Or is it?

How much detail do you like? Take combat as an example. You can from super simple old D&D combat where everything was decided in one roll of the d20. Then go to the other end where hits hit specific places, each with it's own health bar, like legs, arms, chest, head, and so one. You also have everything in between.

Crafting can be the same way. Simple ingredient A added to ingredient B and product Z is created. Or, ancient oak acorns are better than decade old acorns. Or plants harvested during a full moon are more potent.

Head over to a magic system and you have the same variations. Do you spell components or reagents? Hand gestures? Spoken words? Is there a mana pool? Or are spells memorized and forgotten when cast?

How much detail do you like your games?

Is there a point where the game bogs down in details?

Do you believe, "You can not have too much detail?"

On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the most detail, where would you place yourself? Does it depend? If so, on what?

I think people like detail in different categories. For instance, I love visual and audible detail but I prefer the core mechanics of the game to be fairly streamlined and easy to understand.

In terms of visual detail, Bioshock infinite (the beginning at least) had to be one of the most detail environments I had ever seen. I think the resistance of base in Wolfenstein the New order was pretty amazing too.

I like it when it matters, when it adds something to the experience. Taking your combat example, if there's no special result in hitting and damaging limbs, then I don't feel like giving them a separate bar and ability to target them specifically is really needed. If I can cripple a limb by hitting it and that slows the enemy down or prevents them from wielding certain weapons, then I appreciate the extra strategic options and you can bet I'll be using them.

One of the things that draws me to Dwarf Fortress is the way that extreme detail creates incredible (and often amusing) narratives that couldn't otherwise be done in a more simplified game environment. Every dwarf, creature and object can have their own highly unique and interesting history right down to the most insane levels of detail.

I can't think of any memorable instances of games that had a ton of detail which didn't matter, which I guess further shows my tastes here.

*VATS in Fallout 3 comes to mind*

I mean, c′mon, if my foe dies regardless if I shoot an arm, leg or tail, why even have the options? The Dart Gun was useful for crippling a foe due to the poison, but being able to target specific limbs in VATS wasn′t. You could just as well aim at the head or torso.

Regarding details... Well, I loved how you could read newspaper articles on the ground in Deus Ex

Its certainly possible to have too much detail. Anyone who played the old pnp game Chivalry & Sorcery will know this.

I like lots of detail in character creation and in the world. Game mechanics should be as streamlined as possible. By all means let them take lots into account but keep it under the hood and let the computer do the number crunching.

How much did old D&D use d20? But anyway, I am not a fetishist about detail. I am fine with inventory management, and I like ridiculously detailed character systems, but atmosphere beats everything. I prefer ME2 to ME1 due to the writing.

New Vegas showed how you can use a few simple mechanics to increase detail but also increase atmosphere.

For me RPGs are about feeling like you are there, ideally. Endless fussing around is not necessarily the best way to achieve that. Take State of Decay, not the most detailed RPG mechanics ever, but it got into my dreams.

I didn't play Chivalry and Sorcery, but I bought the rule book.

Those were the days of RPGs being "for nerds and by nerds". When you could bet every game designer had an MA in Medieval History.

I never refereed it but I played it. We were lucky in having a referee who not only knew the rules but was a good judge of when to ignore the rules.

It was definitely a bit inconsistent. I think that's a weakness that most games have, which is that an enemy will only stop fighting when it dies. You can't shoot a guy in the leg and leave him spending the rest of the fight on the ground in too much pain to be of any use. Probably a combination of movie influence and limitations stemming from carrying over the abstract notion of hit points from tabletop to video games. I'm struggling to think of a game that did it right, but I seem to recall there being something out there.

That said, for humanoid opponents the option of shooting out their weapon was always there, and not a bad choice before lining up the headshots. Oh, and shooting their grenade before they let go of it, that was a nice touch.

Some really cool thoughts so far. I do agree that the level if detail depends on the situation and overall workings of the game. I love detail in character creation, as long as it matters in the game. I get easily bogged down with too much detail in combat. If I have to switch weapons or ammo for every other encounter, it is too much, though I appreciate the theory. Quickslots help tremendously, but when I have 50 "possibilities" and 8 slots, I just get frustrated.

In our D&D campaigns, we got bored with the "d20 covers everything" mode and tried all kinds of intricate additions like hit location, dodging, cover, and such. What that did was make a combat that originally took 15 minutes last 45 minutes with the same results, usually.

Crafting can get rather bogged down easily, too, for me. On the other hand, I do not enjoy "over-simplified" systems, either.

Agreed about "feeling like you are there."

New Vegas had the opposite effect on me, though. I have yet to encounter an inventory system that I enjoyed working with. Most of them take my character out of the game (pause) and lately, thanks to console iterations, have become quite cumbersome. Yes, there is an ammo key that you can rotate through your ammo in New Vegas, but with my terrible keyboard skills, this is as bad as inventory swapping for me

Writing I also agree that I like more detail, which I have yet to see happen in the matter that occurred prior to voice "over everything" games. I enjoy engaging my brain in games, but sometimes, I just wanna kill stuff

Again, interesting thoughts and reading!

I like crisp sharp details in my environments like buildings, lighting effects, mountainous landscapes, space etc. In my FPS or any shooters I like or would like to have batter details when I shot an enemy either in the leg or arm that they either limp or can no longer use that appendage.

I'm pretty adaptable. I can usually find a way to work with most systems. I roleplay just as easily in Skyrim as I do in Morrowind, perhaps even easier in some respects. In general, when a game provides a bare-bones framework for me, I find I can roleplay very easy. When a game attempts to do everything for me (i.e. too much detail) I can sometimes feel as though some of my control has been lost.

I could roleplay an endless number of conversations with the same NPC in Morrowind because the "Topic" system left a lot to my imagination. But a game that forces me to choose specific lines of dialogue makes it harder for me to use my imagination. And, these days, with voiced protagonists being all the rage, it is even harder to use my imagination. That is too much "detail" for me.

So I like a lot of options in character creation. I like choice and consequence, both in character creation and in the game itself. But I don't like to be told by a developer that my character can't wear heavy armor because she's "A Mage" or that my character can't shoot a fireball because she's "A Fighter." I like to play characters who change over time in response to the events they experience in a game. If a system is too restrictive I can't do that. That kind of detail is restrictive and hampers roleplaying in my opinion.

As far as combat goes I like simpler systems. I don't like games that require me to memorize combos and I don't like games that require quick-reflex eye-hand twitch skills. Since Morrowind, Elder Scrolls combat has suited me pretty well. The Elder Scrolls games have always been hybrid action/roleplaying games when it comes to combat and I love them for that. They are fairly simple (less detailed) and that suits me just fine.

Bah. You want detail, try table top StarFleet Battles. There are so many charts and volumes of rulebooks its not even funny. What's weird is that I once had that all memorized. I even knew the BPV(basic point value) of each ship!

For any ultra nerds out there, Jim Kirk's original Enterprise was a heavy cruiser.

In combat no, combat isnt a group of number to crunch, i like arma games because theres, drop, windage, recoil, not what gun does the best dps, so detail where it needs to be, but in most games i like a simply easy system so it doesnt get bogged down in the whole mechanics, otherwise id go back to real life.

Also other simple things like spawning troops, id prefer that they come from somewhere not a spawn point, playing ME 3 again and Liara yells their dropping from the sky and they are crawling up out of the ground at spawn points. No invisible walls either have a wall there or a fence with a sign saying no entry or something, being in a room where you cant move around fully because theres invisible walls everywhere, while it funnels you where they want you to go.

I also hate it when you either cant damage the environment, or you can and you come back and theres no damage or dead bodies and only a few seconds have passed. Detail such as the newspaper on the ground as Mirocu said sometimes its details like that, that stop making games, like a game, one thing i missed in deus ex human revolution as the same in mass effect and i could list many other games is people, id wish my own city was as sparsely populated as most games.

For my tastes, I'm pretty situational but I do like a fair amount of granularity in my games - but I prefer elegant design over complications for their own sake. And I abhor tedium.

D&D for example - I have a weekly campaign I participate in and we use the new 5th Edition rules. There's things l like about their system, and there's things I don't like so much. Combat in D&D is meant to be pretty fast-paced - if you're planning out your turn while everyone else is doing their actions (which is something some of our players have trouble with) then things move pretty fluidly without a lot of pauses, which is good for a narrative-based roleplaying game I think. It's not terribly complex at it's core, but you start adding in all the special abilities you gain and you can spend some time looking through charts and descriptions until you get used to playing your character.

The thing about D&D's system is a lot of the variables are built in. The primary caveat is your HP, which is actually meant to simulate not just your physical state but your overall health and well-being as well as willpower, fatigue, hunger, and just your overall will to fight. That's why you gain HP as you level up - you're not gaining bone density, nor is your skin getting tougher (barring some spells and special abilities of course.) You're gaining experience and... "grit." Likewise, your Armor Class rolls your chance to dodge, deflect blows, parry, and the ability of your armor to deflect and absorb damage all into one variable.

This keeps things moving quickly but I do find myself struggling with the system sometimes. This also depends a lot on your GM, but the caveat of this system is that you make the roll and then the GM interprets the outcome of that action, what you did and how well you did it, based on those scores. So it's hard to get terribly creative when the interpretation happens after the fact. You can't, say, run up to a giant as a Halfling Ranger and try to skewer it's achilles tendon so it's forced to the ground where you're able to make more effective strikes - there's just no rules covering that.

Conversely, when we'd play Twilight: 2000 or Traveler back in the day, one of the goals as a player was to try to stump the GM almost - to come up with creative attacks and actions that would send them flipping through the rules trying to find the variables and modifiers that would fulfill that, as well as the effects a successful action would have. Because there were more "rules," and because action was resolved from the opposite direction, you had a little bit more to play around with, I thought.

But still, we tend to avoid tedium in most of our tabletop sessions. For example, we don't keep track of our arrows. It's been long established in our game that we pay a set amount for a quiver of arrows, and that that quanitity is sufficient to last us a session, and the cost of buying new arrows is figured into our cost of living expenses (which itself is a set value according to the rulebook, based on how comfortable you want to live and covers all the basics of food and lodging and such.) Other games call for a bit more record-keeping just by their nature of course. If we were playing the post-apocalyptic Twilight: 2000, then we'd certainly be keeping track of every bullet fired and every gallon of gas used.

When I pick a tabletop game to GM I tend to choose one for it's ruleset, and I'll go for some with lots of details, usually. I'll use transparent overlays with bullet deviations spread across figures in different positions to decide hit location, and use rulesets that make use of hit location to decide special effects and damage. I'll keep track of bullets and resources for the party, and make sure they're paying for the equipment they need. But at the same time I'll freely gloss over stuff to keep the action going. I prefer games that are "simple to learn, difficult to master" I suppose.

In video games, I like to see a bit more granularity, too. At least under the hood. That's the nice thing about computers - they can do all that math while you worry about the high-level tactics. But sometimes it just doesn't really matter. Crusader Kings 2, for example - lots of variables in how the combat resolves, but the game takes place at such a high level that you don't generally pay all that much attention to the fine little details that are taking place - you can't alter those variables or change battle tactics anyway, and it's still much more effective to just wildly outnumber your foe.

I kind of like the idea of survival mechanics in games, for another example - but I've just rarely found any that aren't tiresomely tedious. New Vegas, for example, was just a bunch of meters you had to maintain in a game where none of those resources were ever scarce enough for it to matter. It wasn't a "survival game" it was just a game with survival mechanics tacked in - not an elegant solution, I thought.

... So I guess in practice I kind of like the middle ground. I like enough "rules" in a game to give me enough options to play around with (this is why Chess is a more interesting game than Checkers, for instance - they're both essentially the same game at it's core, but Chess has just enough rules to take things to another level.) While likewise I prefer to not see things so carved-down as to render them rather pointless. (For instance I didn't mind the idea of Skyrim paring attributes down to just Health, Stamina, and Magic - but it was so simple it rendered the system inert. It just kind of lacked... any life or vibrancy to it. To the point you may as well have just been gaining points in all 3 equally as you leveled.)