I have a friend who once complained that adding 5ft every other diagonal was too complicated.

Now if you’re playing 1st edition Pathfinder and juggling 7+ buffs some of which do stack and some don’t, then yes that gets complicated. But an extra 5ft every other diagonal is easy.

Change the “what about dragons” answer to “eh, can be cool, but nothing special” and add “what about if we combine all those things?” And I answer “Oooh, that sounds fun!”

You just need to skill in arithmancy. When you need to calculate something in game, roll a check and if you roll high enough the DM has to do the math for you.

That’s why you become the DM

Oh come on. It’s not that complicated.

If it’s 3rd edition you just do basic skill checks on any ones of the 30-odd should for everything. Yes, including leveling up.

If it’s 4th edition you run a spreadsheet program to track the five dozen skulls your selected and curse yourself as you have to walk down a stone stair but you only have points in walking up wooden stairs.

If it’s 5th edition you basically play it like 3rd ed but with a point buy system that allows you to accurately construct an artistically inclined vintner with a large bladder.

(Yes, having a large bladder capacity is an official perk from an official rulebook but few DMs are going to be insane enough to actually play with that rulebook.)

that is my primary suspect. but the problem persists into adulthood to. there is a generational rift between myself and the one before me where people don’t want to teach what isn’t already known. or just can’t understand the process of learning enough to communicate effectively with eachother.

GURPS Vehicles had some options that you needed to do a little calculus for, iirc. To be fair, that was an extremely optional add-on, and the calculations were done as part of designing your custom vehicle, not in play!

Their speed/range penalty calculation is also logarithmic I think, but nobody actually calculates that - you just look up the adjustments on the table, which is reprinted all over the place (rulebooks, character sheets,GM screens…)

This is exactly what I mean. The stairs thing seems to be a common joke.

“Roll to ascend the stairs.” was a common joke in our group.

I remember all the spells being overly specific to the point of uselessness. “You can conjure a cat. It’s just a regular cat and will probably flee from you. You can do this once a month and it costs a billion dollars.”

THAC0 is the reason I am so good at maths.

DSA (aka The Dark Eye, as it’s international release is called) does tend towards a low power level so magic is severely limited compared to e.g. D&D. You can throw fireballs but not as frequently. High-level magic can take days to recover from. I have my own criticisms of how the magic system works but it does work if you accept that a high-level TDE caster is at a lower power level than a mid-level D&D caster.

The overall complexity was insane in the 4th edition; 5th ed did a lot to fix that. There are still a lot of skills but it actually feels manageable now.

I actually like that the system can model mundane professions; it can be pretty cool to play a regular person who gets forced into adventure but is still competent at something, even if that something is not generally applicable to adventuring.