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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4158756" data-attributes="member: 4937">Such as, more rules?  You see, that line of argument doesn't really help you.  Yes, ideally, you'd only have rules for the things which would come up in your campaign as the rest is 'wasted space' that you had to pay for.  But what is going to come up in each person's campaign is different.  That is what source books are for.a) Having extra detailed rules for something that doesn't come up, doesn't slow down play because it doesn't come up.b) Obviously, badly written rules or badly editted books bogs down play and causes confusion and arguments.  Thats true if we have 3 pages of rules or 3000.The total number of rules has very little impact on the speed of play or resolution.  For example, the rules in 'FrostBurn' or 'Stormwrack' don't impact the speed of play in most campaigns at all, because they are just ignored.  'Lords of Madness' didn't slow down many campaigns because the detailed rules there don't impact the ordinary task resolution system in the vast majority of cases.  Detailed rules regarding how lava behaves and how dangerous it is would not slow down the speed of resolution of anything but a bad GM.  For any GM worth his pizza, he's not going to concern himself with lava rules when they don't concern his campaign, but if he plans on featuring lava in a scenario he will familiarize himself with those rules sufficiently before play begins and make what notes he needs so that he's not flipping through books at the game table looking like an idiot.  And this will not slow down preparation for the scenario significantly either, because the sort of things he needs to draw from the rules are the sort of decisions he would have to make before or during play anyway.But the corner cases covered by detailed rules are precisely those that are going to pause the game anyway.  Bad as a pause to look up how some corner case that doesn't happen very often is handled, its not near as bad as the pause to figure out how to resolve this fairly without having some rule already in mind both because it reduces the mental burden on the referee and because less player argument and social consensus is needed.  Plus, the DM is less likely to find that he's made a bad snap ruling that needs to be retconned or otherwise handled at a metagame level.Sure, I'll grant that badly organized rules or overly large rule books can be intimidating to new players, but in any decent game system the core resolution system is going to be pretty simple and clean regardless of how many rules there are.  All that extra detail need only accrue in a campaign at the rate that its needed.  What makes for bad overly complex rules isn't the total number of rules, but the total number of rules that bear on the resolution of any particular situation or player proposition.</blockquote>

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