I want smaller, leaner core books.

[Haffrung]

I hate technical manuals and pure utilitarianism is definitely not my preference for rulebooks.

Do you hate boardgame rulebooks? They’re not written like TV installation manuals. But they are concise, clear, and follow fundamental principles of instructional design.

 

[Reynard]

A game doesn't actually have to be "rules lite" to fit into a reasonable number of pages. It just needs to be presented clearly and concisely. Just by way of example: the original Champions game is 56 pages.

 

[Jd Smith1]

A game doesn't actually have to be "rules lite" to fit into a reasonable number of pages. It just needs to be presented clearly and concisely. Just by way of example: the original Champions game is 56 pages.

Friday Night Firefight, the combat rules for Cyberpunk, lay out a stand-alone combat system with plenty of detail, optional rules, and extensive lists of weapons, armor, and gear, in 21 pages.

 

[Haffrung]

My experience is, people like the theory of a rules lite game, but rarely actually like to them in reality. D&D 5E is a perfect example of this. The free rules, one of the starter boxes and an imagination, is plenty enough to play the game forever, and yet how many people actually do that? A few I am sure, but considering the continued good sales of 5E books, I would say not many. This is why 3E exploded in the way it did and why 5E will eventual be just as bloated, although at a much slower rate, both players and GM's like options, player love to pour over books looking for new and interesting character types and ideas to play, GM's like adventures they do not have to write themselves and even if they have their own home brewed world, they like setting materiel they can integrate into their own work. I am not saying there is no place for rules lite games, all I am saying is, book sales seem to indicate most (not all) RPG players don't mind a little bloat.

That runs contrary to everything the designers at WotC have said about 5E. In the leadup to the design, they carried out the largest market research of the player-base in RPG history. Their findings, which they explained in interviews and panel discussions during the development of Next, is that most players don’t care much about the numbers on their character sheets, they care about the stories at the table. Those exact words were expressed many times.

They also admitted that this came as a surprise to them, and confirmed that the assumptions D&D developers had made about their audience were mistakenly drawn from forum culture, where hardcore hobbyists are overrepresented. They concluded that the crunch hardcore gamers can’t get enough of is a barrier of entry to the much larger casual base of the market. So they made a deliberate choice with 5E to limit the crunch, following a strategy of selling one book each to a large audience, rather than selling a bunch of books each to a smaller audience.

Seems like that strategy is working so far. For every crunch-loving optimizer grumbling about not having enough options, there are two or three players for whom the PHB is more than enough. I‘d wager sales numbers of the PHB vs other books would back that up. It’s also why I doubt we’ll ever see an Advanced Player Guide or PHB 2 - it’s in the interests of WotC to keep the intake of the player-base as broad as possible rather than cater to the hardcores at the top of they pyramid.

To add my own anecdote to the conversation, out of the six people in my group, only myself and one other player owns more than the PHB. And these are all people who have been playing D&D for 15+ years.

 

[Jd Smith1]

That runs contrary to everything the designers at WotC have said about 5E. In the leadup to the design, they carried out the largest market research of the player-base in RPG history. Their findings, which they explained in interviews and panel discussions during the development of Next, is that most players don’t care much about the numbers on their character sheets, they care about the stories at the table. Those exact words were expressed many times.

They also admitted that this came as a surprise to them, and confirmed that the assumptions D&D developers had made about their audience were mistakenly drawn from forum culture, where hardcore hobbyists are overrepresented. They concluded that the crunch hardcore gamers can’t get enough of is a barrier of entry to the much larger casual base of the market. So they made a deliberate choice with 5E to limit the crunch, following a strategy of selling one book each to a large audience, rather than selling a bunch of books each to a smaller audience.

Seems like that strategy is working so far. For every crunch-loving optimizer grumbling about not having enough options, there are two or three players for whom the PHB is more than enough. I‘d wager sales numbers of the PHB vs other books would back that up. It’s also why I doubt we’ll ever see an Advanced Player Guide or PHB 2 - it’s in the interests of WotC to keep the intake of the player-base as broad as possible rather than cater to the hardcores at the top of they pyramid.

To add my own anecdote to the conversation, out of the six people in my group, only myself and one other player owns more than the PHB. And these are all people who have been playing D&D for 15+ years.

At my table, of the six of us, I would say that three have purchased the PHB, and the other three use online versions. I've purchased one adventure supplement.

Now, we like crunch, but house-rules and patching in bits of other d20 games has met that need.

 

[Crit]

Well it does take 82 pages... I counted.

However if you mean, ‘should not’, then what would you take out?

I would probably change the formatting of spell blocks, be it the text format or the general spacing. There's a way for it to take less space.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I would probably change the formatting of spell blocks, be it the text format or the general spacing. There's a way for it to take less space.

I would cut the number of spells by half. Most are simply incremental improvements on earlier spells, or just utility work-arounds.

 

[TheSword]

I would probably change the formatting of spell blocks, be it the text format or the general spacing. There's a way for it to take less space.

Can I ask what you would take out formatting wise? Or is it just keeping the same information but it appearing different in the page. In which case that feels like a fairly superficial exercises.

After all a small page count isn’t very virtuous if everything is printed at size 6 font to make it so.

 

[Mistwell]

Do you hate boardgame rulebooks? They’re not written like TV installation manuals. But they are concise, clear, and follow fundamental principles of instructional design.

Yes, I hate boardgame rules. They're awful. It's something you have to do, so you can get to something enjoyable. But not something you want to do, and they're something you avoid if you can. Usually in our board game groups there's only one person who is willing to read the boardgame rules and then they explain it to the rest of us, because none of the rest of us want to deal with that text unless we really get stuck.

 

[TheSword]

Yes, I hate boardgame rules. They're awful. It's something you have to do, so you can get to something enjoyable. But not something you want to do, and they're something you avoid if you can. Usually in our board game groups there's only one person who is willing to read the boardgame rules and then they explain it to the rest of us, because none of the rest of us want to deal with that text unless we really get stuck.

I agree. They’re also relatively straightforward, managing maybe a dozen concepts at once to model relatively straightforward chooses. The more complicated game’s usually have additional rules in various cards that masks the idea that the game has a straightforward rule book. I remember reading the Witcher board game rulebook for almost an hour before being able to play a game. They’re not the gold standard that an RPG should imitate. Particularly not an RPG with hundreds if not thousands of options and choices.