Your sense of aesthetics.  There's a reason books are laid out the way they are.  Designing an A4 sized book that inexplicably has the text laid out like it's a Chinese manuscript or horizontally instead of vertically or whatever isn't appealing and quirky, it's stupid.

Your advertisements.  If you're pitching a game to me, don't tell me that "Cuttlefish will be detailed in SuperSquids Supplement XIV".  If you spent the ink to say that, then say something I can use.  Yeah yeah capitalism, etc. Put ads in the back, not in the text.

Rules that are mashed up in huge walls of text.  White Wolf, I'm looking at you.  Put the RULES in the RULES.  Don't bury it in 30 pages of self-fellating fanfic, leaving your rulebook bent in a circle all Ouroboros-like, blowing itself at how clever it is.

I don't want your social/gender/political/religious issues.  Ever.  If your game is called "LOL @ XIANS"  I can simply not pick it up but if I'm 30 pages in to your love letter to AD&D and suddenly you've introduced an example PC named Karg Kierkkens who gets an extra 100000 XP because he burns christian churches down 'cause according to you it's a Lawful Good act...fuck off.  Along the same lines, smugly stamping HER (or SHE or HERS etc.) after each and every mention of what a character might do - that doesn't raise my conscience, it makes me want to throw your book in the trash.  I can recall off the top of my head more "him or her" or "his or hers" or the (gasp) acceptably neutral THEIR/THEIRS in the DMG than there are in the entirety of White Wolf's print run.  Finally, along this line, don't republish Rand or Marx or whomever as some thinly veiled attempt to drive home your (likely stupid and ill informed) point of view as an RPG.

I don't want horribly egregious rules problems that you "fix" with an included sheet or a URL where I can go download a PDF of the page that fixes the page that says "At 10th level, the GM can kill the people who come to the game" to read "At 10th level, everyone gets a bonus skill point".  Who am I to know how well your website will be maintained?  What if some fatbeard gets to be your sysadmin and decides that everything that ends with .HTML will be /?PHP from now on?  Whoops, guess that rule fix is gone!  THIS WOULD NOT BE A PROBLEM IF YOU'D JUST KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR BASIC GAMEPLAY BUGS.

Did I mention not to put your weird sexual hangups in the middle of the rules?  'cause yeah.

A little bit of expanding my vocabulary is OK!  D&D taught me some cool words.  However I'm not a philologist and I have no interest in learning the made-up language in your damn game and I mean especially if it refers to things that RPGs already have a word for.  As much as I love the Elder Scrolls games...come on, dammit.  Altmer.  Dunmer.  Bosmer.  The list goes on.  Elves, Dark Elves, halflings.  This may seem to run contrary to what I said about a game being self contained and not generic but it's really not.  AD&D elves (or OD&D elves or dwarves, etc. etc.) are unique to that game, I just don't have to play word games with you, designer, to figure them out.

Enough. With.  The.  Deluxe.  Editions. Stop telling me that I'd have gotten XYZ extra things if I'd bought the tin-boxed slipcase one of 5000 stamped and serial numbered copies.  That's nothing but resentment to the larger gaming base.

No sops to computer gaming.  None.  I don't want to hear about what a money making hobby you think it is, either.  Guess what!  Cocaine is a multi-billion dollar a year addictive hobby, too!  Am I gonna get a free envelope of booger sugar with my copy of Corridors and Creatures?  I bought your game to play a pen and paper RPG.  Not get a lecture on how you're just as cool as Lord of the Rings online or World of Warcraft.

On that, and referring back to the whole "go to our website" - it's fine to have a website.  It's fine to refer to it.  What it is not fine is to turn out a mediocre or just plain bad RPG and have an obviously expensive, flash-enabled multi-media soaked website to support that core book.  Because at that point what you've told me is "I wanted to be a video game designer but I can't program beyond scripts and using flash templates."

...

Anyone else?

Anything more than about 128 pages. 192 maybe if you're including a bunch of setting stuff and adventures.

Massive 600 page rules books are my current pet peeve. Or rulebooks split into multiple 300 page books.  I get it that there are people who like a little meat on their system and that's okay but me personally I just want a simple, consistent way to resolve actions in an rpg, I can't believe it takes 60 pages to do that.

Quote from: Grymbok;412153Anything more than about 128 pages. 192 maybe if you're including a bunch of setting stuff and adventures.

Hehe, you beat me too it. But yes, 128 pages is idea, but basically under 200 is in my comfort zone.

Yeah. Huge rulebooks are becoming a bummer for me too.

Some pet peeves:

Irrelevant art - I've ranted about this one often enough, but it's appropriate here too. Most art in RPGs is bad. Not because it's poorly done, but because it's irrelevant. It shows us little to nothing about the material culture, landscape or denizens of the world. It tends to be far too eclectic and generic, so that you come out of it having no idea what kinds of clothes people wear or what buildings look like, or what any given ethnic group looks like.

Dark Heresy is one of the few games contrary to this trend. AD&D 2e campaign settings were also exceptions, but the genericisation of the art in 3e and 4e has led to overly-stylised drawings that have moved away from that.

In character fiction - Rarely written well-enough to be evocative of a particular mood and style, which is its supposed purpose. I stopped buying Mage products when I bought a supplement and the first twelve pages of the 128pg book were fiction before you even got to the table of contents! This is especially problematic when every book has tons and tons of these pieces (as WoD books do). They become indistinct, repetitive, and cliched.

Generic fantasy settings - If your game is meant to be used with generic fantasy settings, do us a favour and don't include one in the corebook. Unless your game is Dungeons and Dragons, the chances of a novice gamer playing it are next to zero, so you are essentially wasting the time of all the experienced gamers who form your actual audience by giving them content that they could generate in a post-lunch-buffet torpor, let alone during the enthusiasm of reading a new game.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;412150Am I gonna get a free envelope of booger sugar with my copy of Corridors and Creatures?

Yes.

Excessive autobiographical/biographical detail.  I don't care if you are a five time world MMA cruiserweight champion  and based the combat system on that experience.  Nor how your vision of this game saved you from crystal meth.  Or how your six years living on the streets of Albuquerqe has made your setting realistically gritty.  Or how the entire game came to you one night while using psilocybin mushrooms.  Your game is either interesting on its own or not, you can sell as much Dos Equis as you want it won't make me like the game more.

Quote from: Soylent Green;412155Hehe, you beat me too it. But yes, 128 pages is idea, but basically under 200 is in my comfort zone.

I think massive books can work (hell, I bought Ptolus and ran it) but I'd be very wary of ever buying an actual core book which was more than 200 pages, on the assumption that too much of it is going to be rules. There's no way in hell I'd ever buy Starblazer Adventures, to pick one example.

Ideally your core book should be short and simple enough that I can take it to a session without having read it yet and get people at least creating characters, if not all the way in to actual play in one evening.

What about the Traveller model?  One essentially complete and moderately thin corebook, then supplements for various topics (careers, ship combat, planet building, etc)?

I'm fine with a massive core book if the rules are all contained in one area say a 200 page section in the front, middle, back.   What I don't want is a 600 page rule book where the rules exist spread out every 3 pages or so that's just horrendously annoying to try and sort through when you are a) learning the game and b) playing the game - stop it.

I don't mind the big corebooks if the rules themselves are still a relatively small amount, and the rest is setting/adversaries/GM advice/etc.

I'll read 200 pages of setting/monsters/campaign set-ups/etc, but I'll gouge my eyeballs out over 200 pages of combat rules/skill checks and exceptions and so on.

Quote from: StormBringer;412168What about the Traveller model?  One essentially complete and moderately thin corebook, then supplements for various topics (careers, ship combat, planet building, etc)?

Suits me.

In fact, to be honest, the "expansion on topics/areas" model is pretty much the only one that interests me for supplements (including parts of the campaign world as an "area" for covering in a supplement). Well other than scenarios, but they're kind of a special case.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;412157Some pet peeves:

Irrelevant art - I've ranted about this one often enough, but it's appropriate here too. Most art in RPGs is bad. Not because it's poorly done, but because it's irrelevant. It shows us little to nothing about the material culture, landscape or denizens of the world. It tends to be far too eclectic and generic, so that you come out of it having no idea what kinds of clothes people wear or what buildings look like, or what any given ethnic group looks like.

Maybe you bring up this point a lot, but it's a good one. I think a good rule of thumb for the value of an illustration is "will a situation ever come up in play where it would be useful to show this picture to one of the players?" The answer is "no" with a disappointing frequency.

 The overwhelming majority of RPG illiustrations come down to jerkoffs fighting or a single jerkoff standing there glowing. It is infuriatingly often that you have an important organization in a game and they don't illustrate the uniforms; on the same page they will show you a PC-type douchebag floating in the air. If a picture says a thousand words, please do not use it to say "this is why I'm hot" two  hundred times. One cliche that I really dislike is when a game has a chapter on equipment or things to buy and so on, and instead of showing illustrations of what there is to buy, they have a half page illustration of a quizzical looking hero haggling with a merchant.

  I often like monster books for the reason that the art is more often useful than average - what do I need? A picture of the monster. If the players meet the monster, I can show them the picture, or describe the monster based on the clear illustration. Where there is a massive failure is if you show a hint of the monster lurking in a shadow grinning, ready to face off with a jerkoff in a bandanna (who is fully rendered, and well lit if not glowing.)

Extra demerits if on top of the monster lurking beyond the confines of the illustration is accompanied by an abstract or metaphorical description. "Like a thing from a nightmare, a beast of teeth and shadows in the shape of a child's malice." That is bullshit. Many descriptions say a monster is "scary" using 30 words, often in systems where monster has a numerical value for its scariness, making even one word devoted to its monstrousness redundant. It might as well take two words and say "fuck you."

This is not really relevant to core books, but it always annoys me when published adventures involve a lot of NPCs then show you pictures of everything BUT the NPCs. Chaosium used to be good about giving you a little headshot of the NPC next to his stats. I wish more companies did this. Apparently the art departments just love to commision pictures of guys just standing there - this is the time to do it.

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