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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8306127" data-attributes="member: 42582">Some RPG rulebooks I own have lots of expensive full colour art; post-TSR D&D ones; some Monte Cook ones; two games both using art licensed from comics: Prince Valiant and Marvel Heroic; and my PDFs for The One Ring.I have many RPGs with no full colour art, and only modest amounts of art overall: the Rolemaster that I ran for 20 years; Classic Traveller and Burning Wheel, which I have active games in; all the Vincent Baker PDFs that I own.The most recent RPG books that I bought are The Green Knight and Agon 2nd edition. Both use colour in their layout scheme, but The Green Knight has very little interior art (and its not full colour), while Agon's art is colour but mostly using a few tones.I find that RPG art can set an expectation of what the game is about. It may inspire imagination - I once set up <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/session-report-apect-of-vecna-defeated-demon-bargained-with.355600/" target="_blank">an encounter in 4e D&D</a> that was inspired by the cover of Dungeonscape.But if an illustration or diagram in a RPG is meant to be explaining a process of gameplay than I want it to be crisp and clear (Agon has some diagrams like this; conversely, I find the 4e PHB's labelled illustration of a PC sheet to be unhelpfully busy and not terribly clear). As I posted upthread, the way these aspects of a RPG book ignite my imagination is by prompting me to envisage play. They are not themselves a component of, or element in, my imagining; they are a means, not an end.I often read through RPG rulebooks, But as I posted, I am not reading them as fiction to imagine. The imagination they spark is of the situations that might arise from them in play.In a couple of other recent threads, I posted that this is part of my frustration with patient, caution-oriented, dungeoncrawling of the classic D&D sort: because the setups in that sort of game suggest vivid scenes (PCs fleeing through dark corridors; crises with devouring green demon-mouths; as per the recent "fair trap" thread, the comedic horror of the party being sprayed with gelatinous cube goop) but when the game is being played well (ie the players are exercising appropriate care and skill) then none of this comes to pass.I find this dissonance between what a RPG text leads me to imagine, and what the gameplay can deliver, can come up in other ways: the Foreword to Moldvay Basic, which is mostly a story of liberating the land from a dragon tyrant using a sword gifted by a mysterious cleric, is one example; illustrations that show things happening that aren't consistent with the game rules or elements are another.As I said, I imagine that there are others approaching RPGing with a very different mindset.</blockquote>

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