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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5226624" data-attributes="member: 80487">With such arbitrary constraints, Reynard, you are not talking about what is 'required'. You are talking about what fits, and what makes that interesting is that it is not enough.If space were not an issue, then you could pursue the question of what is enough.Metamorphosis Alpha was 32 pages of notably small type, and not a commercial success. Bunnies & Burrows was 36 pages. The "Holmes Basic" D&D book and second-edition Villains & Vigilantes were each about 48 pages. You might consider what 1/3 to 1/2 you would cut from those.You could look at David Cook's Crimefighters, which took up 22 pages in Dragon magazine back in March 1981. That includes a "cover" page, a 4-page scenario and a page of background on the pulp magazines of the 1930s. Layout is typical of TSR product of the time such as Gamma World and Top Secret.Now, that game is inspired by such heroes as Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Avenger and the Green Hornet -- not the mishmash of sword-and-sorcery that informed D&D. There remains the question of whether, for that genre, it is quite a complete game.In a D&D-type game, magic is very prominent, its practitioners being more common (especially as 'heroes') than in the old genre fiction.About half the 128 pages of the AD&D 1st ed. Players Handbook are devoted to spells. Magic as a whole takes up only slightly less space (50 pp.) in the similarly long 1st ed. RuneQuest (which had a whole supplement devoted to the magic-granting Cults of Prax). In The Fantasy Trip, magic first got its own game; with overlapping combat rules stripped out, and details on magic items added, the Advanced Wizard book came to 40 pp (out of about 144 in the TFT trilogy). I think you would probably find at least a dozen or so pages of spells in any edition of Tunnels & Trolls.What I think is really of the essence is to convey a "world" and the driving elements of adventure in it. The world of the "dungeon game" was key in both D&D and T&T. The latter offered much less in the way of cataloged monsters and magic items, and really paled next to its "big brother" in treatment of the world beyond the mazes, yet it managed to fire many imaginations to similar effect.Nowadays, the old dungeon game is "overly familiar" to the point that it has actually become quite alien to many who have never really played it. Whatever it may mean in contemporary Dungeons & Dragons, it is nonetheless with the current edition (and possibly others) that a game essentially imitating D&D inevitably ends up competing.'Supplementary' material can be arbitrarily not counted, but that can be very misleading. Supplement I went a long way toward defining what D&D would mean in all subsequent editions. The thief class, for instance, appeared therein, along with variable damage by weapon and the "additive" treatment of magic shields and armor, and much else.Still, if one is going to convey the 'world' and the 'game' primarily through additional works such as scenarios, then the basic 'rule book' can be very brief. It takes but a little, for instance, to play through most T&T solos -- and less for gamebooks such as the "Lone Wolf" series.</blockquote>

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