Is that fair?
Not sure what your position is on the other questions, if you've played a lot of either I mean.
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.
If you set aside the humor aspect, HM is a game that plays very similarly to 1e, but more fleshed out and with a lot of assorted improvements.
For example the infamous Harlot table where you could roll for the precise form of loose woman you encounter. A different time, for sure.
It seems like the nice thing you get here is that some people went and came up with a whole bunch of stuff that could happen which could be good fodder for "fail forward"[0] style outcomes?
- [0]: https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-mouse-guard-handles-failure...
There are games that democratize the power of the GM a bit. Very traditional RPGs are into putting pressure on the GM to be a one-man band for the players' entertainment, but the more "modern" ones share the authority, get the players involved in worldbuilding and/or expect the players to be proactive (rather than just respond to the GM)
That sounds epic.