I ended up coming across The Law of the Conservation of Complexity which basically says, for a given situation, there’s a fundamental baseline level of complexity that you can’t simplify any further. The interesting part is a second note:
One interesting element to this law is the suggestion that even by simplifying the entire system, the intrinsic complexity is not reduced, it is moved to the user, who must behave in a more complex way.
This points to an issue that is longstanding in tabletop RPGs – what the rules don’t cover by procedure, the play group must do.
In some cases, this is trivial (“name your character”) or well covered by established genre expectations and group expectations.
But in many cases, you can find a number of games which were designed with rules minimalism only because the designers couldn’t figure out what TO push and promote, which then ends up either giving very bland play and/or a lot of creative fatigue on the play group to make up the difference.
While the design maxim is true “emphasize everything and you emphasize nothing”, we seem to have a lot of people who also need to hear “emphasize nothing and you emphasize nothing” as a point as well.
I noted years ago that “the easiest system is ‘I say a thing and it happens'” however, rules should provide you something more interesting as an outcome than that to have a reason to exist.
Deeper in the Game 