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Jon Peterson: Does System Matter?
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<blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8197082" data-attributes="member: 6777737"><p>Well, I think Moldvay Basic and Basic D&D in general were developed specifically to handle this exact criticism and spend more time telling people about the procedures of actual play and the actual setup. Even with the much shorter books in AD&D, they were seen as clearly being too complex for their target audience. Like, that's why the Red Box was supposed to be in toy stores and the AD&D hardbacks were not. Basic D&D was specifically an attempt to create a minimal number of rules that could still be used with AD&D modules, the monster manual, and so on.</p><p></p><p>And I disagree that the rules demarcation is clear when you don't know what a DM even is, because I'm talking about the inertia of switching systems before you know anything about the game. And, well, <em>someone</em> has to read the DM stuff. Even setting that aside, it's not like a 320 page rulebook is somehow a <em>reasonable</em> read to play a game. It's not. It's ridiculous. Even the 64 page player's book in Moldvay Basic constitutes and extremely large amount of reading for a single game.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Bacon Bits, post: 8197082, member: 6777737"] Well, I think Moldvay Basic and Basic D&D in general were developed specifically to handle this exact criticism and spend more time telling people about the procedures of actual play and the actual setup. Even with the much shorter books in AD&D, they were seen as clearly being too complex for their target audience. Like, that's why the Red Box was supposed to be in toy stores and the AD&D hardbacks were not. Basic D&D was specifically an attempt to create a minimal number of rules that could still be used with AD&D modules, the monster manual, and so on. And I disagree that the rules demarcation is clear when you don't know what a DM even is, because I'm talking about the inertia of switching systems before you know anything about the game. And, well, [I]someone[/I] has to read the DM stuff. Even setting that aside, it's not like a 320 page rulebook is somehow a [I]reasonable[/I] read to play a game. It's not. It's ridiculous. Even the 64 page player's book in Moldvay Basic constitutes and extremely large amount of reading for a single game. [/QUOTE]
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