what do publishers keep making huge (300+ pages) core rulebooks if players and gm only need like 10-20 pages to cover all their character options plus combat rules? why don't they just sell boxed editions with a bunch of modular booklets?
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>if players and gm only need like 10-20 pages to cover all their character options plus combat rules
more? less? I'm talking about crunchy systems mostly.
They're shoving too much lore into the core books, also the formatting of new books is ass. Compare Cyberpunk 2020 to RED. One has all the rules you need in 100 pages (Plus some 50 more for netrunning but that part of the system is a messy) with dense text. It's basically like a news mag or a newspaper, tight lettering with images and textboxes here and there. Meanwhile the other takes almost 500 pages to explain its rules, the text is big, the topics meander all the time and there's tons of lore weaved in between the rules so you can't even tell what you can skip and what you can't. 2020 also had random ass lore interspersed in the rules but they were in big obvious textboxes. A quick glance was enough to tell you that you can skip it if all you want is the rules.
>They're shoving too much lore into the core books
For copyright reasons, probably. You can't copyright rules, but lore is IP you can get the courts to recognize as "yours". Same reason the Star Trek opening theme technically has words, even though you've likely never heard that version - makes it a "song" and lets it enjoy all legal protections afforded to those.
Average RPG book structure:
>Introduction to what RPG is
>Introduction to the basic game rules
>Chargen
>General game rules
>Combat rules
>GMing chapter
>Potential bestiary
>Potential spellbook
>Potential example scenario
>Potential assorted tables and various stuff
And that without mentioning lore, which can easily end up being half of the book.
All of which consists for a whole product. A game that a complete newbie can pick, read and start playing/running, even if his only prior experience with RPG was playing LoL back in 2015.
So yeah, you need only 10-15 pages to actually play (and well-organised books have those rules easily accessible in few well-makred points of the book, while truly great games will just release a shorthand with nothing but basic rules)... but you need the whole fricking rest to make it work
how can't they just break that in modular chunks that make more sense?
booklet 1: chargen + game rules + combat rules
booklet 2: spellbook
booklet 3: gm chapter + tables
booklet 4: bestiary
booklet 5: lore
There, now you have everything any player and GM might need easily accesible during play. Player 1 wants to know how more about elves in the campaign? he grabs booklet 5 and reads. Player 2 wants to know details of his spell? just grabs booklet 2. I know they do this so they can sale a huge book of mostly useless shit to the players but come on now, no other game besides D&D and PF has players owning more than one copy of the corebook.
Use to be hownit was done, od&d, traveller, etc. Things shifted towards larger books. Ruleslite indi stuff shifted back, there's a bunch. A lot of them suck though and take light to mean
>idk lol just make it up
And have swung bak to charging a lot for making it look spiffy.
>how can't they just break that in modular chunks that make more sense?
they could and they would charge you the same as a full price book each them
please do not give them ideas
this is, admittedly, a very good idea for the more updateable electronic format if not abused
I never thought I'd see the day when D&D players WANTED splats like GURPS. Far out.
the thing about the availability of splats in GURPS is that you don't NEED them to run any of your games. they do a bunch of the grunt work for you, providing appropriate Chargen materials, creature resources, etc, but it's nothing you couldn't do on your own if you have the free time and the wherewithal.
if you're too busy to whip the specifics together, the splats save you an assload of time. an hour and change of my labor that saves me a dozen hours or better of drafting up this shit myself
It's almost 20 years that i run gurps and i never needed splats other than for neglegible content i looked up out of lazyness, i've run a Conan game (i used the splat as an anthology for consulting lore on the spot), a wild west one (i planned for using the splat but my sergio leone homosexualtry was more than enough), a pirates of the carribbean one (i looked up the swashbuckler splat during campaign planning but i found more useful reference some text book on the argument i already owned), a banestorm one (technically you need at least the magic splat and the setting one for this but my players prefer baseline powers over skill magic so i only needed the setting one and only for lore reasons).
Are you moronic or just never played any RPG ever?
You assuming it could be done for anything else than making loads of money by overpricing is cute. Naive, but cute
They used to do that but manufacturing one big book is cheaper than manufacturing a bunch of little ones. No reason they couldn't go back to the box set method for PDFs I guess, but in that case they might as well just make it one PDF with a bunch of headings you can jump to anyway.
Free League has been doing it and its beautiful.
Having one big fancy book on the shelf appeals much more to the superficial part of ones intellectual ego.
>if players and gm only need like 10-20 pages to cover all their character options plus combat rules?
>if
Well they don’t. Anything more detailed than PbtA or RISUSES needs more than 20 pages to cover all rules and combat options. This isn’t that complicated.
>boxed editions with a bunch of modular booklets
It looks like you’re arguing to replace single purchases with a dozens of microbooks. To hell with that, gimmie a big solid tome that covers a bunch of different situations. I don’t want a player to come up with a novel idea or the game go in an unexpected direction and I have to go “well sorry guys, gimmie a minute and I’ll check the game’s DLC page to see if I can buy the relevant PDF for $4.99.”
High page counts scaring you is not a reason to replace core rulebooks with a pile of pamphlets.
Same reason you press on the website to know the recipe for spaghetti and get a history lesson on the way it was gathered 2 thousand years ago.
Fillers to justify cost. No one is paying 30 or 50 for a 10 page rpg.
>Same reason you press on the website to know the recipe for spaghetti and get a history lesson on the way it was gathered 2 thousand years ago.
That's mostly to let a publication sell more ad space on their website.
First couple of editions of GURPS were exactly a box with a couple of booklets.
And we see where that took it.
So they can justify charging premium prices.
$5 says OP is the kind of homosexual thats in denial about being into Improv
Dungeon Fantasy (powered by GURPS) did the boxset and booklet thing.
Big books look nice on the shelf
Formatting, mostly. That and it depends on what the options are. Sure you can have a rules-lite game that's like 20 pages of character options but the more options you have and the more mechanics a game has the more pages it takes, and then there's formatting to make it look pretty and be readable and easy to search and understand.
For example, I'm working on a modern fantasy system myself and between the formatting, the class tables, the Species and Subspecies options, the skills and rules for how they work, statgen, and the first few sets of spells I'm already at almost 500 pages - and I still haven't finished the combat section, the GM section, or the pre-made setting I intend to put with it.
Again, you CAN make a game that's very lite on stuff, very simple and straightforward, but it has to be low on player options, low on mechanical complexity, and low on any sort of flavor. It will be a very dry, very bland, very basic system and ultimately will require the GM to do more work than they need to. Also, generic systems tend to be worse than specialized systems.
I, however, value making everything CRYSTAL FRICKING CLEAR because I've seen how 5e D&D fricked up with not being crystal fricking clear on a lot of its rules and refuse to make that rookie mistake. I would rather explain something 30 times than not explain it and leave it up in the air. I also like the players having a lot of options baked in to a system, so they can really customize their character and thus their play experience. It not only gives actual choice to the players, but gives replay value.
The classic improv fan in denial move is to use a huge ass rulebook that doesn't have anything useful in it. Like GURPS or D&D3.5.
>The moronic baiter shitting up /tg/ even on Christmas Eve
Are you really THAT fricking lonely to spend this day on your own?
I'm shitting in your Christmas stocking
Kickstarter PBTA merchants thrive on cranking out 300 pages of nothing.
flavour which saves the DM the headache of spoonfeeding the PC everything. If somebody isn’t willing / hasn’t the attention span to read 20 pages out of a 360 page book, then sitting at a table for 3+ hours might not be for them
I agree, really, most recent RPG systems books are just "New" combat rules, conflict resolution, chargen and bestiary. Nothing really new is ever added besides whole pages of homebrew moronic DM tips.
If they at least added innovative procedures for other things that matter, but many people who write systems are absolutely misguided and lack knowledge of what a RPG should be, and for them ttrpgs are just combat and abstract storytelling.
Everytime someone tries to do this a million autists start screaming about bloat
Those who scream too are misguided.
>200 pages of chargen
>100 pages of combat
>100 pages of lore and x-card memes
>0 pages of GM procedures
I love modern RPGs 🙂
Figure it out yourself, nerd.