Lev, I have to say that I love these reviews. I may not agree with everything you write, but it makes for an interesting read. And the comment threads themselves make for some insightful reading. I look forward to seeing some more historical reviews of games outside of the AD&D realm.
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Originally Posted by Bochi
Hmmm. The interesting thing about that is that both AD&D1e and AD&D2 became bloated and overly complex - and muddled - by the end of their active publishing life. D&D 3.x is heading the same way.
If we define rulesets as technologies there is a tendency for the popular technologies to become too complex. They are a bit like mobile phones that will do everything except make it easy to call somebody.
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Game rulesets tend to be more like software than other products. They are adapted over time to incorporate whatever features show up in other games that are popular, useful or considered "better" for some metric of "better". Over time, feature creep forces you to go back and refactor the rules to streamline out the complexity and reduce the system down to its essentials.
The more complex the "hardware", the more the complexity of the ruleset can grow. So board games tend not to rise in complexity too much because of the natural restrictions of the board and that goals of the game (though feature creep happens in board games over time too). RPG "hardware" is almost purely in the heads of the participants, so the possibility exists for potentially infinite complexity. If a game lives long enough, features are going to creep in from supplements and from the community, and so over time you have to find points to cut the cruft and keep only the innovations that make for the "best" game.