I find that as I get older, I get a lot less tolerant of having large rulebooks with lots of rules. This isn't to say that I'm against all rules, but I much prefer, as a DM, to need to remember as few rules as possible. It's one of the reasons I've enjoyed 4E so much: it's actually a very light system at heart, with plenty of complexity added through easily digestible chunks. Monster design is a particular case in point: to run a 4E monster, apart from the base game rules, I just need to know what the conditions do: everything else is in the statblock.

This is in particular contrast to the Pathfinder RPG, which, I'm astonished to find, has actually made the job of running a monster significantly harder than 3.5E. There are a lot of good things I can say about Paizo's adventure and world design. However, Pathfinder has hit a level of rules complexity that I don't care for at all. I ran two full Pathfinder APs over the last year (Council of Thieves and Kingmaker) and all the flaws of 3.5E were there in spades, and then things were made worse by Paizo's stance to rules design. I didn't fight so hard to put the group back together after I had a run of cancellations in large part that I didn't want to have to struggle with Paizo's rules any more.

I'm thus somewhat disappointed that two new RPGs that I've been looking forward to: Edge of the Empire (FFG's Star Wars RPG) and Shadowrun 5E have horribly big rulebooks, both just shy of 500 pages. They might warrant such large book sizes, but I have quite a lot of other things to do apart from working my way through these tomes.

My AD&D campaign has now been running for about 19 months. It's still incredibly popular; I had nine players at the last session, and I dread to think how many will turn up this weekend! One of the lovely things about AD&D is that because I'm so familiar with the system, I can happily let the system get out of the way and I can concentrate on all the things that are – to me – fun. Interesting tricks, NPCs, exploration and the odd combat or five.

It's a completely different beast to my 4E Greyhawk game, which has now been running almost five years. (When did 4E come out? Since then). It's been delayed by various illnesses and other catastrophes, but we're moving towards the endgame with the group having hit 24th level, and the final foe (Tharizdun) having been revealed.

The biggest trouble with 4E is just length-of-combat, which takes away from exploration, NPCs, and interesting tricks. I'm having fun at the moment as I'm able to put in lots of references to classic adventures. The group are on their way to Verbobonc at present, following the trail of a lot of cultists that have power over elemental creatures. I wonder how many of the group are familiar enough with D&D lore that they get the reference? I believe there wouldn't be that many; I think I'm pretty unusual in my group with my fascination with early D&D lore.

I'm experiencing D&D Next mainly through the D&D Encounters program at present. I made a couple of attempts to play it in place of one of my regular other games, but eventually decided that it wasn't complete enough (this was a few playtest packets ago) and I really wanted to properly complete my 4E game. My experience with Next is coloured by the problems that Encounters brings to the table, as well as a player population that is happy to play Next as long as they don't have to read the rules.

There seems to be a very big gap between the capabilities of a 4th level and a 5th level character at present. It's at that level that Deadly Strike comes into play, which significantly increases the damage the martial characters deal. The group almost got completely slaughtered by chitines last session, but, in retrospect, it was mainly due to the fact that the group almost all have 4th level PCs. Character creation in the playtest documents is nowhere near as clear as it will get in the finished product, and I think the players are struggling with it. Personally, I don't have trouble with it, but then I'm an extremely experienced player of RPGs.

The other game I'm playing in is Martin's Deadlands Noir game, which is using the Savage Worlds system. We're two sessions in at the moment, and it's been heavily biased towards role-playing. The system itself is very basic – well, as much as I've seen of it, which has generally been skill checks. It's not a great distance away from the Serenity RPG, with the major difference being that Savage Worlds works while Serenity didn't. My character does break the system somewhat – he's both Attractive and Charismatic, which gives a +4 bonus to Negotiation checks. When you consider that a standard roll is "roll d8 and d6, take the higher", that bonus is astonishingly good.

The last session had only Peggy and Sarah playing in addition to myself, which was the three skill characters as opposed to the combat characters. We thus did a lot of role-playing and investigation; there was one (short) combat, which I ran away from and Sarah demonstrated how dangerous she is with a flower pot – although, unfortunately, not to the other side. Peggy and Sarah are much better at immersive role-playing than I am, although I can do okay for short periods. As I tired, I wandered back into the more descriptive style of role-playing ("I convince her that…") rather than the immersive style I started in ("Miss Jones, I'm desperately concerned that…") There was one great moment when I was completely tongue-tied and then got the giggles; Peggy and Sarah rather liked that moment. Despite both of them being better immersive role-players, I was the one leading the investigation for most of it… and thus doing a lot of the talking.

Apart from the two big books of Shadowrun and Edge of the Empire (the former only virtual, admittedly), I also picked up The First Doctor Sourcebook for the Doctor Who RPG by Cubicle 7. I'm planning on writing a review of it Real Soon Now, but before I did so I wanted to see what other people thought of the book. There's a good review on rpggeek in which the reviewer has found a couple of mechanical issues with the book. I didn't even notice! Part of this is due to the unfortunate fact that I haven't been able to play the game yet, and thus the mechanical elements aren't that familiar to me. A larger part is that I just don't care that much any more, especially as the book does one thing very well, and that thing is very important to me: it gives great advice on creating good RPG adventures and stories.

Are mechanics important? They certainly are, but I'm no longer obsessing over them as much as I once did. When they work, I'm happy. When they don't work, I'm sad, but I'm even less a tinkerer now with rules than I once was. There are systems out there that I'm very happy with and will run. D&D Next might see me not changing to a new version of D&D for the first time (I've gone from AD&D to 2E to 3E to 3.5E to 4E), but it won't annoy me if it's not to my taste; I've got systems that will work for various groups. My feeling is that Next will probably still work for me, but I won't be shattered if it doesn’t.