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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6071018" data-attributes="member: 42582">That's a matter of perspective. Moldvay Basic indicated that Expert was following, but could be played itself as a complete game from levels 1 to 3. B/X together certainly were a complete game, even though Expert (which stopped at 14th) flagged the possibility of levels up to 36. And the combined page count for B/X would be less than 128 pages, once some duplication is allowed for.Essentials is particularly bad. The two players' books have a lot of repetition between them. Then some of that is replicated in the DM book. And much of that is replicated in the Rules Compendium. Not to mention that the player elements - classes, feats, powers, etc - have lots of repetitive, redundant (and sometimes inconsistent) flavour text.For flavour text, I think the model should be Moldvay Basic. Its classes, spells and monsters had enough flavour text to let you know what it was about, but not the lashings of purple prose that seem to have come into fashion around the time of 2nd ed AD&D, and were brought into 4e around the time of MM3 and Essentials.The 4e PHB and MM also illustrate nice levels of flavour text. (But the 4e PHB is obviously too complicated to be an introductory game.)The current designers need to look at Moldvay Basic to get a better idea of how to write clear, concise RPG material!</blockquote>