Realm-Weavers

With little experience with 5E or Roll 20 expertise, I jumped into running Tomb of Annihilation a little over a year ago,. I’ve learned a lot since then and am  grateful for those players that stuck with my bumpy beginning.

Yet I have to admit that I’ve struggled a lot with the crunchiness of 5E to the point where I don’t really want to run a 5E or 5.5 E campaign again. Too many cinematic experiences are paused by lengthy rule discussions about, clarifications or become a mathematics problem about how many modifiers are added. 

I enjoy movies where I can have suspension of disbelief and become immersed. When that emotional experience is interrupted, I can lose interest, especially when that is repeatedly disrupted. 

That’s a huge problem for me with 5E. It’s just not that much fun for me as a DM, and when I’m a player, combat can become quite boring and methodical. 

I realize game companies, big or small, have to keep coming up with new bells and whistles so the income streams keep flowing. Ergo, crunchy has to get progressively crunchier. For those of you not in the know, crunchy means rules heavy.

The upside of a crunchy system is it can add great depth to characters , as special abilities and feats are gained with more experience. The downside is it can completely overtake the cinematic flow of action. Instead of a John Woo film, where time just slows, crunchy systems can make action completely stop. 

I get really frustrated with this as a storyteller, as my storytelling or description of what’s happening often gets interrupted by an action surge or one more attack or whatever the next new or  debate or rules clarification is. 

What’s on page 133 or 247 becomes more important than what’s going on in the game or any sense of reality. 

Combat becomes about mathematics, as numbers are added or subtracted to intangible things like hit points. 

Ugh. 

I’m looking forward to running TOA or Strahd using much deadlier and more story focused systems like Shadowdark.

So you’ll see me posting all about a lot of less crunchy more narrative driven RPGs. 

I know most of you have vastly more experience with crunchy systems than I do, and I also know like playing pool, the game gets sharper and the expectations go up when you’re running paid to play games. 

What’s your experience with this? How do you keep paying players engaged when using crunchy systems and you come to the crunch part?

I’d really love to play/run The Enemy Within  (Warhammer classic) Rise of the Runelords (Pathfinder classic), and perhaps Strahd, but don’t want to lose that cinematic flow of gameplay. 
– Jeff Johnson