Makes sense to me. Magic is the only area where I really felt Dragonbane was lacking something.Sidenote, Free League are working on a book on magic for Dragobane.Nothing is known about it yet, but they've mentioned it in conversations at cons.
There's a lot of headroom before they reach 3000 pages.
Having lots of rules and subsystems doesn't protect you from this. You can still have a reasonable idea and when the GM finally finds the rules in Supplement 36A, your character still has a 78% chance of failing and a 16% chance of dying while doing so.
This moves RPGs out of the bounds of "games" as a field for many players. Playing a game I don't know the rules to (unless we're talking about the sort of puzzle game where learning the rules is in fact the gameplay loop) is something I've described before as a special kind of hell. This takes us into the territory not of people playing a game together, but one person using a game as a mechanism to do something else; an activity that clearly can and does have value, but isn't the same, and doesn't engage the same faculties I'd use to to play any other kind of game.
I've argued before this is overrated as the defining feature of RPGs, and I don't think it's necessary to constitute one. I think the far more important feature of the RPG is that their unbounded in resolution and time; the mechanisms might spell out a few loss conditions, but when the game ends and what the goal is are negotiated by the players and not fixed by the game systems; moreover, they continue to be negotiated and changed over the course of play.
What you're describing sounds more like a boardgame to me. Never doing anything not explicitly covered by some specific rule in 3000+ pages of rules. Having to memorize or constantly look up rules just to play the game. It quickly becomes too cumbersome to actually play. Or worse, have a computer do all that work for you. As you say, it would be a special kind of hell for me.
In our case, it was more that they were used to situations the rules covered being foiled by adjudication. When Deirdre used food to lure a bulette away from their settlement, she knew if she got a success that she would do it and not suffer some “well, actually” consequence. When everyone worked together to trick a dragon into eating a corpse they’d poisoned, they could count on success meaning success.
We hash it out while playing.
At the cost of a bunch of wasted time. You spend 20 minutes finding, reading and parsing the rule, only to discover that the thing you declared you were doing is a bad decision. Now you have to retcon your choice and spend another 20 minutes looking up the rules of a different action. (I'm being hyperbolic for effect, of course).
