HM was absolutely playable (I only know the original 4th edition), but it was created by a company making RPG comics (specifically, it was the, until then, imaginary system the characters in Kights of the Dinner Table played), so it does not take itself super serious.
The super-detailed tables mostly don’t matter. It’s not as if you’d know the shorter ones by heart, so you either look them up anyway, or you (what we did) have a small program on the GMs laptop.
As with most roleplaying games, almost everything lives and dies with the skill of your GM to make it work and to a lesser part with the skill of your players (and by skill I mean ability to get into a flow with everyone else)
Our first session ended in (Chaotic Neutral with a bit of evil) me accidentally killing the party fighter and him re-rolling a Paladin that did not like me. And I got critically hit by his thrown pebble after clapping at a funeral.
The super-detailed tables mostly don’t matter. It’s not as if you’d know the shorter ones by heart, so you either look them up anyway, or you (what we did) have a small program on the GMs laptop.
As with most roleplaying games, almost everything lives and dies with the skill of your GM to make it work and to a lesser part with the skill of your players (and by skill I mean ability to get into a flow with everyone else)
Our first session ended in (Chaotic Neutral with a bit of evil) me accidentally killing the party fighter and him re-rolling a Paladin that did not like me. And I got critically hit by his thrown pebble after clapping at a funeral.