here is no way on Earthg I am touching a roleplaying book that is 600 pages long. Or 300. I respect people who want that level of detail, but I think you are all insane.

I'll only consider something 150 pages max, and with a lot of pictures. 32 pages is even better!

And let's not even talk about games with dozens of source books, equipment books and races. It's all insanity, people!

Quote from: Soylent Green;364333And let's not even talk about games with dozens of source books, equipment books and races. It's all insanity, people!

Unless it's D&D, it's also really hard to find players for such things.  "Ok everyone go drop $100 on books A, B, and C and spend a few days reading them before we start our new campaign next week."  Other than a few pockets of hardcore gamers, I'm convinced that such games are targeted for and bought by collecters who read but don't play.

Quote from: Nicephorus;364337Unless it's D&D, it's also really hard to find players for such things.  "Ok everyone go drop $100 on books A, B, and C and spend a few days reading them before we start our new campaign next week."  Other than a few pockets of hardcore gamers, I'm convinced that such games are targeted for and bought by collecters who read but don't play.

Which is why I'm glad White-Wolf is focusing on doing limited lines from now on.

The supplement treadmill model is a pain, especially when you've got players who want to try to incorporate all the "cool bits" from a half-dozen different source-books.  Not only do they have to drop lots of money, but I as the GM have to go over all of the material with them to make sure it meshes well with the campaign should I choose to try and make my players happy.

And that's not even talking about the "let's sell the setting in bits!" that Exalted has suffered from.  No, they couldn't just put together "idea" books...it all has to be canon.  Technically the GM defines canon, but when you've got a line like Exalted, there are tons of players (or should I say, metaplot fans?) who want to play the universe as BtB as possible.

I had more fun with Exalted when I winged it off the barebones in the corebook.  Once my players started engaging with the alternate subsystems and reading up more of the fiction, shit became a burden.

Quote from: Nicephorus;364278This is true.  One small tendency that I've seen is bloated products where the writer is intending for it to be pdf so they think it can be as long as they want and more is better.

When I wrote things for paid publication, in the beginning was 2003-4. Our thinking then was that we should write assuming that what we wrote would be printed on someone's crappy inkjet printer at home - those things only have a few hundred pages of printing in them.

So a lot of consideration was given to brevity, layout, images and what they'd look like greyscale, and so on. 100pp was about the most you'd want to minimise the chances of their printer cartridge dying halfway through (presumably they print something other than your game on the machine). 48pp was more realistic. My d4-d4 was 88pp, but more than a third of that was game play advice in a separate chapter, you wouldn't need to print that out.

Realistically, if it's never printed out it'll never be played. So by writing a pdf too long to be printed out, you're designing a game nobody will play.

Quote from: BenoistSome game systems won't have skills on purpose. Swords & Wizardry for instance. It doesn't mean that the designers are necessarily lazy or didn't do their job properly

I'm not talking about games with no skill lists because the game doesn't use skills.

I'm talking about games where skills are used, but the authour is too lazy to write them out and describe them, and so gives a few examples and says, "um, I'm just letting you be creative!" For example, Fudge, Unknown Armies, and a zillion rules light rpgs.

It's like having a game entirely based on cowboy gunfights, writing a heap of rules for different types of guns, then just listing a few example guns and then telling the players, "um, be creative!"

When the game system revolves around something, you need that something described well. Swords & Wizardry just doesn't use skills at all, so complaining about their absence would be like complaining about its not having a list of guns. Fudge and Unknown Armies' game mechanics revolve around skills, skills which are left vague and undefined. That's laziness.

I'm not sure a big book is bad if its complete. If it isn't? That's a problem. I know that a lot of explanations and telling how to use a system can pad out a book. (Not just "roll die+stat+skill" but how to apply what skills, what they might be used for, etc.)

I'm alright with a book being complete, but if you can do it in shorter more condensed packages and still get the point across? That's better to my mind anyway.

Quote from: chadu;364271FWIW, a goodly chunk of book 2 is stats and descriptions of nearly all of the characters mentioned by name in the first 10 books of the series.

Chadu is correct on this. I'm a DFRPG playtester and have copies of all of the proto documents, and most of the material in the rulebooks is background and setting information. DFRPG is loosly based on FATE, which is a somewhat rules lite but narration heavy rules set.

What the DFRPG rulebook looks like is they mention some part of the Dresdenverse, spend a page or two talking through what it is and how it works, then gives a paragraph or so explaining how it fits into the rules system.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;364307I am not big on pages and pages of gaming philosophy. But a brief discussion on why the rules were designed the way they were, and how people might use them can be handy.

That's really what the DFRPG is about. Not about telling you how to play, but giving lots of examples of how certain elements of the setting can pop up in your game. It makes more sense if you have seen Spirit of the Century or other narrative games. There are almost no tables or equations in the whole rulebook.

Think about the Dresden setting for a moment. You've got wizards and three main types (Courts) of vampires to explore. There are werewolves, fairies, necromancers, various types of undead, Knights of the Cross, Demons, monster hunters, regular mundane humans, and other types of potential characters. Think of White Wolf's World of Darkness, (Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, Changeling, etc.) only in fewer rulebooks. Where WoD has lots of sourcebooks, DFRPG is not planning them unless Jim Butcher introduces a lot of new material requiring some sort of update.

So, you've got all of the neat stuff in about a dozen novels all packed into two rather hefty tomes. It looks really nice, too. Good layout and graphics, well written. I think folks will be very happy with it, even though it may seem pricey at first.

Amber consists of a "goodly chunk" of describing every character in the novels (three times each, in fact!), and its every inch of page well-spent.

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