logically, once the orcs notice a couple patrols never came back, they're gonna take steps to either not encounter the party or kill them all. Ideally, you should establish that stupidity = TPK early in a campaign, don't wait until the party is level 8 to bring down the hammer.

Ideally, there should be some level of urgency or a deadline to any given adventure. That way the players would know attrition isn't even an option and they would have to come up with some way to get the task done within the allotted time.

Of course, the task needs to fit the party's capabilities. If the party can't kill a group of 200 orcs up-front, but that tribe needs dealing with, then the mission needs to be different than just "kill them all". Attempt to sneak in and kill the chieftain. Or poison their food supplies. Or detonate the huge pile of explosive barrels they looted from the nearby mine. Or stage an elaborate display of Gruumsh's power to scare the orcs away. If the mission boils down to "face overwhelming odds head-on in a suicide mission" someone fucked up already.

 

[Ghostse]

How do you stop them, exactly? You can double- or triple-up on your patrols, or launch an all-out attack on the nearest settlement and hope that you haven't been attrited too much already, or go full siege mode and hunker down in your cavern and hope like hell your attackers leave, and don't take advantage of the change in tempo to set up their own fortifications outside the entrances to your caves and hunker down to starve you all out and massacre you when you make a push to escape your home-turned-deathtrap.

The problem is that if 200 orcs are a problem that can reasonably happen to a 4E party, then the party needs to be playing the attrition game (or else there needs to be a very specific objective, on the lines of "The orcs have kidnapped my uncle and are demanding gold, weapons, and land rights for their safe return, which I cannot give without breaking my own oaths to the crown, and they demand an answer within a week. We think they will be prepared for a large-scale army movement, so I'm going to order my troops to mass at my watchtowers to cover you and hopefully draw out the bulk of the tribe's forces while you infiltrate the orcish lands, free my uncle, and escape."

Ideally, you want to make the logical-but-borning-and-degenerate strategy simply not apply at all; by emphasizing the specific objective of getting in, fighting enough to capture an objective but not stopping to massacre every orc you see, and getting out, you as GM can leave yourself room for orcs milling around in confusion going from room to room and just missing the PCs. However, if the mission objective is to secure the orcish caves and reclaim the treasure the orcs have been stealing from nearby human villages, then you don't have a lot of good ways of doing that without killing most or all of the orc combatants. So, if there exists the possibility of a 200-on-4 fight, you're kind of requiring the PCs to engage in guerilla tactics to whittle them down first, because there's the possibility that they were misreading your signals as GM and they could be walking into an unwinnable fight if they get to the cave and every orc hunting party happens to be home at that exact time.

One of my usual ways around this is to toss in a Necromancer or a Demon Priest. You might kill the Orcs, but if you don't hurry up you're going to have undead Orcs, unless you start dropping cash to cast Gentle Repose and also hope that no one comes and fucks with you 8 minutes into the ritual. You have killed the demons, but its only a matter of time before more get summoned.

If my party comes up with a viable attrition strategy though, I'll ask them to lay the plan out for me in detail, figure out some sort of skill challenge, and then roll to see how well it works out. If successful, OpFor will be a little less combat capable when the party rolls through. If it doesn't work, maybe the party is out some gold & gear. That was a good idea, fun for all. You attrited the Orcs with your plan, but it looks like that probably won't work a second time now that the orcs and their low-cunning is wise to your plan, so now back to the assault on the Orc Caverns. What do you do?

If they insist on continuing to try to break the game instead of playing it and keep trying to play attrition, they will quickly discover that Gruumsh and Bane are gods with God powers don't give a flying fuck about logic, they want mighty warriors winning glory on the battlefield not bean-counting accountants, and have lead a coven of Troll-witches, laden with supplies from a Caravan raid, to the Orc Caves.

 

[WhatIsThePunchline]

My own experience is that turned into wars of attrition pretty fast. If you're facing an enemy that follows normal humanoid constraints (orcs, goblins, etc.) and there's a huge tactical reward for forcing a 5-minute delay in between encounters, then the logical pattern for invading PC parties is to lurk on the utter outskirts of the controlled territory, murder some patrols, then withdraw, and repeat going deeper as the defending force loses more and more ability to project those patrols farther and farther out.

There's also the issue of morale; if you're being sent off in a warband which you know should be good enough to survive the lands around you, only literally half your tribe has gone out in bands like this and never returned, at what point do you abandon your patrol and just hide out and report back that yup, didn't see anything, or just run for the horizon and hope to become a smaller tribe somewhere with less-effective adventurers?

In my own experience, playing the logistics game as opposed to just assuming that the PCs will be at full when they get to the dramatic encounters and balancing the encounters accordingly ends up both making the game much easier and much less fun for the PCs.

Old school dungeon crawls are pretty binary as far as the dungeon goes. You're either in the dungeon or not. There's no edge. You can camp outside it until you're blue in the face, but any random monster encounters you face are just going to be stuff the gm is spawning in. It won't empty the dungeon. Same thing goes for wandering monsters in the dungeon. In-game they are monsters wandering the dungeon. Mechanically the gm can just spawn them in when the players try to rest. But old dnd was very explicit about not being any form of simulation. Economy or monster ecology was very arbitrary.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Old school dungeon crawls are pretty binary as far as the dungeon goes. You're either in the dungeon or not. There's no edge. You can camp outside it until you're blue in the face, but any random monster encounters you face are just going to be stuff the gm is spawning in. It won't empty the dungeon. Same thing goes for wandering monsters in the dungeon. In-game they are monsters wandering the dungeon. Mechanically the gm can just spawn them in when the players try to rest. But old dnd was very explicit about not being any form of simulation. Economy or monster ecology was very arbitrary.

Plus this is a world with magic and monsters are NPCs. They can do things the party can't. Who's to say the orc shaman can't whip up a ritual that unleashes constant swarms of stinging insects upon the party? Normally that ritual would take days to set up and complete, but since the party is just camping out there and waiting...

 

[WhatIsThePunchline]

Plus this is a world with magic and monsters are NPCs. They can do things the party can't. Who's to say the orc shaman can't whip up a ritual that unleashes constant swarms of stinging insects upon the party? Normally that ritual would take days to set up and complete, but since the party is just camping out there and waiting...

I mean there's a bunch of alternative to stop party from doing boring combats.

Add a time constraint.
Take the cool set piece encounters you've prepared and shift them to where the party is.
Make a bit more specific quests than 'kill x amount of monsters'.
Just run with it if it's fun enough.
Have other parties active that'll be less risk averse and then if the player party loiter around clearly show how they're missing out on loot and glory.
Have the orcs camp right outside of the edge of were the party is camping, picking them off one by one.

It all depends on what you're going for.

 

[The Ugly One]

Ideally, there should be some level of urgency or a deadline to any given adventure. That way the players would know attrition isn't even an option and they would have to come up with some way to get the task done within the allotted time.

Of course, the task needs to fit the party's capabilities. If the party can't kill a group of 200 orcs up-front, but that tribe needs dealing with, then the mission needs to be different than just "kill them all". Attempt to sneak in and kill the chieftain. Or poison their food supplies. Or detonate the huge pile of explosive barrels they looted from the nearby mine. Or stage an elaborate display of Gruumsh's power to scare the orcs away. If the mission boils down to "face overwhelming odds head-on in a suicide mission" someone fucked up already.

I actually had a party decide they could eliminate a troublesome band of orcs via scout patrol attrition. I told them to think what would happen if they sent out some guards on patrol who never came back, and found it was just four orcs hiding in the brush. They came up with ideas on their own for how the orcs would crush them and realized that piecemeal scout patrol assassinations were not the way.

 

[Brain Problems]

I actually had a party decide they could eliminate a troublesome band of orcs via scout patrol attrition. I told them to think what would happen if they sent out some guards on patrol who never came back, and found it was just four orcs hiding in the brush. They came up with ideas on their own for how the orcs would crush them and realized that piecemeal scout patrol assassinations were not the way.

As a DM how often do you (and anyone else who wants to chime in) give PCs an opportunity to reflect on a plan or an action before resolving it? I find I do it reflexively all the time by accident whenever the murderhobos start planning something silly but I've been trying to catch myself more often and only do it if it's mind-bogglingly retarded or will fuck up the session. I personally have had more luck bringing down the hammer on PCs if they think they're trying to cheese or break the game in an unfun way as a kind of wake-up call slap in the face to try and take things a little more seriously.

I guess for me the bigger issue is most non-combat things are usually handled pretty goofily but I've been working to make things more serious without losing out on the fact we're literally all adults playing pretend together.

 

[The Ugly One]

As a DM how often do you (and anyone else who wants to chime in) give PCs an opportunity to reflect on a plan or an action before resolving it? I find I do it reflexively all the time by accident whenever the murderhobos start planning something silly but I've been trying to catch myself more often and only do it if it's mind-bogglingly retarded or will fuck up the session. I personally have had more luck bringing down the hammer on PCs if they think they're trying to cheese or break the game in an unfun way as a kind of wake-up call slap in the face to try and take things a little more seriously.

I guess for me the bigger issue is most non-combat things are usually handled pretty goofily but I've been working to make things more serious without losing out on the fact we're literally all adults playing pretend together.

I do it pretty much whenever they're being so retarded that executing the plan will lead to TPK. If they're just having fun, that's fine, games are supposed to be fun. But I have one specific player who keeps coming up with insane Rube Goldberg-style ideas like, they're in a room, orcs beating on the door, the obvious solutions are either (a) be really quiet and hope they go away, or (b) ready attacks and suddenly open the door to get the drop. And then he'll suddenly say, "I throw my lamp oil at the door and light a torch."

Me: "Uh...why?"

"Because if we set the door on fire, it'll burn the orcs trying to beat it down, so it'll make the fight easier."

Me: "You are in a closed room. The oil is on your side. What do you think happens to you when you set the door on fire?"

"Uhhhh...we get warm?"

Other player: "You idiot, you'll kill us all!"

Me: "Roll an Intelligence check. If you roll above a five, your character is not stupid enough to do this."

 

[Judge Dredd]

What's different here?
I can't place it.

The official answer (ie. the answer get whenever I suggest a not 5e system) is "I don't want have to learn a whole new system!". As if learning a RPG is a herculean effort that takes years.

Oddly enough, the only system where that was the case was PathFinder. I played that game for years and still have no idea about a lot of it. I played a whole campaign as monk and still couldn't tell you how multiple attacks work. Games like Savage Worlds can be learned in the same time it takes to explain a board game.

I also see the claim that people don't want to have to buy a bunch of new books. Again, this is only true of 5e and Paizo games where you need a players guide, the dmg, and the monster book just to get started, and that's before supplementary material. Most other games are self contained, and people would just download PDFs from The Trove anyway.

On a marginally related note, how do y'all feel about homebrew systems?

I steer clear of them as much as possible. Let's be honest, most people are not game designers. Most homebrew systems are going to be autistically detailed, slow, and poorly thought out. And that's assuming it's not just an unrefined version of an existing game.

I know a guy who keeps trying to sell people on his homebrew system, but no one goes for it. I gave it a read once and it was basically a less developed Savage Worlds with some "magical realm" mechanics on top. Not horrible by any means, but why would we ever play it?

Which brings me to another point about homebrew systems. What are you bringing that's new? Generally games are either skill based or class based. Most games focus on changing what amounts to minutia. eg. DM rolls for enemies to hit the PC, or the PC rolls to defend themselves from a enemy attack. Both mechanics are basically identical.