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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5125350" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is such a broad analysis that I don't think it gets us anywhere.Let's try to avoid speaking in generalities.I consider a rules set 'complete' if it contains every rule necessary for playing the game.  This is what is normally meant by 'complete rules' when we speak of a board game, for example.  For the purposes of RPG's, this is strictly impossible, so I would allow that an RPG rules set must and should exclude 'conventions of play' that would be part of the common knowledge of all players, such that a chair is something you sit on or that barring some special exception you can't walk through a wall.   So, for the purposes of RPG's, it is sufficient for the RPG to describe itself sufficiently to describe all the things in its imagined gamespace that aren't part of the standard RPG 'conventions of play'.Now, let's consider the D&D Basic set.  You consider it complete because you could sit down and start playing the game using only the D&D Basic set, and in that sense you are right.  However, I consider it incomplete for several reasons.  The obvious reason I consider it incomplete is the existance of the Expert set.  However, this isn't a sufficient reason in and of itself to consider the game incomplete.  It could be that you have an imagined game world were no character exists which is over 3rd level.  The trouble with this is that the designers of the game seemed to have alot of trouble desribing there imagined world within these contraints.  In particular, right there in the D&D Basic set was the module, 'B2: Keep on the Borderlands', and in the module it described the existance of things not covered by the rules, like for example (IIRC) the Castellan was a 6th level fighter - impossible under the rules.  This is in my opinion sufficient (among many other examples) to prove that the Basic set was incomplete.  It was an insufficient ruleset set to describe everything that was included in its imaged game space - a fairly generic fantasy setting.  This was less true, but still true, of the Basic set and the Expert set combined. And again, I think I've already demonstrated that it has never been a complete game at 200 pages or less, and that the closest it ever came was 304 pages (and even then, I'd already rejected it as incomplete).Go ahead and do so then.  I argue that a complete version of any of those games in 200 pages or less would have significant economic value.</blockquote>

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