MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Yeah, same here. InSPECTREs, Dialect, Grin, Dread, etc. have always been one shots for me. Even Paranoia is a game I only run as a several session mini campaign at most. The best systems for long campaigns for me are medium crunch games like D&D or Warhammer Fantasy. Light enough that players can pick up what they need to during play and which I pick up with a moderate investiment of time into learning the rules. But they have enough complexity to customize and add to.For me at least though, I've never wanted to play those light frameworks for more than say 12 hours with the same characters. I guess everyone has different aesthetics but rules light frameworks to me fill like one shots or short campaigns, whereas if I want to do some serious story telling and stay in a system for 300 hours or more than I'm going to want something crunchier with more meaningful advancement. Also light frameworks tend to have one thing that they do and one thing only with the players expected to stay in the lane and not depart from what the system intends to be the play cycle. I prefer in a long campaign for the players to feel like they can just do whatever and the system won't constrain them.
This conversation has made me realize that complexity really isn't about the volume of text in the rules but more about how streamlined they are and how easy there are to access and engage with. The core mechanics and play loop of D&D, for example, is quite straight forward. Generally, the sub-systems in my 5e game--whether RAW or home‑brew--are only needed for specific situations, are easy to pull up and easy to explain and run without a great deal of friction. Most importantly, it is really easy to explain to players what they need to do in a given situation. There are board games I've played with only a few pages of rules that take a lot longer for a group of players to figure out and start playing.