Although I have played and enjoyed some of the crunchier games out there, sometimes they just start to feel more exhausting than fun. I’ve also found it hard to get players to buy into games where you have 20+ different questions/choices during character creation.
Ontop of those, sometimes a systems release schedule has made me stop wanting to run the game, I am personally not a huge fan of games that put out 3+ books a year,
How much is too much for you/your table?
I feel like “more exhausting than fun” is a good definition for too much 😀
In my case it depends on what you’re trying to do: i once played a GURPS campaign about a far-future SWAT team taking on an alien secret operation and it was a delight to play, I even remember how fun it was, at a very high stakes moment, to look at my teammate players on my turn and declaring “I’m holding my breath” as my action.
On the other hand, we later tried to go for a super crunchy low-fantasy medieval game and it was terrible: we all really just wanted to focus more on the choices of our characters and the morality and what was driving them forward and didn’t really care much for what angle the sword was coming from… (The Riddle of Steel).
So it really is a matter of expectations and seeing if crunchy is a good fit. The latter campaign ended up going in the complete opposite direction and transitioning into a Fate campaign, while the first one just worked amazing for what we wanted.
Crunchiness is a tool, and it’s a matter of just seeing if it’s the tool you need for the game you want to play 🙃