Sailor Steve wrote:
> My background over the decades has been in tabletop miniatures gaming,
> and one of the biggest arguments in game design has always been 'Realism
> versus Playability', which of course equates 'Realism' with 'Detail-oriented'.
Yes, that's the easy equivalency. And like most easy equivalencies, it's wrong.
One can make a game (and I'm coming from a board wargaming background here) infinitely complicated, all for sake of supposed "realism," and end up getting it completely wrong. Complexity is not, in itself, an improvement in game design, and if it leads to confusion or fatigue in players, it's explicitly a bad thing, because it discourages gameplay and reduces whatever gain they might have attained by it.
I like small-scale, tactical games (especially naval subjects), and I enjoy the detail and understanding they convey. But at the same time, I cannot stand flipping back and forth between tables printed on (it seems) ever-decreasing font size on cardstock. The sheer friction of digging out the box, setting up the data sheets and ships' logs is off-putting, so Ironclads, Submarine, Close Action! and Royal Navy sit on the shelf, while the my study echoes with the sound of SH4's dive klaxon.
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